These Food Filmmakers Want to Change Your Views on Immigration

The Perennial Plate are filmmakers who capture everything from Guatemalan farmers in Colorado to fair-trade tea growers in Sri Lanka, showing how ideas about sustainability surface in different communities. Or rather, that was the focus of the seven-year-old project — until the results of the U.S. election happened in November last year.

“No matter who you are, if you hear the same story over and over again, you start to believe it,” says Daniel Klein, co-founder of the Perennial Plate, referring to the current media landscape and narratives that emerge from “fake news.” This is what prompted him and his other co-founders, Mirra Fine and Hunter Johnson, to conjoin their filmmaking with online filtering tools in order to reach out to Facebook audiences who might not seek out immigrant and refugee stories.

The campaign, Resistance Through Storytelling, hopes to “promote a more empathetic way of thinking about immigrants and refugees,” Klein says. The Kickstarter campaign began as a way to fund the research, travel, and targeted-advertising expenses for a total of five short films, and it has since surpassed its goal. Klein and his co-founders will be starting their research and post-production in the next coming months; learn more about the project in the video above.