On Tuesday, August 19 at 4:30 pm, Movies That Matters will screen two related films, King Corn and Big River. Together the films focus on the hidden costs of industrialized agriculture.

King Corn is about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In this film best friends from college on the East Coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. The film features Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Earl Butz, former US Secretary of Agriculture.

In Big River the friends return to Iowa with a new mission: to investigate the environmental impact their acre of corn has had on the people and places downstream. In a journey that spans from the heartland to the Gulf of Mexico, they learn that the pesticides they sprayed, the fertilizers they injected, and the soil they plowed now lead to new questions, explored by new experts in new places.