Geneva can't help but notice how perfectly identical all the apples at the grocery store are. Melissa sighs after reading that these apples have come all the way from New Zealand. Youri feels frustrated that his corner store does not stock more locally grown, organic produce.

 

Have you ever wondered how much of the food you eat is genetically modified?

 

Have you ever wondered if there was a connection between industrial food production and the poverty and indebtedness of local farmers throughout the world?

 

A group of young Canadians have. Their efforts are featured in Diversidad, a documentary film that examines issues regarding food production in the twenty-first century.

 

On July 27th, 2003, in Vancouver, fifteen activists from across Canada got on their bicycles to undertake a journey of awareness aimed at connecting people to the food they consume. Their name: The Deconstructing Dinner Caravan (DDC). Their destination: the World Trade Organization's (WTO) 5th ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico.

 

Inspired by their sense of urgency and wanting to fully explore food production problems that the world faces today, the makers of Diversidad followed the group as it engaged with individuals and communities that are attempting to reclaim their autonomy from the industrial food system. They encountered hundreds of people along the way, including a local farmer who became a father figure to the group, a community activist spreading a message of peace through organic food, and a Mexican indigenous farmer who introduced the DDC to ancient rituals of corn.

 

Diversidad captures their journey, using it as a connecting element in an audio-visual network of images, sound and music that is at once a travelogue, an informative resource and a plea for social change. The working title of the project, the Spanish word for "diversity", communicates the intimate latticework of forces that constitutes a healthy ecosystem, wherein all parts complement one another and contribute to a whole in harmonious complexity.

 

Informative yet pointed, probing yet personal, the film explores a number of pressing issues, from exploitive agribusiness practices to the proliferation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), from the lopsided relations of First- and Third-World nations to the mass movement against the WTO and other global decision-makers that has become an integral part of our socio-cultural landscape.

 

Through music, words, images and montage, the documentary will ask its questions not in a spirit of antagonism towards the economic and social forces behind the problems, but in a spirit of celebration for the earth and of humanity's capacity for change.

 

By exposing the problems that we face as consumers in the twenty-first century, and by tracking three individuals who are struggling to live sustainably within an unsustainable food system, Diversidad hopes to inspire its viewers to become, as one character in the film puts it, solutinaries, proponents of holistic diversity and sustainable practices.

 

email: diversidad.doc@gmail.comTel: 514.996.1267