Cooked: Survival by Zip Code

The film bites off more than it can chew... but its argument is persuasive and worrying.

Helfand’s documentary and its accompanying teacher’s guide argue convincingly for a more layered view of so-called “natural” disasters: one that considers poverty and race as underlying factors to thousands of unnecessary deaths each year.

A timely film which demonstrates how easy it is for privileged people to miss the subtle effects of racism, and how dangerous living in a white supremacist society is for people of colour...

Docmaker Judith Helfand probes a deadly 1995 heat wave that took at least 739 lives in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. Helfand deftly connects the climate-change dots from Chicago's "unnatural disaster" to Hurricane Katrina...