Eating Alaska
New Day Films
•
56m
Directed by Ellen Frankenstein • Documentary • 2009 • 57 minutes
What happens to a vegetarian who moves to the Alaskan Frontier?
Eating Alaska is a film about connecting to where you live and eating locally. Made by a former city dweller now living on an island in Alaska and married to fisherman, deer hunter and environmental activist, it is a journey into food politics, regional food traditions, our connection to the wilderness and to what we put into our mouths.
In this quest for the "right thing" to eat, the filmmaker stops by a farmer's market in the lower 48 stocked with fresh local fruits and vegetables and then heads back to Alaska, climbing mountains with women hunters, fishing for wild salmon and communing with vegans. She visits a grocery store with kids to study labels and heads to the Arctic to talk with Inupiat teens in a home economics class, making pretzels while they describe their favorite traditional foods from moose meat to whale blubber.
The postcard like scenery in Alaska may be a contrast to what most urban residents see everyday and the filmmaker may have gone into the wild, but she also finds farmed salmon, toxics getting into wild foods and the colonization of the indigenous diet.
Up Next in New Day Films
-
The Shrimp
Directed by Keith Wilson • Documentary • 2010 • 15 minutes
The Shrimp follows the life cycle of a shrimp along the marshes of Savannah, Georgia. Lush, painterly images and a (un)canny audio soundtrack create a rich observational work about Southern culture, human folly and the interplay of natur...
-
My Brooklyn
Directed by Kelly Anderson • Documentary • With Jamel Shabazz, Craig Steven Wilder, Kelly Anderson • 2012 • 76 minutes
My Brooklyn follows director Kelly Anderson's journey, as a Brooklyn gentrifier, to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood. The film documents the redevelopment of Ful...
-
Woo Who? May Wilson
Directed by Amalie R. Rothschild • Documentary • With May Wilson, Meredith Monk • 1969 • 34 minutes
When her husband informs her, after 40 years of marriage, that his future plans no longer include her, May Wilson, age 60, former "wife-mother-housekeeper-cook" and a grandmother, moves to New Yor...
