在这部Cooked纪录片片中,In July 1995, a heat wave overtook Chicago: high humidity and a layer of heat-retaining pollution drove the heat index up to more than 126 degrees. City roads buckled, rails warped, electric grids failed, thousands became ill and people began to die — by the hundreds. Cooked tells the story of this heat wave, the most traumatic in U.S. history, in which 739 Chicago citizens died in a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. Balancing serious and somber with her respectful, albeit ironic and and signature quirkly style, Peabody award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand explores this drama that, when peeled away, reveals the less newsworthy but long-term crisis of pernicious poverty, economic, and social isolation and racism. Cooked is a story about life, death, and the politics of crisis in an American city.
In her signature serious-yet-quirky connect-the-dots style, Peabody Award winning filmmaker Judith Helfand takes audiences from the deadly 1995 Chicago heat disaster -- in which 739 people died, mostly black and in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, ties it back to the underlying man-made disaster of systemic structural racism and then goes deep into one of our nation's biggest growth industries -- Disaster Preparedness. Along the way she forges inextricable links between extreme weather, extreme disparity and the politics of "disaster," daring to ask: What if with a slight torque of the system and a re-frame of the terms disaster, preparedness and resilience we could invest in the most "vulnerable communities" now - instead of waiting for the next "natural disaster". COOKED is adapted from Eric Klinenberg's ground-breaking book, HEAT WAVE: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.
