Cooked: Survival by Zipcode

Synopsis

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, in which 739 people died, mostly black and in the poorest neighbourhoods of the city — tying it back to the underlying man-made disaster of systemic structural racism and then goes deep into one of America's biggest growth industries: Disaster Preparedness. Along the way she forges inextricable links between extreme weather, extreme disparity and the politics of disaster, daring to ask: What if with a slight torque of the system and a re-frame of the terms disaster, preparedness and resilience we could invest in the most vulnerable communities now — instead of waiting for the next natural disaster.