Following the success of his documentaries Wild Caught and With These Hands, Matthew Barr is on a roll. His latest project, Hungry For Green: Feeding the World Sustainably, has already drawn the attention of some big names, including former senator and presidential candidate George McGovern and documentarian extraordinaire Ken Burns.
Barr lives in Winston-Salem and is a film professor at UNC Greensboro.
McGovern, a longtime advocate for fighting hunger, narrates and appears in the half-hour documentary, which examines ecological sustainability and modern farming. He will join Barr at 7 p.m. Wednesday on the UNCG campus for a free screening of the documentary, and they will answer questions from the audience afterward.
The film was an outgrowth of the 2008 McGovern Conference on World Hunger, which was in South Dakota.
"What we ended up doing was trying to interview all the main participants of the conference while they were there, and filming (at farms) in South Dakota afterward," Barr said.
His wife, Cornelia Wright Barr, conducted the interviews. Later, they filmed some more farm footage in North Carolina.
Barr had drawn McGovern's attention with Wild Caught, which looked at commercial fishermen and a small fishing village on the North Carolina coast that was suffering because of larger overseas fish farms. The movie was screened at the RiverRun International Film Festival.
"I learned that those fishermen have parallels to small farmers, and I was drawn into exploring these same themes in a different venue," Barr said.
"The result is this film here. What we want to do is get it out there and push for these ideas that can happen on a local level."
Hungry For Green examines the possibilities of using small-scale farming in more efficient ways to avoid the pitfalls of larger farms.
"The soil (on larger farms) is getting chalkier and drier, and needs more chemicals," Barr said, "so the answer may be to go back to some of the old ways.…
"Go back to smaller farms, use the manure from cattle you have instead of petroleum-based fertilizer, utilize the best of the new technology together with the old ways."
Among other subjects discussed in the documentary are the aging population of farmers and the reluctance of young people to get into the business of farming.
Getting McGovern to not only be interviewed but also narrate, Barr said, "adds a cache to the film."
Burns, best known for epic documentaries such as The Civil War and Baseball, saw Hungry for Green and gave it an endorsement, describing it as "an important film that underscores the urgency of achieving agricultural sustainability to help alleviate hunger and protect our natural environment."
Barr said he hopes to distribute Hungry For Green to PBS stations.
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