“Cooked: Survival By Zip Code” will air on PBS as part of “Independent Lens.” A press release confirmed that Judith Helfand’s documentary about the 1995 Chicago heat wave that claimed the lives of 739 people, most of whom were Black, will make its national television debut February 3, preceding coverage of the Iowa caucuses.
Directed and produced by Helfand, the Kartemquin Films doc revisits the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave, which has largely been erased from history. Most of the people who perished during the disaster were Black or living in poor neighborhoods, which suggests that the victims didn’t have access to the resources necessary to survive the heat. Structural racism and poverty were as much the cause of their deaths as the environment.
And, as Helfand’s film argues, what happened in Chicago in 1995 isn’t an isolated incident. Over and over again, marginalized communities are the ones most affected when natural disasters hit.
In “Cooked,” Helfand “forges critical connections between the unprecedented cataclysmic natural disasters we’re willing to see and prepare for, and the everyday, constantly churning, slow-motion disasters we’re not – that is, until an extreme weather event hits and they are made exponentially more visible and deadly,” the press release details. “Whether it’s a deadly heat wave in Chicago, Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, or Maria, or massive wildfires in the West, these disasters reveal the ways in which class, race, and zip code predetermine who lives and dies every day regardless of the weather, who gets hurt the worst and first in the wake of an ‘official disaster,’ which communities recover and rebuild and which simply don’t.”
“A Healthy Baby Girl,” “Blue Vinyl,” and “Everything’s Cool” are among Helfand’s other docs. She received a News & Documentary Emmy Award for producing “Good Fortune,” a report on poverty in Kenya that ran on PBS’ “POV.” Last year, she took home the Freedom of Expression Award at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where “Cooked” screened.
“Cooked: Survival By Zip Code” will air on “Independent Lens” on February 3. You can find more info on PBS’ website and check out the trailer below.
