Directors: Kristi Jacobson, Lori Silverbush
Cast: N/A
Running Time: 95 min
Synopsis: A documentary that investigates incidents of hunger experienced by millions of Americans, and proposed solutions to the problem.
FINDING NORTH is in an intriguing documentary revolving around the hunger crisis in the present day United States, and the very first film that I have experienced at this year’s inaugral Sundance London Film and Music Festival. You may be asking indeed the same question as myself going in, possibly rather arrogantly; what hunger crisis? You see, this is not a documentary focussing on the homeless issues across the country and the expected hunger issues that go along with that, which is what I presumptuously expected, but the 50 million Americans that live on the bread line where they live almost hand to mouth every month, relying on limited government handouts to get their food.
The film covers a number of different regions of the States, focussing in on the urban jungle of Philadelphia and a single mother trying to provide for her two young children, another family located in Colorado in an almost desolate unreachable partof the country relying on local food banks and the local community church, and a ranch worker who works two jobs, staring at 7am and working through to 11pm every day, just to support his family.
The film is wonderfully shot, particularly the opening sequence which uses fantastic aerial shots over crop fields, long-country roads in the middle of nowhere, and glorious images of the famous Philadelphia skyline, all accompanied by a superb musical soundtrack by T Bone Burnett, the huge talent behind a very successful musical career in performance, writing and producing, and a contributor to such amazing soundtracks for WALK THE LINE, THIS THING CALLED LOVE, CRAZY HEART and O’ BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? He’s easily the best thing about this movie, and his original music is sprinkled throughout the film, providing a seamless and fitting soundtrack to the imagery of both urban and country subject matter.
The film itself was quite engrossing in terms of subject matter, and I loved previous documentaries WAITING FOR SUPERMAN and FOOD INC, both produced by the same people behind this, so I was quite optimistic. The problem is that it is let down on one simple thing; it tries to cover too much. As well as delving into the world of the ‘human stories behind the statistics;’ the single mother Barbie from Philidephia, the ranch handler who has to manage two jobs to make ends meet and the local community at the far climbs of Colorado that relies on handouts, the film also covers the nutrition, or lack of it in American schools and the people trying to change it, Jeff Bridges and his 30 year old charity that striving to change the mentality of the US government and get them to invest more into food support, the actual supermarket culture that sees the lack of nutrtional foods making it to the small towns of America and much, much more. It has the potential to be great, and in terms of the technical part of the filmmaking, it is. If it had concentrated on just the one area of this vast subject, even if it were just the three main, and indeed very different areas of the country in which this is such a huge problem, and left out the irrelivant politics, talking heads etc, it would have come across so much better.
That’s not to say I disliked the film at all. It is, as I previously said, an engrossing and at times emotional watch, and the great thing about these kind of documentaries is that they raise an instant awareness of issues that we otherwise wouldn’t have known about, and in this case, believed would and could happen in one of the richest countries on Earth. It’s relevance is not just in the US, but also indeed in our country too, and I was engaged in it from beginning to end, asking myself a million questions as the film played out before me. I would have just like some parts of it investigated some more and some parts left out altogether.
A worthy addition to the programme all the same.
FINDING NORTH was reviewed at the 2012 Sundance London Film and Music Festival
