The Ants and the Grasshopper

Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. Travelling from Malawi to California to the White House, her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the US, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe they live on a different planet from everyone else.

‘We don’t want to have the difficult conversations about whether the land was stolen, we don’t have conversations about whether farm laborers are being paid well, we don’t want to have the difficult conversations about whether what we’re doing is killing off species here in the United States, and not making it possible for farmers to farm elsewhere. The goal for this film is to be as an entryway into these conversations, so we have that confrontation with power, as [the Black Lives Matter movement] did last year. It’s easy for the food system to carry on pretending the business as usual is OK.’

Co-director Raj Patel, from an interview with The Guardian.