Documentaries To Watch With The Family

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Grab your kale chips, put on your pajamas and enjoy an FMTV documentary night with the family! We’ve come up with our top films, perfect for a quiet night in, to educate and inspire the whole team.

Occupy The Farm 

'Occupy The Farm' tells the story of a community's fight to save public land for urban farming. When 200 farmers march to the gates of the last farmland in the urban East Bay near Oakland, they don't carry signs protesting University of California’ s plans to build a shopping center. Instead, they carry tents, tools, and 15,000 seedlings.

They clip the padlock off the gate and march onto the fields. What happens next will change the fate of the land and introduce a new strategy for activism. From tilling the soil and watering vegetables to police raids, from lawsuits to overflowing harvests, 'Occupy The Farm' reveals a resourceful, creative, and determined community responding with direct action to a serious social need: access to healthy food.

The Uni Project

NutriBullet University is a 90-day healthy eating program that empowers students to take control of their health and change the way they eat. Over the course of 90 days, students are provided fresh produce, nuts, and seeds to make their personalized smoothies or what we call NutriBlasts. Through this hands-on experience, students are given a chance to change their health and reprogram their taste buds - a task which is not always easy. At the end of the program, results are in. Were students able to change their health for the better?

Edible School Gardens 

Author and educator, Leonie Shanahan, has built dozens of edible school gardens over the years and has been a positive influence on children and their new, healthy eating habits. Leonie's years of study in the fields of horticulture, permaculture, and organic gardening is translated into a passion for the health of our children and the need to make a difference by creating organic, edible gardens full of health and abundance in every school and in every backyard.

Yuck!

Zachary is a fourth grader at a large New York City public elementary school. Each day he reads the Department of Education lunch menu online to see what is being served. The menu describes delicious and nutritious cuisine that reads as if it came from the finest restaurants. However, when Zachary gets to school he finds a very different reality. Armed with a concealed video camera and a healthy dose of rebellious courage, Zachary embarks on a six-month covert mission to collect video footage of his lunch and expose the truth about the city's school food service program. This short documentary provides a fun and spirited insider's perspective on the elementary school lunchroom.

Polyfaces 

'Polyfaces' is a joyful film about connecting to the land and the community. Produced over a period of 4 years, it follows the Salatins, a 4th generation farming family who do ‘everything different to everyone else’ as they produce food in a way that works with nature, not against it. Using the symbiotic relationships of animals and their natural functions, they produce high quality, nutrient-dense products.

We show how they regenerate their landscapes, communities, local economies, customer’s health and, most importantly, their soils. We meet various characters and follow their powerful, personal journeys as they benefit physically and emotionally from the Salatin’s way of farming. This model is being replicated throughout our global village, proving that we can provide quality produce without depleting our planet.

Get access to the entire Food Matters Film Library. Start watching here.