Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand (Blue Vinyl, A Healthy Baby Girl, Everything’s Cool), in association with Eric Klinenber’s book, “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago” (a document on the deadly 1995 killer heat wave that rocked Chicago and claimed the lives of 739 people), tells the story of the 1995 Chicago “meltdown” that saw temperatures race to over 100 degrees for five-consecutive days … and with humidity levels that raised to heat index to Death Valley like conditions.
Where you lived, how you lived and who you were, was telling. The South Side of Chicago was particularly hard hit, with its large black and low-income population. The “Gold Coast” and other more affluent areas of the city only suffered through the inconvenience of power outages and “uncomfortable” weather.
In the aftermath, there were the calls to action. The problem-solvers would go to work … and like past efforts, they would be unproductive. Like the “homeless” problem, everyone talks about it, money is thrown at with little regard for results … and, in the end, the problem never goes away.
Death by your zip code … think about it. On Apr. 20, filmmaker Judith Helfand, through interviews and footage from then and now, brings the issue front and center in Cooked: Survival by Zip Code.
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