{"id":354552,"date":"2026-03-30T02:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T02:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/354552\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T02:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T02:40:10","slug":"food-system-doc-fork-in-the-road-premieres-at-sonoma-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/354552\/","title":{"rendered":"Food System Doc ‘Fork In The Road’ Premieres At Sonoma Film Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cWatch what you eat\u201d used to be a commonly heard expression, typically urged in the context of dieting. But the maxim applies in a different way in the documentary Fork in the Road<\/a>, which made its world premiere Saturday at the Sonoma International Film Festival<\/a> in California\u2019s wine country.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film directed by Vivian Sorenson<\/a> and Jonathan Nastasi<\/a> invites viewers to reevaluate the current American food system which has achieved massive scale, delivery of cheap calories to consumers and immense profits to mega corporations but at the expense of healthy food and sustainable practices.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe antagonist of the film really is the industrial food system,\u201d Nastasi observed at a Q&A following the world premiere. But this is not a film about the bad guys \u2013 it\u2019s about the good guys who are reconnecting people to the land, innovating in farming methods, and working toward a sustainable future of quality food and dramatically reduced carbon footprint.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe wanted to highlight people that\u2026 were working around that challenge, creating workarounds and solutions through the nonprofits that were supporting their work,\u201d Nastasi continued. \u201cThat was a unifier amongst all of the subjects. Everyone in the film\u2026 is looking at how do we get food to people that is healthy and good, make a living, create jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong the innovators in the film is Dune Lankard, an Eyak Athabaskan Native of the Eagle Clan who grew up in southcentral Alaska. Part of his work focuses on scaling up kelp harvesting off the Alaskan coast.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Dune<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDune Lankard in \u2018Fork in the Road\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Revery<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cKelp is like the hemp of the sea,\u201d Lankard explained at the Q&A. \u201cIt has all these amazing properties. If you take 3 percent red seaweed and add it to animal feed and feed it to cows and pigs, it reduces their emissions by 60 to 80 percent. They found that if you add it to fertilizer, things [grew] greener, faster, stronger, and required less water. So, we\u2019re going to start a campaign from the homelands to the heartlands and work with all you farmers that want to grow things differently and think about how we can change these impacts from climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Dune<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDune Lankard speaks after the world premiere of \u2018Fork in the Road\u2019 at the Sonoma International Documentary Festival.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMatthew Carey<\/p>\n

\n\tLankard noted, \u201cWe are going to have to change the way we live, the way we act, the way we think, the way we grow our food. And so, when this opportunity came up to do this film with you all, I was like, \u2018I\u2019m in. Let\u2019s figure out how to tell the story and think about how we can do things that are regenerative, that are going to be good for the ocean and good for the wildlife, good for the sea life, and good for the people.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tChef, restaurateur and Food Network star Marc Murphy, who appears in the documentary, shows people how to incorporate kelp into recipes after learning of its healthful properties and remarkable sustainability. He first met director Vivian Sorenson when they worked at the Food Network.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen this kelp thing came around and [Vivian] told me about it, then I got together with Melissa [Clark, New York Times food columnist], an old friend of mine, and we just were like, \u2018Wow, we can try to make this sh*t popular, man. Let\u2019s do it.\u2019 And we got together and we did this,\u201d he said at the Q&A. \u201cTo me, it was like, if we could get it popular and we could get it into every grocery store and everybody could start eating it, it\u2019s like back in the day when arugula \u2014 nobody knew what that was and all of a sudden now everybody eats arugula.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Nick<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tNick Offerman<\/a> in \u2018Fork in the Road\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Revery<\/p>\n

\n\tActor Nick Offerman, an Illinois native whose family background is in farming, participates in the documentary and serves as an executive producer.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne of the worst ills to afflict our modern society is cheap food, because it\u2019s empty in so many ways of nutrients,\u201d he comments in Fork in the Road. \u201cI am worried that our consumerist culture, if we don\u2019t make some important changes, is going to be the death of the small American farmer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the film, Offerman expresses admiration for the work of author and environmental activist Wendell Berry and travels to the writer\u2019s home base in Henry County, Kentucky. The essayist, novelist and farmer, 91, is interviewed off camera in the film, his deep, rumbling voice grounding the documentary with words of wisdom. \u201cThe future of food is not distinguishable from the future of the land, which is indistinguishable, in turn, from the future of human care,\u201d Berry says. \u201cBut care also involves love. It means a lifelong duty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Berry Center, launched by Wendell\u2019s daughter Mary Berry Smith in 2011, is one of the nonprofits featured in Fork in the Road. The organization\u2019s website notes it is \u201cdedicated to bringing focus, knowledge and cohesion to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agricultural system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAppropriately, there was an organic evolution to the documentary project, going back almost a decade.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Directors<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDirectors Vivian Sorenson and Jonathan Nastasi speak after the world premiere of \u2018Fork in the Road\u2019 at the Sonoma International Film Festival.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMatthew Carey<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe started in Missouri with John and Holly Arbuckle,\u201d Sorenson commented, referring to a couple that has pioneered regenerative farming at Singing Pastures. \u201cWe\u2019re like, \u2018\u2026How do we get to the next part of the story?\u2019 And then we started shooting in Kentucky and that\u2019s when we met the Coombs [Curtis and Carilynn Coombs of Jericho Farmhouse] and we began to see that reciprocal relationship, and then we met Nick Offerman. Then of course we met Dune and Dune actually came to us from GreenWave [and executive director Brent Smith], and Lisa Holmes, who is our executive producer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSorenson added, \u201cIt was incredibly important for us to first reach out to the nonprofits that support these farmers\u2026 because without the nonprofits, these farmers would cease to exist or be able to farm in the way that they want to farm\u2026 We wanted to make a movie about shining a light on the people who had ideas and were doing something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"'Fork<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Revery<\/p>\n

\n\tFork in the Road is screening today at the Skyfire Environmental Film Festival in Phoenix, AZ. It will also be playing in April at the RiverRrun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, NC, the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival in Dubuque, IA, and the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival in California. Additional festivals are also on the schedule.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt is incredible accomplishment to finish a documentary film that comes from a little baby idea into a feature documentary,\u201d Sorenson said at the world premiere. \u201cIt takes so much blood, sweat, tears, arguments, love, passion, giving up, starting again. And I can\u2019t believe that we\u2019re actually here today.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWatch what you eat\u201d used to be a commonly heard expression, typically urged in the context of dieting.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,48422,187512,409,111,139,63395,69,187513,187514],"class_list":{"0":"post-354552","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-fork-in-the-road","10":"tag-jonathan-nastasi","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nick-offerman","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-sonoma-international-film-festival","17":"tag-vivian-sorenson"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}