Filmmaker To Screen ‘The Hand That Feeds’ At MUW

COLUMBUS, Miss. (PRESS RELEASE) — On Thursday, April 14, Mississippi University for Women’s Gordy Honors College Forum Series will feature filmmaker Robin Blotnick, who will screen and discuss his documentary “The Hand that Feeds.”

The film follows sandwich-maker Mahoma Lopez as he leads his restaurant co-workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, to organize for better working conditions and higher wages in New York City.

According to The Village Voice, “The Hand that Feeds” has “the urgency and suspense of a Hitchcock thriller,” while The Boston Globe says it is “socially conscious documentary filmmaking at its best.”

It received Best of Fest at the AFI DOCS Festival in Washington DC and the Audience Award at DOC NYC, among numerous other awards.

It was also a 2016 finalist for the Social Impact Media Awards.

Blotnick wrote, directed and produced “The Hand that Feeds” with his wife Rachel Lears, a 2013 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow whose film “Birds of Passage” (2010) was broadcast nationally throughout Latin America.

Blotnick’s first documentary, “Chocolate Country” (2006), received a Grand Jury Prize at the Seattle International Film Festival and is used as a teaching tool by educators and Fair Trade advocates around the world.

His documentary “Gods and Kings” (2012), about masks, magic, and mass culture in the Guatemala highlands, won the Intangible Culture Prize at the RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Films.

He was also a 2013 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow.

The screening and talk are free and open to the community and begin at 6 p.m. in Nissan Auditorium.

For more information, contact Kim Whitehead, interim director of the Honors College, at kmwhitehead@muw.edu, (662) 241-6850.