Gene Siskel's Film Center From Your Sofa Series: COOKED: Survival By Zip Code

She read Eric Klineberg’s acclaimed book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, and then Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand (BLUE VINYL) took a hard, personal, and often quirky look at the inequity of natural disaster, beginning with her family’s own experience of Hurricane Sandy. She ultimately zeroes in on Chicago’s shockingly inadequate response to the deadly July 1995 heatwave, during which the city morgue overflowed with the sudden deaths of 739 citizens, largely the elderly and people of color from the city’s impoverished South and West Side. This audacious look at natural disaster American-style starts with the stark premise that a zip code can be an accurate predictor of life or death when nature unleashes its worst. With increasing frequency and force, climate change sets the agenda for hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and such, but systemic neglect, deep poverty, and political expediency have already drawn the line between the survivors and the doomed, even before disaster strikes.

Stream the film here.