Food Industry Under Scrutiny At Berlin Film Fest

`I`ve been a Slow Food member for a long, long time,` Kosslick told a packed Sunday audience.

Two documentary films showing at the Berlin film festival take a swipe at the international food industry, one of several aspects of big business that come in for criticism at the event this year.

Confessing his disdain for fast food before a gala screening of "Food, Inc.", festival director Dieter Kosslick included the two anti-agribusiness films in this year's festival and seems to have captured the public mood.

"I've been a Slow Food member for a long, long time," Kosslick told a packed Sunday audience of 1,500, referring to a global movement founded to challenge the spread of fast food.

"When I saw this film I was so shocked that I said 'It has to be in Berlin'," said Kosslick, who before the festival told a German parliamentary committee "Food, Inc." would be one of the its most important films.

The second film, "Terra Madre" (Mother Earth) made by Slow Food International, is about a meeting of 5,000 small organic food producers from around the world in Turin.

American film maker Robert Kenner's "Food, Inc." is a hard-hitting expose of the agribusiness.

It looks through the eyes of farmers, consumers and legislators, contrasting corporate images of red barns and white fences with factory farms and huge processing plants.

Kenner said he tried but failed to get the companies themselves -- such as Monsanto, Smithfield Foods and Tyson Foods -- to give their side of the story in his film.

"We hoped to have a dialogue with the companies about the challenges of feeding us," Kenner told the audience. "We reached out to the companies. They seemed interested but in the end almost all said no, they didn't want to be involved."

DISTURBING IMAGES

His documentary looks at poultry sheds and meat packing plants. There are disturbing shots of cattle feed lots and animals heading for slaughter. It critically examines the corn subsidies that allowed the agribusiness to become so large and the synthetic fertilisers, herbicides, and hormones used.

The United Nations says food production is the main cause of pollution and the destruction of ecosystems because of the massive use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers.

The film, first screened at Toronto in September, is expected to be released in the second half of 2009 in the United States by Magnolia Pictures and Kenner said the international rights were being sold in Berlin's European Film Market.

"The film is ostensibly about food but it's also about the concentrated power in the United States and the corrupting effects of that power," said Eric Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation". He is in the film and also spoke as a panellist.

"But it's not only the United States, you also see the same tendencies in the European Union. It's a real threat to ordinary people when one company has so much control."

After the screening of "Food, Inc.", festival organisers decided to forgo the usual finger food delicacies and instead offered organic vegetable stew made by one of Berlin's most famous chefs.

"Terra Madre" focuses on the meeting in Turin of 5,000 organic food producers from 1,700 communities. They formed an informal network and meet to exchange ideas and techniques and to share problems.

The film focuses on a solitary farmer who for decades led a lifestyle of agricultural self-sufficiency. However, the elderly man died after a severe drought in 2003.