BITE-SIZED: A Short Films Showcase

This free event coinciding with the Public Market brings together powerful stories where food becomes a lens into community, culture, and resilience.

From a haunting meditation on industrial farming, to the public film premiere celebrating our local food co-op’s 50th anniversary, to intimate looks at honey production and grassroots food justice, this cinematic tasting menu celebrates the connections that bring us together around the table. Filmmakers Jonathan Ramos and Jon Steinman in attendance.

OTHER HAPPENINGS

• Food Festival and Market (10:00am-3:00pm)
• BITE SIZED: a Short Films Showcase (11:00am-12:50pm)
• Young Farmers & Diversity on Film (1:00pm-3:00pm)
• Local is Sweet—one-of-a-kind Dessert Tasting Expo celebrating the region’s finest treat creators (3:00pm-4:30pm)
• Sweet Story—feature film (4:30pm-6:00pm)
• Soil & Soul (7:00pm-9:15pm)

THE FILMS

A Nation’s Table: Anita Stewart & The Food Day Canada Story

(2024, Canada, 11min)

Ask a farmer, a fisher, a chef, and a home cook to define ‘Canadian food’ and you’ll get four different answers. After all, the food found in Canada is as diverse as the people who live here. A Nation’s Table, explores the life’s work of Anita Stewart, the “patron saint of Canadian cuisine”. Thanks to her boundless tenacity and enthusiasm, she contributed more than ever imaginable to uncovering untold stories that celebrate Canadian cuisine, ultimately leading to the nationally recognized “Food Day In Canada”. Through her life of activism on food and the people who bring it to us, she turned crisis into opportunity, setting the table for Canada to build its culinary traditions into an evolving food system that’s the envy of the world. 

Producer: Ward 1 Studios / Executive Producers: Canada Beef & Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph / Director: Garett Smith with Sandy Clipsham and Blair Cameron 

Valley Pride

(2023, Austria/Germany, 15min)

The supposedly extraterrestrial camera eye hovers upside down through a palm grove planted in strict, rectilinear lines. Nature is literally upside down, a simulation game in artificial order. Only with the grand and strange, vibrantly smoldering score by Jung an Tagen does the view slowly turn clockwise. Then a cut: peace, vastness.

At some point, in the middle of the Californian desert, “Valley Pride” is written on oversized corrugated iron, the name of one of the most important areas of US industrial agriculture. A place of inhospitableness that, through Lukas Marxt’s unmistakable approach, is increasingly exposed to its bizarre unnaturalness. Powerfully photographed, the monocultural agrarian symmetry and its irrigation ballet testify to humanity’s self-annihilation in the service of constant profit orientation – even as the necessarily anonymous workers return to the frame in Marxt’s fourth approach to the Imperial Valley.

Director, Lukas Marxt

Give and Take

(2021, USA, 11min)

After seven of their drivers died from COVID-19, a car service in Queens, NY started hosting a community fridge on the sidewalk outside their offices. A small business started by immigrants, Fenix XL now serves a largely immigrant community with 24hr access to free food. Fanny, who lost her cleaning job when schools were closed, now relies on this fridge to survive. The first community fridge in NYC started outside a Bed Stuy apartment in February 2020; there are now over 100 across the city, inspiring a movement around the world. 

Director: Gareth Smit / Producer: Justin Levy

Women of the Earth: How This Indigenous Farmer is Solving Food Insecurity

(2023, USA, 16min)

As climate chaos increases around the world, Michelle Week, a farmer outside of Portland Oregon is drawing on her Sinixt indigenous knowledge to adapt her farm to the changing seasons. By practicing techniques like seed saving and dry farming, Michelle is combating the increasing food security crisis while continuing to provide fresh food to her local community.

Women of the Earth is a new show on PBS Terra, produced by Summer Moon Productions, featuring stories of women across America who are leading a new movement to restore and protect the land. By focusing on women in land stewardship roles like farmers and shepherds, the series will explore women’s unique relationship to the earth and their innovative undertakings to heal the earth from climate change.

Director and Executive Producer, Chiara Hollender / Producers, Chiara Hollender, Lauren Nolan / Series Produced by Summer Moon Productions for PBS Digital Studios

Deconstructing Dinner: Honey

(2013, Canada, 24min)

From flower to plate, the story of how pure honey ends up in a jar is an awe-inspiring reminder of the work of the honeybee and the ecological relationships we are all a part of. There are, however, many options of honey to choose from and consumers might want to question if what’s on the label, is what’s really in the jar?’ Deconstructing Dinner: Reconstructing Our Food System is the result of two lovers of food and media coming together with the enthusiastic commitment of a small independent Canadian television company. Created by Nelson’s Jon Steinman and James Beard Award winning filmmaker Declan O’Driscoll, the series invites us to rediscover food – in our kitchens, our communities, and through one of our most precious assets… our sense of taste. Local musician Adham Shaikh was the Music Supervisor for the series alongside local animator Alex Avelino. 

Director: Declan O’Driscoll / Writer & Host: Jon Steinman / Music Supervisor: Adham Shaikh / Animator: Alex Avelino

More Than a Grocery Store

(Kootenay Co-op 50th Anniversary Film)

(2025, Canada, 20min)

Public Premiere. For 50 years, the Kootenay Co-op has been more than a grocery store – it’s been a gathering place, a movement, and a story about what happens when people come together with care and purpose. This short film captures that spirit, honouring the hands and hearts that shaped it. 

Director, Jonathan Ramos / Executive Producer, Amanda Verigin