The Producers

Judith Helfand - Producer/Director

Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark worlds of chemical exposure, heedless corporate behavior and environmental injustice and make them personal, highly-charged and entertaining. Her films include The Uprising of ‘34, the Sundance award winning and 2x Emmy nominated Blue Vinyl, its Peabody Award-winning prequel A Healthy Baby Girl, and Everything’s Cool. Three of those premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, with national broadcasts on PBS (POV), HBO and The Sundance Channel. A committed field-builder and educator, Helfand co-founded Working Films in 1999 and Chicken & Egg Pictures in 2005. She was Producer on the Oscar-nominated, DuPont winning short, The Barber of Birmingham, and Executive Producer for Brooklyn Castle, Semper Fi: Always Faithful, Private Violence, and Hot Girls Wanted. In 2007 Judith received a United States Artist Fellowship, one of 50 awarded annually to “America’s finest living artists” and in 2016 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. Helfand is currently in production on a first-person, non-fiction feature called Love & Stuff, an intergenerational love story about losing her mother and becoming a new “old” mom in her fifties - both at once.

Fenell Doremus - Producer

In addition to producing COOKED: Survival by Zip Code, Doremus co-produced the Academy Award nominated and Emmy Award winning, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail for PBS’ Frontline series. Doremus got her start working as an Assistant Editor on Hoop Dreams and went on to serve as staff Producer at Kartemquin Films for the next eight years. She Produced and Directed A Year on Teen St., a short documentary broadcast locally on PBS, following a teen theater troupe over the course of a year and was Segment Producer/Co-Editor of the groundbreaking multi-part immigration series The New Americans, broadcast on PBS’ Independent Lens and winner of multiple awards at festivals worldwide. She is currently producing End of Love, a story about the dangerous intersection of technology, adolescence and porn. Doremus lives in Chicago, is an active member of the Documentary Producers Alliance and serves on the Board of Kartemquin Films.

Making The Film

Director's Statement

"I'’m not from Chicago. I’m a middle-class Jewish woman born and bred in Long Island turned New Yorker living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My three most essential filmmaking tools are, listening loud to divine gut-hunches, serial optimism and dark humor – especially when tackling problems that are accepted, expected, business-as-usual and systemic.

For the past two decades these tools have served me well. I’ve made films that explore heedless corporate behavior, the long-term impact and bio-accumulation
of toxic chemical exposure and one generation unwittingly poisoning the next. One environmental justice crisis led me to another, until I was following a group of self-selected climate-change messengers racing to communicate the urgency of the moment. That movie evolved into EVERYTHING’s COOL. ALong the way I stopped off at the intersection of extreme heat, entrenched poverty and disaster politics because of an acclaimed book called, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, by sociologist and Chicago native Eric Klinenberg. Shocked by what I read, I set out on a circuitous process of discovery, with the lead question being: how could 739 people die in one week— in one of the wealthiest cities in the developed world -- ostensibly of the heat?

Official R&D shooting started on the ten-year anniversary of the Chicago heat disaster. I took eleven days of footage home to edit a “trailer” and on the day we completed it, Katrina struck. Like most Americans I watched the T.V. transfixed. But I was watching with a parallel crisis in mind, the 1995 Heat Disaster. Different extreme weather event; same revelation about extreme poverty. It was survival by zip code all over again.

Irony entered the picture. I changed the name of my film from Heat Wave, An Un-Natural Disaster to COOKED. I became resolute about exploring the impact of entrenched poverty and global warming as one interconnected crisis. With an official "1995 Chicago heat-death/poverty map" in hand, I openly stop to ask for directions, definitions and answers to an ever evolving, series of naïve albeit critical questions? “How do you define disaster?” What if we treated poverty as if it were an “emergency”? If we’re willing to go in “afterwards”, why not help turn the most “vulnerable" neighborhoods become "resilient", before the next “natural disaster” hits ? This is a local life and death story. And that is why we added a colon and a brutal reality to our film’s title -- COOKED: Survival by Zip Code."