Covid’s Hidden Toll w/ Filmmakers Daffodil Altan and Andrés Cediel

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join Rev Books for a discussion of the Frontline documentary, Covid’s Hidden Toll, with the filmmakers Daffodil Altan and Andrés Cediel.

Do you know what is happening to the people who put the food on your table? This documentary, completed in the midst of the pandemic is a visceral and shocking window into how the developing crisis of Covid 19 has hit vulnerable immigrants and undocumented workers, how an estimated 10s of thousands have been infected, and 100s have died. And it exposes the cold negligence and brutality of the ag industry, the government institutions, and Trump.

We will show clips from the film –powerful interviews with the workers which reveal in the most gut-wrenching, and moving, way how their lives in the fields and meat processing plants-already among the most exploited workers in this country-have been made exponentially worse by this pandemic, and by the way they are being treated by multi-million dollar agricultural and meat-processing businesses.

Farm and meat plant workers tell about having to choose between their health and their jobs – and about a lack of protection from their companies. “It’s necessity that makes us work despite the fear we have,” Sinthia, a broccoli picker who is the sole provider for her mother, her children and her two siblings

While the conditions of the life of these workers was already a horror, the pandemic has pushed things to an extreme. “Every day we go to work we’re thinking about the coronavirus. If we’re going to catch it again. Who’s going to catch it? Is it on the walls? Is it on the product? Is it on the equipment we use?… It doesn’t feel like we’re essential workers. It feels like we’re slaves.” — a worker at Central Valley Meat

Watch this at https://www.facebook.com/revbooksnyc/. You don’t have to have Facebook to watch.

Investigative journalist Daffodil J. Altan is an Emmy-nominated producer and correspondent for Frontline PBS. She produced, directed and was the correspondent for the FRONTLINE documentaries, Kids Caught in the Crackdown (2019), and Trafficked in America(2018). She has a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she is also a lecturer.

Andrés Cediel is a documentary filmmaker and Professor of Visual Journalism at UC Berkeley. He produced “Rape in the Fields” and was a writer and producer of “Rape on the Night Shift,” which brought to light rampant sexual assaults of immigrant women in the agricultural and janitorial industries. He was a producer of “Kids Caught in the Crackdown.”

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