Duncan's Donuts

natural , 2019 What is 'natural'? It is a vague term that means different things to many people- to some, meat is natural. To some, only eating plants is the only way to qualify as natural. In my short, I endeavor to question this dynamic in attitudes towards farming, food, and sustainability. I want viewers to come away thinking about their deep seated biases towards food and question why exactly they feel the way they do- is it because of a truly deeply held belief, or is it a gut reaction to something that someone else has shown them? The short does not aim to demonize one particular facet of consumption - this film is not anti-vegan, anti-GMO, or pro-factory farming. Rather, I want things like conspicuous consumption and branding of food, the dichotomizing of plants as food and meat as food, and even so far as the place of humans in the food chain to become questions in the forefront of the viewer's mind. I will know I have succeeded if even one person ...

Natural, 2019 We often question (or are led to question) whether our food is 'natural' or 'green' or 'healthy', all words loaded with meaning, yet functionally useless as real qualifiers of our food because of their proliferation by industry. In my short, I humorously try to use surrealism and match cuts to question our relationship with our food and the qualifiers we give it. What makes a pepper more 'natural' than bacon? Is a tomato really more 'healthy' than beef? What is more 'green'- the farm raised pig, or the corporate farmed tomato, or the factory farmed cow, or the locally grown pepper? Many of these questions have no firm answers, yet there are many people who vehemently defend their position or stance. I aim to call attention to these questions through humor and surrealism.

The whole idea behind avant garde is defying expectation to create something bizarre and inscrutable, right? What could be more inscrutable than the mundane? There's a lot of nuance to our everyday actions and the way they are depicted on film, and I think it opens a lot of space for making small changes that can be easily passed off as real, but ultimately convey a sense of the fantastical, or of dread, or of just plain confusion. Perhaps I am cooking something, but the item on the stovetop is very much so not food. I'm not entirely certain of the direction I want to take this yet, but I am trying to hone in on a particular avenue of focus and I think that cooking may well be that avenue.