kingcorn.net

Taking a brief hiatus from the Big City, King Corn co-producer Curt Ellis reported from Central Oregon’s Bend Film Festival this weekend, where King Corn took home the prize for Best Documentary!

King Corn was up against eighteen other delightful feature documentaries, among them the tale of a wiener dog racing contest and the unlikely story of a Pentecostal minister who receives a divine calling to…make movies.

While we never imagined corn would be more exciting to jurors than either wieners or fire and brimstone…we’re grateful the folks at Bend did!

Check out the other winners here.

King Corn ended the weekend with a screening at Boston’s Muddy River Film Series, at The Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. Coolidge Corner theater-goers keep your eyes peeled: King Corn returns for a full run at the cinema on October 19th!

King Corn returned to its old editing haunts at the Old American Can Factory this weekend, showing a New York City sneak preview of the film in Brooklyn as part of Rooftop Films 2007.

The crowds were great, and the sunset superb…and King Corn was glad for a little chance to walk down memory lane. Or at least Fourth Street.

We’re flattered to have been a part of Israel’s incredibly friendly, incredibly warm environmental film festival, held in Tel Aviv each summer. King Corn got some red-carpet treatment as Ecocinema Israel’s opening night film, and the cinematheque was packed!

Israel is one of the top importers of US corn, and the audience had a lot of questions for us. It didn’t take long to find out why…Curt took a bus through the countryside to show the film at a Kibbutz in the south, and saw dairy and chicken confinement farms along the way, and a silo complex that might well be holding some of our Iowa corn.

It made us wish we’d had more time to talk about the role of exports in King Corn, because almost 20% of US corn ends up being consumed overseas. While we like to imagine that all that corn is feeding hungry people somewhere, it often winds up undermining local farmers and regional food systems, and encouraging other countries to eat the same way we do. In Israel, already 39% of the population is overweight, and the problem seems to be worsening. They do have the good idea of eating salad for breakfast, though, and that’s a habit we’ve taken home with us.