Documentary on Community Gardening and Food Justice in North America 2010

 

Urban community gardening is a phenomenon that is spreading throughout the world. At the core of the films are gardening activists who explain how and why their gardens are a “green oasis” within the city, as well as projects of resistance that bring “another world” into being. The films also show the critical and ambivalent ways in which the gardening movements can be instrumented by neoliberal regimes.

North America has a vibrant  community garden scene that is currently developing into a broad social movement for food justice. Through the local production of ecological food for subsistence and for sale at farmers’ markets, community gardeners not only construct an alternative to the agro-industrial business and “food deserts”, they simultaneously create a new local self-reliance and new discourses on justice.

In a series of four documentaries, film director Ella von der Haide features urban community gardens and their connections to emancipatory social movements in South Africa, Argentina, Germany and North America. The community gardens portrayed in this film, in New York, Detroit, San Francisco and Vancouver, are all engaged in different social change processes, from anti-racist resistance and post-colonial healing to indigenous self-determination and queer-feminist environmental politics.

The director will be present for Q&A.

More information on the film and research: www.communitygarden.de

Information on the director:

Ella von der Haide is a Dipl.-Ing. of Urban and Regional Planning, Garden Activist and feminist Filmmaker from Germany.

Contact: post@ella-von-der-haide.de

Sponsored by: SJWG, Film & Digital Media, and Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

October 27, 2011, 4:30-6:30 PM | Studio C (Room 150 in Communications Building)