To start its winter documentary film series, which runs most Mondays at 7:00 p.m. from February to March, the Norfolk Library will host a screening of The Same River Twice, about a group of young friends and lovers who raft down the Colorado River together in the 1970s, caught on film by filmmaker Robb Moss. Twenty years later, still carrying his camera, Moss revisits the members of his old gang one by one. The film documents the journey each has made from heedless youth to responsible adulthood, or, as one participant puts it, “from peyote to Prozac.” The film will be introduced by local resident Tom Hodgkin, who has said: “I lived that life, I was one of them.”
Food, Inc. is the library’s next offering, on Monday, February 8. The film’s thesis is that food producers in America don’t want us to see how food is made–or at least the handful of big corporations who produce most of what’s in American supermarkets don’t. They would rather keep alive the myth of the family farm, and the image of an idyllic rural setting as the source of foodstuffs. But the filmmakers show us otherwise, taking us to the factories, the feedlots, the processing plants where food originates. Michael Pollan guides the viewer on this tour of modern agribusiness. On hand to discuss their own experience of raising grassfed, pasture-raised beef will be members of the Wike family of Sharon CT, whose Barlow Beef is well known at the Norfolk Farmer’s Market.