SLIFF 2019 Interview: Fenell Doremus – Producer of COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE

By Tom Stockman | November 12, 2019

COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE will screen at The Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar) Friday, Nov 15 at 5:30pm  as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Producer Fenell Doremus will be in attendance and will host a post-screening Q&A. This is a FREE event.

Chicago suffered the worst heat disaster in U.S history in 1995, when 739 residents — mostly elderly and black — died over the course of one week. “Cooked” — an adaptation of Eric Klinenberg’s groundbreaking book “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago” — not only links the heat wave’s devastation back to the underlying manmade disaster of structural racism but also delves deep into one of our nation’s biggest growth industries: disaster preparedness. Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand uses her signature serious-yet-quirky style as interlocutor and narrator to examine both the cataclysmic natural disasters for which we prepare and the slow-motion disasters we ignore — at least until an extreme weather event hits and those slow-motion disasters are made exponentially more deadly and visible. But whether it was the heat wave in Chicago or the devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma, and Maria, all of these disasters share something in common: They reveal the ways in which class, race, and ZIP code predetermine who gets hurt the worst, who recovers and bounces back, and who receives minimal or no aid. “Cooked” asks the question: What if a ZIP code isn’t just a routing number but a life-or-death sentence?

Producer Fenell Doremus took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman November 12th, 2019

Tom Stockman: You have produced a movie called COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE that will be screening Friday night at the St. Louis international Film Festival.  You’ll be here for the screening, correct?

Fenell Doremus: I will be.

TS: Have you ever been to St. Louis before? 

FD: I have. My children are big fans of The City Museum there so we have made a couple of road trips to visit that. 

TS: A wonderful place. Let’s talk about your film. How did you first meet up to work with the film’s director Judith Helfand?

FD: Judith approached me three years after she started production on the film. That would have been summer of 2008. I’m a local Chicago producer and she is a New Yorker who is telling the story of Chicago and realized that she needed to pair up with someone that was local. She talked to me a bit about the film. I knew of her other films and had a lot of respect for her. I also had lived through the 1995 heat wave so her project naturally appealed to me. In 2008, Hurricane Katrina was still very much on our minds and this was just about three years after that disaster. I immediately saw it as a parallel story and one that people still weren’t really talking about in the right kinds of ways, so I very much wanted to get on board and work with her to make this film. 

TS: Tell me again how many people died in the Chicago heat wave of 1995? 

FD: The number that the Chicago epidemiologist came up with was 739. 

TS: I watched the film. Why do you think so many people died? It seems like a lot of people had their windows nailed shut, and no fans. 

FD: I think it’s a combination of several things. What we found to be the case was that people who died were disproportionately living in the low income neighborhoods and communities. Those people may have had their windows nailed shut, but that was the natural state of their existence. They lived in a community where they were afraid to go outside because the crime rates are high, and there are a few jobs because of disinvestment in those communities. It’s layers and layers and layers of different factors that go into why someone would nail their windows shut. There is also a huge health disparity in those communities that goes back to the fact that if people who live there don’t feel safe to go for a walk or a run in their neighborhood and they don’t have grocery stores that sell fresh produce. There have been decades of structural racism and segregation in Chicago that contribute to poor health, isolation, crime, and inadequate housing.

TS: Was 104° the highest temperature in 1995? 

FD: Yes, and it lasted for three or four days. What I learned what was that the critical factor, when it gets that hot, is that if it does not get below 80° at night, then you are in trouble. Even when it’s hot, if the temperature goes down to 75° at night, it’s survivable because your body has that chance to cool down  in the evening. Even though in 2012, we had similar hot daytime temperatures, at nighttime people were able to cool down and there weren’t as many deaths. 

TS: In 1995 mayor Daley blamed, in part, the families of the heat victims. What do you think of Daley‘s statement? Do you think he had some kind of point? 

FD: What’s interesting is that what has happened ever since then, we’ve had such messages as “check on your neighbors“, “take care of yourselves“ and I think that has had some effect on people.  There have been programs that have cropped up, Nonprofit groups that will collect air conditioners for people with low incomes and who might not otherwise be able to afford them. That has helped a little bit, but ultimately it’s never effective to blame the victim.  Ultimately, Mayor Daley‘s statements caused Ill will in the city. As a white filmmaker going to the South side of Chicago, even 10 or 15 years later, there is such a level of distrust of any sort of media  because the people felt that they were generally mistreated  by Mayor Daley and the media during the heat wave.

TS: Your film has an interesting structure. It starts out really about this1995 heat wave, and covers it in depth for the first 20 or 30 minutes, but then goes off in a lot of different directions.  It covers economic disparity, racism, food deserts, and disaster preparedness. When you and Judith had planned out this film, was there an outline of where the film would go, or did you just let things unfold? 

FD: Like any documentary, you sort of have an outline in your head for what it might look like but once you are on the ground, the story can unfold in surprisingly different ways. We took it to the editing room and found other ways for the trajectory of the film to go. So no, we definitely did not plan for it to go this way.

TS: Your film shows that the politicians of Chicago have put a lot of programs into place since 1995 to make sure something like this does not happen again. You cover a lot of that. Do you think that’s good enough or do you think there’s even more they should be doing? 

FD: Chicago is always opening more cooling centers and trying to come up with ways to address extreme weather. Today it’s extremely cold in Chicago, so we are talking about warming centers.  I think that government and institutions still need to address the underlying issues that affect social determinants of health. In our film we talk about how there is a 16 year life differential between the South side of Chicago than the North side.  But that was in 2011. Just this last year, New York University Medical School did another study and found that differential is closer to 30 years in Chicago, which is greater than any other city in the country. So all of those factors that I was talking about; disinvestment, lack of jobs, lack of grocery stores, those are factors which make neighborhoods healthy and vital places for people to live. There needs to be reinvestment in those communities. Over 50 schools were closed in 2011 in Chicago. That sends a huge message to a community that their future is not being invested in. There may be legitimate reasons for closing those schools, but even that is rooted in systemic policies of racism that over the years weakened the schools to begin with. I don’t think everything that needs to be addressed for these communities to be healthier is being addressed.  That’s what we’re trying to say in our film. We got a lot of attention when our film played in a small theatrical run in Chicago last summer.  We scheduled it to coincide with the anniversary of 1995’s heatwave and it happened to get very hot that week, as it tends to do in July in Chicago. It was a mini-heatwave. We got a lot of press attention that we normally would not have received.  If you have a film about racism and poverty, people often don’t really want to touch that. It’s hard and it’s complicated and often people just don’t want to go there. Our film used a weather disaster as a portal to talk about racism and poverty and the media wanted to talk to us because it was hot. The focus was that there was another heatwave in Chicago and had the city done enough to prevent another disaster. But we tried to stear the conversation to be about addressing the roots of poverty in the city as the ultimate preparedness.

TS: Let’s talk about these food deserts.  There are great swaths of neighborhoods in South Chicago where you can simply not buy healthy foods. Why do grocery chains not recognize that there are markets there?  Are these neighborhoods just so dangerous no one wants to open stores there?  It seems like a missed opportunity. 

FD: That’s a good question and something I’m not sure I have a handle on. I think it’s simply that the economic drivers went away.  People have really struggled since the factories have closed up and jobs went away.  Convenience food and fast food became more of an affordable option. Also, those communities really thinned out. Of course there was a decade of white flight in the 1950s, but I think later, when the jobs went away, there were plenty of black and brown neighbors that also left if they could. They went looking for better neighborhoods and for better opportunities.

TS: There’s a striking shot in your film or somebody goes in and buys a bag of chips and some candy that has to be pushed through bullet proof glass. We have that in St. Louis as well. There’s a dividing line here as well. If you go north of where were where you were when you visited The City Museum, that’s like the Chicago South side, But south of there is mostly much better.  Let’s talk about you. What is your background in filmmaking? 

FD: I attended the university of Wisconsin for undergrad as a sociology major. And one of my final classes was about the history of social movements.  We watched Eyes On The Prize and I was really moved by that series. It’s a long series and very in-depth. It had a lot of voices of people who lived and fought through the civil rights movement. I started to think about documentary film as a career.  I did not go to film school but I moved to Chicago and started looking around at who was making documentary films here. Kartemquin Films was one of the few options and I got an internship there. They were in their final years, I believe year two of editing HOOP DREAMS.  As an intern, I was pulled into that project to assist in editing and transcribing interviews. It was tape-to-tape editing in those days so a lot of what I did was to go through what was a six-hour cut at the time, and replacing that VHS footage with newer VHS footage that was watchable. I was hooked and completely fell in love with the form. I was hired on at Kartemquin Films as a staff producer and manager for about nine years. I worked on developing a number of films and was producer on the series The New Americans and Five Girls, another documentary that came out of Kartemquin. 15 years ago I went freelance and have been a freelance producer ever since.

TS: Have you taken COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIPCODE to other film festivals? 

FD: Yes. We premiered it one year ago yesterday at Doc NYC.  We’ve played it a number of environmental film festivals: DC Environmental Film Festival and Dallas has one called Earth X. We played it at the San Francisco Green Film Festival, The Planet In Focus Film Festival in Toronto and some other smaller film festivals.  We’re showing it in Wilmington North Carolina in a couple of days. We’ve shown it at several community screenings as well, partnering with different community organizations to think how than can use COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIPCODE as a tool to further their work. 

TS: How has it been received?

FD: People are loving it, but they are also very angry when they are finished watching it. People who have lived in better resourced communities are feeling guilty, and wondering how we can let this all go on in our neighboring communities. We’re developing an engagement campaign right now and thinking about how we can take action across the country with people who want to do something about this problem. 

TS: What are your distribution plans for COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE? 

FD: It is streaming now on iTunes  and Amazon and Google Play. It will play on PBS’s Independent Lens series next year on February 10th as part of their Black History Month programming. We’re just trying to get it out there as much as we can. 

TS: Best of luck with the film and I hope you enjoy your visits to St. Louis.

FD: Thanks, I’m sure I will.