Authors: MSU Student Filmmakers and recent graduates, guided by School of Journalism Faculty Geri Alumit Zeldes and Troy Hale.

Summary

This SLFG project will create a documentary film that will be an epilogue to The Kings of Flint" (2011) and "Flint River Farm” (2012). The crew will interview Dora King of King’s Youth Karate-Ka studio and Urban Farm and Roxanne Adair of Flint River Farm” the central characters of these two films. The new film will make clear the legacies of those pioneering farmers and how they influence the newer farmers in the city. Like the previous films, this new documentary will explore environmental justice, the human right to fresh food and how farming builds community. The films, released two years before the Flint Water Crisis that began in 2014, showed the early challenges and achievements the urban farmers in Flint faced. With the Water Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic in the rear-view mirror, what new challenges lay deep in the soil? 

The film tells the story of urban farming in Flint hit hard by the Water Crisis and the COVID pandemic that further ravaged a city already devastated by the economy. This film, like the films released prior to the Flint Water Crisis, will frame the urban farming movement as a potential “sustainable infrastructure” for a city built on the automobile. Farming is a vehicle for economic development and a model of a circular economy that begins with planting, harvest, use, composting and regeneration.

Author Information

Geri Alumit Zeldes, Ph.D. (full bio) is a tenured Professor in MSU’s School of Journalism who previously served as the J-School's Graduate Studies Director (2014-2017) and the College of ComArtSci’s Faculty Excellence Advocate (2017-2022).

In 2022, Zeldes received an MSU William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award, only given to 10 or fewer faculty each year for awesome-ness demonstrated in teaching, advising, research, publications, art exhibitions, committee work, public service, continuing education ... The work grows out of service to Communities and Students of Color.

Zeldes doubles as an academic and practitioner. She has a dozen best paper awards from international communication associations and 100+ honors and screenings for her documentary films and other creative scholarship