Have you seen Fresh? Then you know that starchitects, supermodels, and star chefs have had their day.

It’s time to focus on the people who feed us. Farmers are eloquent, passionate, and frequently photogenic.

The movie Food Inc bared the “mechanized underbelly of food production;” Fresh focuses more on the flip side of the coin.

In Fresh you have farmers like Russ Kremer, a reformed high-volume pork producer from Frankenstein, Missouri, who fell into organic because he couldn’t stomach dousing his pigs with antibiotics any longer. He now raises pigs in fields rather than feedlots and pays two times the going wage to workers.

Will Allen

Or urban farmer, Will Allen, a former pro basketball player, now full-time farmer and educator, who hands out buckets of worms to inspire home gardeners.

I recently talked with Fresh’s director Ana Sofia Joanes, who says that her inspiration for the film grew from a sense of powerlessness.

“I had a hard time taking action around global warming,” said Joanes. “It felt so overwhelming, and my actions so meaningless. But there was something so wrong with this form of cynicism. I wanted to tell my child that I tried to make a difference when faced with a crisis. Farming and food involves everyone at some level.”

Anna continued, “Farmers taught me a sense of awe. Living in the city, you forget the miracle of life. When I was on the farm I realized how plants turn sun energy into food energy. You relearn things forgotten from childhood. When I carried buckets of water to the chickens at Joel Salatin’s farm, it seemed like the most meaningful thing I had done in months.”

Ana Joanes, Director of Fresh

In America we need to reconnect with real food. To learn or relearn what food really tastes like. (There is even a book with that title, Real Food, by Nina Planck.) Good news, then, that the majority of chefs surveyed recently said they would be adding local and sustainable food to their menus. We can do the same at home.

Most documentaries—other than movies by Michael Moore, and Food Inc—come and go without a trace. Very few make back their budget. Joanes wants her film to be seen and to became the basis for conversation, even activism. Rather than going the traditional in-theater distribution route, Joanes turned to a license model. For $29.95 and up you can host a screening at your home, on the wall of a barn, school, church or theater. Since its release this Spring, Fresh has had more than 1,000 screenings that have run the gamut from ‘your parlor wall for family and friends’ to ‘the side of a barn for more than 500 people’.

The movie is just an hour and ten minutes long but, “then people spend two hours talking about the movie.” Many viewers are inspired to take immediate action—buy a share in a CSA, get involved in water use issues, talk to farmers, and change their buying habits. And, ideally, inspire others to do the same.

This is not a movie for a specific demographic or subculture. No preaching to the choir. As Joanes notes, “we all eat. And hope is what you need to stay engaged with the world.”

Additional Reading: What to Eat After Seeing Food Inc