King Corn

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Halifax: FOCI
Monday November 5, 2007
Screening begins 19h00
Venue: Room SB160, Sobey Building, Saint Mary's University, 903 Robie Street.

USA / 2007/ 90min

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation.

In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds,and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how we farm.

Almost everything Americans eat contains corn: high fructose corn syrup, corn-fed meat, and corn-based processed foods are the staples of the modern diet. Ready for an adventure and alarmed by signs of their generation’s bulging waistlines, college friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis know where to go to investigate. Eighty years ago, Ian and Curt’s great-grandfathers lived just a few miles apart, in the same rural county in northern Iowa. Now their great-grandsons are returning with a mission: they will plant an acre of corn, follow their harvest into the world, and attempt to understand what they—and all of us—are really made of.

A Production of Mosaic Films Incorporated
A Film by Aaron Woolf, Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney
Co-Produced by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis
Produced and Directed by Aaron Woolf

King Corn is a co-production of Mosaic Films Incorporated and the Independent Television Service (ITVS), with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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