King Corn's filmmakers can attend your event, host a discussion, or give a keynote address. To inquire about inviting a filmmaker to your screening, please contact bigriverfilm [at] gmail [dot] com. If you would like to also purchase posters to promote your screening, call us or email us at kcorn@bullfrogfilms.com.]

KING CORN is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation.

In KING CORN, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the East Coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat - and how we farm.

Features Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Earl Butz, former US Secretary of Agriculture.

This disc also includes the new companion film, BIG RIVER, on the environmental consequences of industrial agriculture.

Note about the short version of KING CORN by co-creator, Curt Ellis: "In creating a classroom-length version of KING CORN, our goal was to keep the content and spirit of the original film intact, while trimming out any details that weren't essential to the film's main points.

The similarities. Both the full-length version and the classroom version structure their stories around my best friend Ian and me moving to Iowa, growing an acre of corn, and setting out to see where our harvest will go when it leaves the farm. Both versions follow corn into corn-fed meat and corn-sweetened soda, and both uncover corn's role as an enabler of fast food, obesity, and diabetes. Both versions deal closely with farm subsidies, using archival footage and a visit to the elderly Earl Butz, father of modern American farm policy. And both films strive to deal fairly and compassionately with the farmers, experts, policymakers and professionals who appear on screen.

The differences. In the full-lengh version, we explore the fact that Ian and I had family roots in rural Iowa; in the classroom version we don't mention it. In the full-length version, we show us injecting fertilizer and applying herbicide; in the classroom version we just include the fertilizer scene. (That alone still gets the point across that farming has largely become a chemical profession, and still conveys the theme that the overriding goal of modern agriculture is to grow as much corn as possible. The chemical aspects of our farm are explored most thoroughly in the accompanying BIG RIVER.) In the full-length film, we include a few scenes that deal with corn as Americana; in the classroom version we remove those moments.

If you're able to, we hope you'll put both copies in your library. The full-length version has the pacing and nuance that made KING CORN really sing when it showed it theaters; the short version hits the highlights and ships with a copy of our follow-up film BIG RIVER, which we think takes the KING CORN conversation to the next place it needs to go.

We're grateful for your support, and for showing KING CORN in the classroom."

Web Page: http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/kcorn2.html

Reviews
"King Corn not only describes the debilitating industrialized agriculture system in which farmers are caught, it also reveals a food system that is not serving us citizen-eaters well. The 'cheap food' provided by our industrialized food system may turn out to be very expensive when all of the costs are considered. This film will encourage many citizens and organizations to become engaged in the food debate that has already begun in many sectors of our society and to join with others who are already part of that debate, to change the policies which, as the film points out, helped to create this food system in the first place. Everyone should see this film...Big River tells 'the rest of the story.' King Corn helped us to understand how growing corn in Iowa is not particularly profitable for farmers. Big River takes us down stream from the farm to better understand additional unintended consequences--of growing as much corn as possible as--especially to the quality of our water. I appreciated the fact that Big River does not blame the farmer for this ecological disaster. As Paul Thompson has indicated, farmers are now forced into a system which requires them to 'produce as much as possible, regardless of the cost' and Big River points out some of the costs to the farmer, to the environment, and to our communities...We have all been living as if nature's sinks were limitless and they are now full, so we have to redesign our human economies, including agriculture, to function within the limits of nature's resources and nature's absorption capacity. Anything short of that will only degrade our big rivers even more--to the detriment of the health of all living species--including our own. Big River begins to help us understand that."