The 2019 Planet in Focus Fest Forum topics include transportation, climate change, and mass production. Each panel is filled with experts who will share their perspective and answer your questions to further explore the film themes.
As the Amazon burns and the US-China trade war continues to escalate, Soyalism is a sobering probe of a global industry with surprising links to both crises. Following each link in the worldwide chain of pork production, from the United States to Brazil, Mozambique, and, ultimately, China, this classic investigative documentary surveys the international consequences of Beijing’s growing demand: enormous soybean monocultures in the Brazilian rainforest; lagoons of hog waste threatening water supplies in North Carolina; Mozambican farmers coerced and displaced. A market once driven by local producers has been transformed by industrial conglomerates controlling feed production, livestock rearing, slaughterhouses, and distribution. Without a concerted effort to combat rapacious agribusiness and unsustainable consumer habits, Soyalism reveals that pork’s calamitous social and ecological by-products are only likely to escalate.
Preceded by short film Farming for Future
This short documentary visits the unexpected places where the farms of the future are emerging—a school in west Baltimore, a garage in St. Louis—and introduces the people who are helping this movement take shape.