Finding North Documentary . One Nation. Underfed.
Forty-nine million people in the U.S.—one in four children—don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
This film bravely confronts the appalling truth that 49 million people in the U.S., including one in four children, don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Finding North easily dispels the dangerous myth that such issues affect only the poor, unemployed and uneducated.
It’s difficult to fault the film’s sophisticated presentation of persuasive information and passionate interwoven testimonies. In particular, the film’s well-chosen interview subjects paint a shocking and accurate portrait of the genuine human impact of the Hunger crisis in American. It’s impossible to be left unaffected by the anguished accounts of mothers, teachers, workers and young children.
The film provides an explanation for how it is possible for millions of children to be effectively starving in the middle of a country blessed with a notorious overabundance of food and simultaneously cursed with one of the highest rates of obesity in the world.
Directors Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush examine the issue of hunger in America through the lens of three people struggling with food insecurity: Barbie, a single Philadelphia mother who grew up in poverty and is trying to provide a better life for her two kids; Rosie, a Colorado fifth-grader who often has to depend on friends and neighbors to feed her and has trouble concentrating in school; and Tremonica, a Mississippi second-grader whose asthma and health issues are exacerbated by the largely empty calories her hardworking mother can afford.
Ultimately, the Finding North Documentary shows us how hunger poses serious economic, social and cultural implications for our nation, and that it could be solved once and for all, if the American public decides – as they have in the past – that making healthy food available and affordable is in the best interest of us all
What You Can Do
For Finding North Documentary, Participant Media will convene a consortium of leading nonprofit organizations, experts and companies working to relieve the immediate urgency of hunger, as well as those working to solve the tougher, complex issues that contribute to food insecurity in America. This interactive social action campaign will launch in the Fall / Winter of 2012.
In the meantime, we invite you to the conversation on Facebook and visit the Food Reseach and Action Center— the leading national nonprofit organization working to improve public policies and public-private partnerships to eradicate hunger and undernutrition in the United States.
