MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Enthusiasts of local and seasonal foods can treat themselves to a private viewing of “Eating Alabama,” an award-winning documentary that has been traveling the film festival circuit earning praise, fans and environmental awareness.
The film will be broadcast at 8 p.m. Sunday on Alabama Public Television stations.
“Eating Alabama” follows a couple of native Alabamians, director Andrew Beck Grace and wife Rashmi Grace, as they return from the West to Alabama to live off the rich agricultural land in their home state as their grandparents did — locally and seasonally.
What they find is that nearly everything has changed about the food system at breakneck pace in just a few generations.
The film, a production of Moon Winx Films in association with the Independent Television Service and Alabama Public Television, had its world premiere at the enormous annual South-by-Southwest film/music/media festival in March in Austin, Texas.
The competition for just a minute of attention at that conference is stiff, but attendees were won over. The movie played to two near-capacity crowds and two sold-out screenings, the final one attracting scores of local food advocates and farmers.
Next up was the Yale Environmental Film Festival (its first “Yankee” screening), in New Haven, Conn.
“The movie was warmly received, and I was thrilled to be part of a conversation afterward about the local food scene in New Haven,” Grace wrote in his online blog during the tour. “I’ve always hoped that the film would be a conversation starter.”
Its next stop was the Full Frame Film Festival in Durham, N.C, drawing a crowd of 500, and then it went on to Columbia, S.C.’s Indie Grits Film Festival, bringing in more sold-out crowds and also winning the event’s grand jury prize, the “Top Grit.”
Stopping in the filmmaker’s home state, “Eating Alabama” showed to sold-out crowds and won Best Alabama Film at last month’s Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham.
On www.eating alabama.com, you can actually follow the film’s genesis, beginning with blog entries from January 2008 — just before the couple committed to what seemed to be an easily attainable all-local diet — all the way up to Dec. 2011, just one month before the film’s first screening. The blog has an interactive map of just some of the state’s 45,000 farms, zoning in on the small-scale farmers with diverse crops and a commitment to sustainable agriculture.
“All of my family is from the South, but I’ve always had a kind of love/hate relationship with the place. Like many young Southerners growing up here, all I’d wanted to do was get out,” Grace wrote in his director’s notes. “But the older I got, the more I felt drawn back to it — no matter how tortured and complicated its past.”
The plan, he wrote, was to find all the rural farmers he assumed would be in Alabama and “make a movie about how rewarding and gratifying it was to eat locally.”
Turned out there weren’t many farmers left in the state, and the food system here had become increasingly mechanized and corporatized. The audience gets to experience the often disheartening realizations Grace makes on his and Rashmi’s journey.
Grace calls the film, which had support from Alabama Public Television, the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Alabama Humanities Foundation, among others, “a personal essay about why food matters.”
“I hope viewers come away from the film curious about their own eating habits and wondering if it’s possible to change them, just a little,” Grace wrote in an email to the Advertiser. He said the movie is not designed to propose sweeping changes to “what’s wrong with our food system. Rather, it’s about how “slowing down, working hard, and sharing good food can go a long way toward living a good life.”
“This is not a movie that advocates rethinking your entire diet, but if people came away wanting to share a locally grown meal with friends — that would be a huge accomplishment for me.”
