Presented by VTIFF & Vermont PBS
Host Sponsor: Main Street Landing
Directed by Judith Helfand
54 mins | Documentary
Followed by Q&A with Ben Rose, Recovery and Mitigation Section Chief – Vermont Emergency Management Division, moderated by Eric Ford, Director of Programming at Vermont PBS
Broadcast date: Feb 10, 2020
*** Free, with suggested donation of $5-$10 ***
In her signature serious-yet-quirky connect-the- dots style, Peabody Award winning filmmaker Judith Helfand takes audiences from the deadly 1995 Chicago heat disaster deep into one of our nation’s biggest growth industries – disaster preparedness. Along the way she forges inextricable links between extreme weather, extreme wealth disparity and extreme racism, daring to ask: What if a zip code was just a routing number, and not a life-or-death sentence.
Asking open-ended questions that push people to deeply consider what it might mean to redefine the term “disaster” and reframe the concept of “resilience,” Helfand forges inextricable connections between the cataclysmic natural disasters we’re willing to see and prepare for and the slow-motion disasters we’re not – that is until an extreme weather event hits and they are made exponentially more deadly and visible. Using a combination of chutzpah, humor and candor,
Helfand delves deep into one of our nation’s biggest growth industries: disaster preparedness.