Daniel Garber talks with Charles Uwagbai about Kipkemboi
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Kipkemboi is a young man who lives with his family in a small town in Kenya. His parents may be farmers but he has been a gifted mathematician since he was a child. He can tell you how many birds are flying in a flock in the sky, scored 100% on his SATs and has been accepted into MIT. But an unexpected family tragedy has kept him close to home. Instead, he has invented a new financial algorithm that allows him — with unbelievable accuracy — to predict stock market gains and losses worldwide. All operated out of a simple mud hut. But when word gets out, police, military, and foreign interests descend on his village to take everything away. He’s accused of being a criminal or even a terrorist. Can Kipkemboi outrun and outsmart the powers that be?
Kipkemboi is the name of a highly entertaining, dramatic film 
filled with humour, thrills and romance. Kipkemboi is the first Canada-Kenya co-production ever made and word is spreading. It’s directed by Charles Uwagbai and stars Thamela Mpumlwana in the title role. Charles is a Canadian-based director known for The Ghost and the Tout, Esohe and Charlie Charlie, and whose work has been seen on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Canal Plus.
I spoke with Charles Uwagbai in Toronto via ZOOM>
Kipkemboi recently had its gala premiere in Toronto, will be streaming on CBC Gem in 2025, and is currently showing in theatres at film festivals worldwide.
Daniel Garber talks with Paul Kemp about Searching for Satoshi
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Exactly 15 years ago on Halloween day in 2008, an unknown man named Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that has affected countless people’s lives. That’s the same year as the Great Recession that followed the Wall Street crash and bailout. The paper was an elegant mathematical treatise outlining BitCoin, a parallel, person-to-person crypto-currency that functions without any bank, credit corporation or national government at its helm. Satoshi Nakamoto released his design of a blockchain database for anyone to use. But a few years later, in 2011, he disappeared leaving Bitcoins now worth as much as $70 billion. Who was he? Where did he go? Why did he disappear? And is Satoshi still alive?
Searching for Satoshi: The Mysterious Disappearance of the 
Bitcoin Creator is a new documentary that looks at the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto and who he (or she?) really was. The film tracks down some of the people rumoured to be him, and tries to see whether he’s still alive. It’s the work of multi-award-winning Toronto documentarian Paul Kemp. I’ve spoken about his work many times on this show. I interviewed Drew Hayden Taylor about the series Going Native and the doc The Pretendians that Paul Kemp directed and produced, and talked about Transformer with Michael del Monte and trans bodybuilder Janae Marie Kroczaleski which Kemp produced.
Searching for Satoshi premiered earlier this week on The Passionate Eye and is currently streaming on CBC Gem.
I spoke to Paul Kemp in Toronto via ZOOM.
Daniel Garber talks with Sam Soko and Lauren deFilippo at #TIFF22 about their new doc Free Money
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Photos of Lauren DeFilippo a
nd Sam Soko by Jeff Harris.
Kogutu is a poor, east African village in Kenya. Some of the villagers have kids who can’t afford schooling, while others have a bleak future ahead of them. Various foreign NGOs have come and gone over the years, leaving poverty and disappointment in their wake. But the latest one tries a different tact: They’re offering a monthly stipend paid to all adult members of the village for over a decade, to see if this transforms their lives. But what’s the catch? And what do they mean by “free money”?
Free Money is a new documentary that looks at the effects of 
UBI, Universal Basic Income, on the people who receive it, and those who don’t. The film was made over many years tracing changes in the villagers, concentrating on the lives of three villagers. The film is directed by two award-winning 
documentarians. Lauren DeFilippo’s film acclaimed doc Ailey played theatrically in Toronto and across North America. and Nairobi-based Sam Soko’s film Softie was a big hit at Toronto’s Hot Docs International documentary film fest.
Free Money had its world premiere at TIFF.
I spoke with Lauren and Sam on-site at #TIFF22.
Histories. Films reviewed: Hollywood, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(Home recording, no music)
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
History, they say, is written by the victors, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other histories still out there. This week I’m looking at two stories, a doc and a TV drama. There’s a pessimistic, economic history of the world; and an optimistic, revisionist history of Hollywood.
Hollywood
Creators: Ian Brennan, Ryan Murphy
It’s just after WWII in LA. Young people from small towns across the US are flocking to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune in the movies. People like Jack (David Corenswet), a handsome young actor who lines up each day at Ace studios on the chance of a day’s paid work as an extra. But a pretty face is no guarantee of steady work in Hollywood. So when a mysterious man named Ernie (Dylan McDermott) recruits him for a day job at a gas station he welcomes the extra income. He’s stuck in a loveless marriage with his pregnant wife who works at the famed Schwab’s Pharmacy (where actors hang out to get discovered). Camille (Laura Harrier) is a beautiful actress on contract at Ace, where she attends locution lessons to 
perfect her elegant mid-atlantic accent. Still she’s stuck playing demeaning roles as maids, simply because she’s black. Rock Hudson (Jake Picking) is a talentless but good looking actor who thinks his luck has changed when he is signed by an agent named Henry (Jim Parsons). But the power broker demands sexual favours from all his clients.
Luckily, these three actors all have love interests. Jack soon discovers his job isn’t about pumping gas. It’s a front for male sex workers to peddle their wares for Hollywood’s rich and famous. Powerful women, including an older woman named Avis (Patti LuPone), grant him a chance for a foot in the door in a real movie. At the gas station, he works beside Archie (Jeremy Pope) a black writer hoping Ace studios will produce his script about a failed actress
HOLLYWOOD
who kills herself by jumping off the famed Hollywood sign. His first client is none other than Rock Hudson, looking for male companionship. Camille is in a relationship with Raymond (Darren Criss) a director at Ace. He says he’s part-Asian but can pass as white. And he wants to direct that movie Archie wrote, bringing all the main characters of the series together in one production. But is Ace Studios – and America – ready for a multi-racial romance?
Hollywood is a TV mini-series that appears to give an insider’s view of the post-war movie industry, but actually it makes it all up. The infamous casting couch – where directors or producers forced woman to have sex with them in exchange for a part – is reversed here to make men both the victims and the objects of desire. In this fantasy world, 1940s Hollywood produces movies written by, directed by, and starring non-whites. Studios are headed by women, actors come out publicly as gay and the Academy Awards happily nominates lots of African-Americans. In reality, desegregation and repeal of 
Jim Crow laws was decades away, “miscegenation” – mixed racial marriage – was still illegal, homosexuality was a crime, and even today Hollywood (and the Oscars) are still as white as snow.
About the only true part of this series is the gas station used as a front for male hustlers. All of this was revealed in a book and a documentary featuring the late, great Scotty Bowers (I interviewed him here in 2018.) The Netflix series is the story of his career… but he’s never mentioned by name, even once. I don’t dislike the series – it’s never boring, it’s fun to watch and has beautiful production values along with many interesting new players in the cast – but, like most Netflix productions, historical accuracy applies to hairstyles but never to the script.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Dir: Justin Pemberton
Based on the book by Thomas Piketty
What is capital? How is it distributed? How has that changed over the past three centuries? These are just some of the questions dealt with in this new documentary. In the 18th Century 99% of capital – meaning wealth, money and land – was controlled by the aristocracy, less than 1% of the people. Life expectancy was low, and life for the poor was nasty, brutish and short. But revolutionis, in France and elsewhere, didn’t mean a transfer of power and weath from the top to the bottom. Government was still controlled
by those with the most money and laws were passed to ensure they didn’t lose their wealth. The rise of colonialism in the Americas, Africa and Asia led to more wealth in Europe extracted from the lands and people they now controlled. Slave-based agriculture generated even more capital – in the form of human beings – now bought, sold and traded like commodities. And people working 
in factories could be arrested even for quitting a job, and imprisoned for being poor or in debt. But, following the widespread death and destruction of WWI and the following worldwide depression, came the first signs of a transfer of power and capital from huge corporate monopolies and the very rich to the rest of the people.
Following WWII, the remaining aristocracy was heavily taxed, and wealth was transferred to the average person in the form of housing, education, health and the welfare state. People were finally rewarded for study and hard work. They were able to move up from poverty. This lasted for a few decades, until it began to unravel with new ideologies introduced by Thatcher and Reagan. 
Unions and welfare were suddenly bad. Greed was good. And once again, wealth was transferred from the poor and shrinking middle class back up to the top 1%. That’s where we are now.
How can we reverse these awful changes?
This documentary is a fascinating — and fast-moving – condensed look at economic history over the past 300 years and how it affects us today. It’s narrated by Pickety and other economists in a very accessible and easy to understand way. And it’s beautiful to look at, filled with thousands of tiny, 
quick film clips, mostly one to three seconds long, of stately homes and Victorian factories, mints printing dollar bills, Thatcher talking to schoolgirls, and people breathing through face masks in a horribly polluted Beijing. The images and music are as meticulously researched as they are lovely. Constant eye-candy.
Even the talking heads, those usually dull academics interviewed in the doc, are enthusiastic and interesting, and uniformly filmed against lavish backgrounds and scenery. And it’s filled with cool sequences. l loved one about a psychological experiment where volunteers play Monopoly without a level playing field – it favours certain players at random. These newly “rich” players are recorded acting rude, scarfing pretzels and generally behaving entitled as soon as they discovered the rules were tilted in their favour. So if you want to learn about history and economics and what to do about it, but don’t feel like reading thousands of pages, Capital in the 21st Century is a great place to feed your brain without wearing it out.
Hollywood is now streaming on Netflix; Capital opens May 8 in Toronto at the Hotdocs Virtual Theatre; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks with Jennifer Deschamps about her documentary Inside Lehman Brothers
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s 2008, and Lehman Brothers, one of the world’s biggest investment banks, is riding high on the hog. With assets in the trillions, it has pioneered innovative financial products like marketing subprime loans to people who can’t otherwise afford a mortgage. And its top execs are pocketing huge amounts of cash… that is, until it all came tumbling down, plunging 
the world into an economic crisis. Everyone seemed surprised, except some insiders at Lehman Brothers… who saw it coming a mile away.
Inside Lehmann Brothers is a new documentary about the criminal activities of the financial sector that helped being about the Wall Street crash of 2008. It’s told through the eyes of the insiders, accountants, salespeople, auditors and underwriters whose warnings were ignored by both the company and by government regulators. It’s co-written and directed by noted Paris-based filmmaker and journalist Jennifer Deschamps, who has created films on topics ranging from Scientology to the Sub-Prime economic crisis.
I spoke to Jennifer Deschamps in the south of France, via telephone at CIUT 89.5 FM in Toronto.
Inside Lehman Brothers plays on Sunday, Aug 25th on Documentary Channel.
Art and deception. Films reviewed: Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies, The Art of Self Defense, Push
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
The things you see online – or on TV for that matter – aren’t always true (suprised?). This week I’m looking at three movies, two docs and one dark comedy, about lies and deceptions. There’s a man who trains in the art of karate, a look at the art of selling lies, and a look at the lies of selling real estate.
Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies
Dir: Larry Weinstein
What is Propaganda? Is it art and literature? Or brainwashing and fake news? The word comes from a benign Catholic term meaning the propagation of faith, the planting the seeds. The Vatican opened a department of propaganda to counter Martin Luther’s austere reforms. It combined the opulance of baroque cathedrals, the 
lure of incense and all the lush frescos, paintings and marble statues you’ve seen. But art and magic and religion were around long before that, and so, says this documentary, was propaganda. Some historians 
trace it as far back as Neandrathal cave paintings.
Propaganda is easy to spot in other cultures but very hard to see in your own. Many people were entanced by dictators like Hitler and Stalin thanks to their skillful use of films (like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will) radio broadcasts and posters. But with the shift to digital culture, it has taken on new forms; like patently false news stories online, repeated ad infinitum, until people start to believe it.
Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies is a fun, light documentary that talks to a lot of artists and writers – Astra Taylor, Ai Weiwei and Kent Monkman – but also musicians, analysts and others. It shoots a constant barrage of propaganda at you, images from the past 100 years, shown in harsh black and white periodically blanketed in fields of red. A lot of it is familiar but there are also some bizarre juxtapositions you’ve never heard of: like the racing cars that now drive around the former Nazi Nuremberg Stadium. Or Laibach, a Slovenian band known for its fascistic costumes and images, who performed in North Korea before a concert hall of nonplussed party apparatchiks and university students. Very funny.
The Art of Self Defense
Wri/Dir: Riley Stearns
It’s the 1990s in small-town America. Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) is a shy accountant who lives with his dachshund. He’s a 98-pound weakling who works in an office full of alpha males. But when he’s violently attacked by strangers on motorbikes he decides 
something has got to change. No more sand will be kicked in his face! He joins a local karate dojo with its own set of hierarchical rules. Everyone is ranked by their belt colour. There’s Anna (Imogen Poots) who teaches the kids class; get on her wrong side and she’ll beat you to a pulp. And at the top of 
the heap is Sensei (Alessandro Nivola).
He says karate is not just a martial art, it’s a way of life. You must punch with your feet and kick with your hands. Casey is starry-eyed, and ready to do whatever Sensei tells him. You must become more masculine, he says. Stop learning French, start learning German. And throw out those adult contemporary CDs; only listen to metal! Casey takes the blue pill. He leaves his job and devotes his life to karate. He worships Sensei, has a secret crush on Anna, and proudly displays his 
low-ranked yellow belt for all to see.
But something is not right. When he joins the mysterious night classes he is exposed to a violent world of hyper-masculinity he doesn’t subscribe to. He is asked to perform dubious tasks outside of the dojo. Is this place only about karate? Or is it a cult? And what is hidden behind Sensei’s secret door?
The Art of Self Defense is a low-budget, uncategorizable, odd sort of a movie, part dark comedy, part mystery, with a bit of violence and horror mixed in. It’s slow to develop, but picks up nicely about halfway through. It’s filled with wood paneling, old computers and ugly clothes from the 90s, which adds a humorous tinge. But It’s hard to tell whether it’s being satirical or straightforward, comic or scary. Jesse Eisenberg is totally believable as the wimpy accountant trying to become more manly, and Allessandro Nivola is good as the mysterious sensei.
Take it as a cautionary tale about the search for masculinity, self-confidence and the cult of martial arts and you’ll enjoy this dark comedy.
Push
Dir: Fredrik Gertten
There’s a housing crisis in the world’s cities and no one knows seems to know what’s going on. In Toronto there’s a shortage of affordable apartments, with stagnant wages, soaring rents and home prices quadrupling. Speculators are buying up land as a bankable commodity, something bought and sold, with little 
thought given to the people who live there. And in many cities entire blocks of housing sit empty, because rent income is dwarfed by what they can earn from the constant increase in value of the buildings themselves. What’s going on?
Enter Leilani Farha, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on 
Adequate Housing. She’s a mom from Ottawa who travels around the world collecting data and advocating on behalf of tenants everywhere. She views housing not as an investment but as a right.
This documentary looks at the dire situation in the world’s cities – from Milan to Berlin, Seoul to Valpariaso – where 
people are facing the same situations: gentrification, renoviction, and the displacing of average- and low-income earners from the world’s cities.
It explores the role of organized crime in the housing crisis. 
They use property investment as a way of laundering money by over investing in legit properties, driving up demand and prices and hiding their illicit profits.
It looks at how the financial sector is turning housing into an investment commodity, with the people who live in them entirely erased from the equation. One particularly notorious player is Blackstone – founded by former Lehman Brothers execs – a voracious American property investment company that swooped into the real estate market after the stockmarket crash of 2008. Now they’re making money by 
buying up public housing for profit, while neglecting the people they were actually built for.
And it looks at the role of pensions, both government and private, which invest in housing to grow their capital, but, unintentionally, lead to skyrocketing prices and increasing homelessness.
Push is an incredibly important and informative documentary that explains in simple terms the economics, politics and effects of this crisis. It uses experts – like Joseph Stiglitz, Saskia Sassen and Roberto Saviano – to explain the reasons behind the crisis. But it also talks with ordinary people around the world. It shows the multiple, small-scale problems people face as well as the large-scale disasters, like the Grenfell Tower Fire in London. They are all related. And it’s the great Leilani Farha who is trying to confront these problems in a new way.
I recommend this doc.
Propaganda: The Art of Lies, Push, and The Art of Self Defense all open today in Toronto; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Hot Docs 2019! Films reviewed: Bellingcat, The Corporate Coup D’Etat, American Factory, One Child Family
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Toronto’s Hot Docs International Documentary Festival is on now. These films tell us what will be news in a year or two, and goes behind the scenes of stories we only think we know about. Hot Docs is showing hundreds of documentaries from around the world, way more than I could ever talk about, but let me briefly tell you about a few I’ve seen that might interest you.
These capsule reviews are shorter than usual, but hopefully long enough for some of it to sink in. This week I’m exposing you to amateur journalists influencing world politics, multinational corporations taking over governments, foreign-owned factories replacing local ones, and government control reaching into women’s bodies.
Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World
Dir: Hans Pool
With the explosion of Photoshop, propaganda and fake news, how can we find the real truth? A new news source called Bellingcat offers an alternative. It is similar to Wikileaks but functions as an original news source, rather than a publisher of leaked documents. Founded by Eliot Higgins, a UK “vigilante journalist”, Bellingcat uses Open 
Source investigations to determine whether what we see on the news and online is what is really happening.
Composed of a network of digital news geeks spread across Europe (all men), Bellingcat’s investigations range from responsibility for the Malaysia Airline plane shot down over the Russia/Ukraine 
border, to a look into bombings in Syria, and identifying neo-nazi faces at the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. Using an ingenious combination of satellite footage, snapchat images, and uncensored, online discussion groups of soldiers wives, they find convincing evidence that conventional journalists – and government propaganda – ignore. I would have loved to have seen more about Bellingcat’s investgations into malfeasance within its own country – not just about Russians – but their work is fascinating, valuable and so clever.
You can find Bellingcat’s most recent investigations here)
Moving on now from journalism to governments themselves…
The Corporate Coup D’Etat
Dir: Fred Peabody
Do we still live in democracies, imperfect though they may be? Or has there been a corporate coup d’etat, a virtual takeover of our government? Well this filmmaker says, at least in the United States, the answer is a resounding yes. Widespread incarceration, congressmen and senators with corporate ties, and the phenomenal number of paid lobbyists working in 
Washington. New laws with extreme libertarian views are often written in total not by politicians but by ALEC a private body associated with the Koch Brothers.
Talking heads include Chris Hedges, Cornel West, Maude Barlow, and John Ralston Saul — who coined the term corporate coup d’etat.
But it also takes us into the heart of the problems by talking with 
the people of Camden, NJ., a city allowed to decay, and Youngstown Ohio, a former engine of the steel industry, where some people switched their votes from Obama to Trump… not because they love him, but because everyone else had failed to rescue the steel industry, so why not try someone from “outside” the system? This is a great doc, filled both with smart pundits and unknown but unforgettable ordinary people who tell it like it is. Corporate Coup d’état is another politically astute doc from Fred Peabody (whom I interviewed about All Governments Lie in 2016).
Youngstown Ohio may look bleak but how are things in Dayton? The next doc looks at both sides of an…
American Factory
Dir: Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert
Dayton Ohio is the longtime home of Moraine, a major General Motors plant. But when it moved south, the burgeoning middle class started to collapse.
Enter Fuyao Auto Glass, a China-based multinational that manufactures windshields for a large percentage of the 
world’s cars. Formerly struggling workers with decades of factory experience are offered a new chance. The only problem is GM payed $29 an hour, Fuyao pays $12. Workers are flown in from China to “train” 
already skilled labourers in the company’s philosophy. Can formerly unionized factory workers adjust to an autocratic, and some say unsafe, 
shop? Or will they succeed in unionizing the plant? American Factory is great look at changes in a Midwest factory town. It talks to the people on the shop floor and in their homes. It also follows some American managers visiting the mother plant in China. And it speaks directly both to the American and Chinese workers and management (including the odd, billionaire owner) and the cultural roadblocks they meet on the way. Another great doc from Bognar and Reichert!
And finally, a highly personal doc set in China that exposes some dark secrets…
One Child Nation
Dir: Nanfu Wang, Jialing Zhang
Nanfu Wang is a young American filmmaker, originally from Jiangxi, a desperately poor, landlocked province in southeast China. She was born in the 1980s right when the One Child Family policy comes into force. (It lasts officially until 2013.) It says city people can only have one child, but peasants can have a 
second child if their first one is a girl. Why? It’s simple economics: peasant families depend on their son to stay in the family home and provide for the parents in their old age. Girls move away once they marry.
But the film shows a dark side of this policy. Wang returns to her home village and finds evidence of parents abandoning 
baby girls to die, foetuses scattered in garbage dumps, and a trafficking ring that sold babies to orphanages to be adopted abroad. There are even cases where village chiefs dictated whether pregnant women must abort their foetuses. I don’t know how much of the film applies to a huge country with 1.4 billion people, but what the filmmaker uncovers in her own area really makes one wonder. One Child Nation is a heartfelt but disturbing documentary.
You can catch all of these films — One Child Nation, American Factory, The Corporate Coup D’Etat, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World — at Hotdocs over the next ten days. And remember, students and seniors can get in free to daytime screenings!
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks with filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn about “The Price of Everything”
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Art can be beautiful, shocking, moving or novel. It can function as a historical record or signal future changes in how we view the world. But it has never been a commodity, an investment, a future or a stock to be leveraged. That is until its steadily rising value proved irresistible to investors, many of whom know “the price of everything… but the value of 
nothing.”
The Price of Everything is the title of a fascinating new documentary that takes us behind the scenes of the monetary side of fine art. It talks with curators, collectors, historians, critics, dealers and auctioneers… people trying to determine — or change — the 
perceived value of a work of art. And it talks to the artists themselves who either embrace or reject the Long Game.
It’s written and directed by award-wininng American filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn, best known for the Oscar-nominated My Architect.
The Price of Everything showed at Hot Docs 18 in the spring and is now opening in theatres in Toronto.
I spoke with Nathaniel, via telephone, from CIUT 89.5 FM.
“What is Democracy?” Daniel Garber talks with Astra Taylor about her new documentary
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Photos by Jeff Harris
Is democracy justice or is it freedom? And if it’s freedom, is it freedom to think and say what you want, or is it freedom from hunger, poverty, and homelessness? Or is it just choosing which political party to vote for once every four years?
Should democracy just exist inside a nation, or should
it extend across borders? Is majority rule fair and equal?
What is democracy, anyway?
A new documentary poses just that question to intellectuals and the 
hoi polloi in America and across the Atlantic. It talks to barbers and doctors, students and politicians, in legislatures and at Trump rallies, to try to determine what democracy actually is.
It’s called What Is Democracy and is written and directed by noted documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor, whose works include Examined Life and Zizek!
What is Democracy had its world premier at #TIFF18.
I spoke with Astra Taylor at NFB’s Toronto headquarters during TIFF. Her film is opening soon.
Daniel Garber talks with Ann Shin about her new documentary The Superfood Chain
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
What do walnuts, goji berries and garlic have in common? How about quinoa, teff, virgin coconut oil and wild salmon? They’re all “superfoods” full of vitamins and minerals, and great traits like 
anti-oxidents Omega-3, high protein, gluten-free, or high fibre. As soon as a newly-marketed food is dubbed a superfood, it flies off the shelves of our grocery stores. But what happens to the people who grow these superfoods and who consider them a 
staple when the demand for a superfood skyrockets? What happens – good ot bad – to the people at the other end of the superfood foodchain?
The Superfood Chain is the title of a fascinating new 
documentary that follows four families whose local food has become an international commodity: teff growers in Ethiopia, coconut processors in the Philippines, quinoa farmers in Bolivia and salmon fishers in Haida Gwai. The film is directed and narrated by noted Toronto filmmaker Ann Shin, whose powerful documentaries like Escape from North Korea and My Enemy, My Brother use personal stories to tackle major issues.
I spoke with Ann Shin in Toronto by telephone at CIUT 89.5 FM.
The Superfood Chain premiers on TVO Docs on Monday, Oct 8 at 10 pm and is also playing at the upcoming Planet in Focus Film Festival.
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