FREE VIRTUAL SCREENING + DISCUSSION
Judith Helfand/2018/75 min

Presented by GreenTown in partnership with One Earth Film Festival.

FILM DESCRIPTION: Chicago suffered the worst heat disaster in U.S history 25 years ago in 1995, when 739 residents mostly—elderly and black—died over the course of one week. As “Cooked” links the heat wave’s devastation back to the underlying manmade disaster of structural racism, it delves deeply into one of our nation’s biggest growth industries: Disaster Preparedness. Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand uses her signature serious-yet-quirky-style as interlocutor and narrator to forge inextricable connections between the cataclysmic natural disasters we’re willing to see and prepare for, and the slow-motion disasters we’re not.

On this 25th anniversary of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, join GreenTown and One Earth for this screening of "Cooked," which chronicles that deadly event and the socio-economic forces that made it so much more severe in certain areas of the city. We'll also have a discussion with the film's director, Judith Helfand, as well as local advocate Orrin Williams of University of Illinois at Chicago and the Center for Urban Transformation (who appears in the film). Also learn about concrete action opportunities related to the film's topics. Facilitator: Delmar Gillus, Jr., Chief Operating Officer of Elevate Energy, and Greentown Leadership Team.