The movement to eat clean, local and organic has been growing rapidly for the past several years, but what about the people who actually pick our food? In the next session of BK@24FPS #Resist Film Series we will explore the fight for labor rights by farm workers across the United States. We will look back to the 1960s with Delano Manongs on the Filipino pickers who started the famous grape boycott and a clip from Dolores, the timely documentary on the life of Dolores Huerta of UFW. We’ll then flash forward to the present with Food Chains, an exposé on the deplorable conditions that forced Latino tomato pickers in Florida to join together and fight for better wages.

We will view a clip from Dolores, the timely documentary on the life of Dolores Huerta of United Farm Workers.

In this exposé, an intrepid group of Latino farmworkers battle to defeat the $4 trillion global supermarket industry through their ingenious Fair Food program, which partners with growers and retailers to improve working conditions for farm laborers in the United States.

There is more interest in food these days than ever, yet there is very little interest in the hands that pick it. Farmworkers, the foundation of our fresh food industry, are routinely abused and robbed of wages. In extreme cases they can be beaten, sexually harassed or even enslaved – all within the borders of the United States.

Food Chains reveals the human cost in our food supply and the complicity of large buyers of produce like fast food and supermarkets. Fast food is big, but supermarkets are bigger – earning $4 trillion globally. They have tremendous power over the agricultural system. Over the past 3 decades they have drained revenue from their supply chain leaving farmworkers in poverty and forced to work under subhuman conditions. Yet many take no responsibility for this.

We will look back to the 1960s with Delano Manongs on the Filipino pickers who started the famous grape boycott.

Sanjay Rawal had a over a decade’s worth of experience as a human rights and humanitarian aid consultant with projects in over 40 countries before being bit by the film bug. His first feature, Food Chains, chronicled the struggle of a small group of tomato pickers, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, as they fought for rights and wages from multibillion-dollar corporations atop the food supply chain. The film was produced by Eva Longoria and Eric Schlosser and narrated by Forest Whitaker.

It had its world and domestic premieres in 2014 at the Berlinale and Tribeca, respectively. It was released theatrically nationwide by Screen Media and won a number of awards, including the 2015 BritDoc Impact Award. Sanjay is currently finishing a film on indigenous long-distance running which took him from Botswana to Japan to Arizona.