Could a Documentary Save Your Kid's Life?

Christian Taylor 00:00
Today's children will be the first generation in American history to live shorter lives than their parents.

Christian Taylor 00:08
Now, that's not a guess. It's not a doomsday hot take. That's the central argument of a film called The 100-Year Effect. It's made by an OHSU medical scientist named Dr. Kent Thornburg, and it's backed by decades of research.

Christian Taylor 00:24
Six in 10 American adults have a chronic disease. Treatment of chronic disease accounts for 80 to 90% of US healthcare costs. Heart disease is still the leading cause of death in this country.

Christian Taylor 00:35
And the cause of all that, according to Dr. Thornburg, isn't lifestyle choices in the way we usually mean that phrase. It's nutrition, it's environment, and quite frankly, it's what we've allowed corporations to do to our food supply, our farms, and our bodies over the last several decades.

Christian Taylor 00:57
I watched that film in a theater — a real theater — and I had the honor of moderating the Q&A. And when I went back to my room, I couldn't stop thinking about it. That's the mark of every good documentary, by the way.

Christian Taylor 01:10
Over the week, the thoughts compounded though, because I also watched two other documentaries that, in retrospect, were telling me a very similar story.

Christian Taylor 01:21
This episode is about all three and what they have in common. And it's a question I've been chewing over ever since: what are these filmmakers doing, and why does it matter so much that we pay attention to them?

[Documentary First intro] 01:37
[Documentary First: The Deep Dive intro plays]

Christian Taylor 01:45
This is Documentary First: The Deep Dive — where I take an insight from a recent podcast conversation, plumb its depths, and see what gold we can bring to the surface. I'm Christian Taylor. Let's dive in.

Christian Taylor 01:58
Last week on Documentary First, Episode 276, I sat down with a filmmaker named Robin Canfield. Robin lives in Orlando, but I caught him in Saigon, where he was running a four-week documentary program with student crews from five different countries.

Christian Taylor 02:12
Robin is the co-founder of a company called Actuality Abroad. And for the last 15 years, he's been training student filmmakers to do one specific thing — tell the stories of people he calls the changemakers: the people in the world quietly doing good, often in corners where corporations and governments would rather we didn't look.

Christian Taylor 02:36
Robin also wrote a book called Purpose Driven Documentaries: A Field Guide to Creating Impact. And that title is the spine of this whole episode. Take a listen.

Robin Canfield 02:48
We really started with wanting to meet these really cool people and help tell their story. It was not an idea to start a study abroad...

Christian Taylor 02:56
He didn't sit down to start a business. He sat down to do something that mattered, and the business assembled itself around the work. Purpose-driven. That's his phrase, and it's the phrase I want you to hold onto for the next few minutes.

Christian Taylor 03:11
Because what I started to see at the Julian Dubuque International Film Festival last week is that there's a quiet army of filmmakers in this country doing exactly what Robin's book describes. They're not making the films the streaming algorithms reward, but they're making the films we need. And I want to show you three of them.

Christian Taylor 03:31
The first is The 100-Year Effect. Dr. Thornburg's argument is simple, and it's devastating. The food we eat — and more pointedly, the food a pregnant mother eats and the food her mother ate — is rewriting our chronic disease risk across generations. Birth weight, prenatal nutrition, environmental exposure. These are predicting heart disease, diabetes, cancer outcomes decades before symptoms appear.

Christian Taylor 04:01
And the corporations that have shaped what's on our grocery store shelves for the last 50 years have not, to put it mildly, optimized for this. They've optimized for shelf life, profit margin, and adaptive flavor profiles. The damage is generational. The damage is, quite literally, in our cells.

Christian Taylor 04:25
The second film is Ali Eats America. Ali Allouche was four years old when he was first diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. He survived it. 13 years later, however, at 17, he was diagnosed again — this time with osteosarcoma in his right shoulder. And here's what Ali himself told me when I sat down with him at the festival. Listen carefully.

Ali Allouche 04:48
So when I was four years old, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is a cancer that I had in my throat. I was all good. I obviously recovered from that. But the radiation that I received from having Hodgkin's lymphoma is one of the main reasons why we believe that I had cancer again when I was seventeen years old. So radiation then caused cancer.

Christian Taylor 05:08
A child's body, treated with the best technology available in 2004, became — 15 years later — a body fighting a second cancer caused in part by the treatment that saved him from the first. That's not anyone's fault. That's a system doing its best. But it's also a story about what our bodies absorb, what we can't always see, and what we are quietly carrying.

Christian Taylor 05:32
While Ali was in the pediatric ward at Walter Reed for 10 months of chemo, eating hospital food — which he describes as having no salt, no sugar, no flavor, no nourishment of any kind — he and his mom started planning something. They got obsessed with food. They watched Anthony Bourdain together, and they made a map. A restaurant in every state. A reason to live. A Bourdain-style foodie road trip. That was the headline that ran in the New York Post. Let's watch the trailer.

[Ali Eats America trailer] 06:02
[Ali Eats America trailer plays]

Christian Taylor 08:23
The film follows Ali for two years, through 17 states and 35 restaurants, and into the homes and kitchens of chefs like José Andrés and Wolfgang Puck and Carey Bringle the pitmaster. Small operators, family kitchens, regional joints — the kind of human-scale, place-based food that the 100-Year Effect generation is starving for.

Christian Taylor 08:43
Ali got sick from a system. And the thing that brought him back to life was the part of America that system has spent 50 years trying to consolidate, homogenize, and replace.

Christian Taylor 08:54
The film was made by two filmmakers from Los Angeles named Greg Morris and Roush Niaghi. They self-financed it through their camera rental company. They slept on the floor of Ali's hospital room for five months. Greg told me this:

Greg Morris 09:08
It really is like a movie with heart. I work in television, and sometimes it can be very crass, sometimes it can be very commercial, and this is just a job. And to do something that, like, re-instills your faith — I'll always carry that with me with this project.

Christian Taylor 09:22
The third film won Best Documentary at the Julian Dubuque Film Festival. It's called Déjà Vu, and it's directed by Bedabrata Pain — who, I'll just mention because it kind of blew my mind, was one of the lead engineers on the team at NASA that invented the CMOS image sensor. The technology in your phone's camera. He left NASA to make movies. And he made this one.

Christian Taylor 09:46
Déjà Vu is a documentary about American small family farmers, and what's happened to them over the last four decades as agriculture has been corporatized. You know — mergers, consolidations, market reforms, vertical integration. The kind of slow, structural, paperwork-driven destruction that almost never makes the news because it doesn't have a single villain or a single dramatic moment. It just has families losing farms their grandparents built.

Christian Taylor 10:17
The film parallels the American story with what's happening right now to farmers in India, who are in the middle of one of the largest protest movements in modern world history, fighting their own version of the same corporate consolidation. The film's tagline is one we have heard before: those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

Christian Taylor 10:39
Here are your three films, and I want you to see them stacked. The 100-Year Effect — what corporations have done to our bodies. Ali Eats America — what one family did to survive that, and the small, human, regional food culture that brought a sick kid back to life. Déjà Vu — what corporations are doing to the people who grow our food, in America and India, right now.

Christian Taylor 11:05
These are not three random films. They are one story told from three different angles. And the people who made them are not getting rich. They will, in many cases, not even break even. But they are doing something for our culture that I think is genuinely vital.

Christian Taylor 11:24
As I was working on this episode, something C.S. Lewis said in Oxford in June of 1941 came to mind. The bombs were falling on London at the time, and in the middle of all of that, during one of his sermons, he said this: It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Christian Taylor 12:06
I think that sentence is the truest thing anyone has ever said about the moment we are in. We are far too easily pleased. We are pleased with food that is making us sick. We are pleased with content that is rotting our attention. We are pleased with the corporate consolidation of every single thing we eat and drink and watch and read, because we can't imagine — or we won't imagine — what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

Christian Taylor 12:37
And what these filmmakers are doing — Robin and his students, Dr. Thornburg, Greg and Roush, Bedabrata Pain — what they are doing is exactly what investigative journalists have always done for our democracy. They are shining a light into the dark places. They are showing us the slum we are sitting in. And they are pointing to the sea.

Christian Taylor 13:02
This is not a partisan claim. There is no political party that owns this question. The 100-Year Effect, Déjà Vu, and Ali Eats America are not asking you to vote a particular way. They're simply asking you to see. And that's a civic act. That's the same act a journalist performs when they file an investigation about a city council taking bribes, or a pharmaceutical company hiding a study, or a school district covering up a scandal.

Christian Taylor 13:33
Documentaries — purpose-driven documentaries — are the immune system of a free culture. They tell us where we are sick.

Christian Taylor 13:42
And like the press, they are under enormous pressure right now. The streaming platforms are not really buying them. The algorithm is not surfacing them. The funding that used to support this kind of work has been cut, consolidated, or quietly redirected. And the people making these films are doing it on credit cards, GoFundMes, hospital floors, and personal savings.

Christian Taylor 14:10
If we don't watch, they will go away.

Christian Taylor 14:15
So here's what I'm asking you to do. And it really isn't very much. Find these films. The 100-Year Effect, Ali Eats America, Déjà Vu. All three are on the festival circuit right now, looking for audiences and looking for distribution. Their websites and socials are linked in the description of this episode. Go follow them. Watch the trailers. If one of these films comes to a theater near you, go. Bring someone. Tell a friend.

Christian Taylor 14:44
And while you're at it — text this episode to just one person. Only one. Someone who you think will benefit from hearing it. This is how films find the audiences they need. And this is how our show grows.

Christian Taylor 14:58
If you're new here, hit follow or subscribe wherever you're watching or listening, so you don't miss what comes next. And if you want to go deeper with us, join our community on Patreon. All the details are in the show notes.

Christian Taylor 15:11
We are far too easily pleased. We are sitting in the slum eating mud pies, while a quiet army of filmmakers is trying to point us to the sea. The least we can do is look up.

Christian Taylor 15:25
I'm Christian Taylor. This has been Documentary First: The Deep Dive. I'll see you next time.