Category: Info Point
Attention please!
Large industrial groups defend animal testing by claiming that it is currently the only method available to advance medical research and that there is currently no alternative that is nearly as good. Who said that:
1. avoids saying that animal testing is not only carried out for medical purposes, but also in the cosmetics industry. The pointlessness of these animal experiments is, I agree, obvious.
2. it takes advantage of the fact that people generally consider themselves more important than animals. Typical question: “Who is more important, your child or a mouse?”
3. avoids mentioning the huge economic interest behind animal testing and the pharmaceutical industry.
Soon in the movies:
“MORE THAN HONEY” by Markus Imhoof
Bees are more than just honey producers: A documentary.
More than a third of our food is dependent on pollination by bees. The physicist Albert Einstein is said to have said: “If bees die out, humans will die out four years later.”
The renowned director Markus Imhoof(Das Boot ist voll) was familiar with the unique world of busy insects from an early age and still has a family connection with them today: “My grandfather’s apiary was a magical place for us children. Fascinating, but also scary when we ventured barefoot closer to the excited buzzing in the summer heat. And in the middle of it all was the old man in a straw hat, without any protection. The bees did nothing to him, as if they knew him.” Today, it is his daughter and son-in-law who are leading a research project with bees in Australia.
Starting with a beekeeper in the Swiss mountains, Markus Imhoof has traveled around the world. To the USA, where bees are transported from monoculture to monoculture on an industrial scale, or to China, where in certain regions the flowers already have to be pollinated by hand. In Arizona he meets Fred Terry, who specializes in killer bees, and in Austria he meets the Singer family, who breed queens and send them all over the world. He interviews scientists, talks about the phenomenal intelligence of bees and their social coexistence. Finally, we are in Australia, where bee mortality has not yet arrived and where the young Baer-Imhoof family is conducting its research.
Cinema release: 25.20.2012 at Riffraff, Neugasse 57-63, 8005 Zurich, box office 044 444 22 00
The top of the food mountain
The documentary “Taste the Waste” by Valentin Thurn mercilessly shows how our society is increasingly becoming a throwaway society and treats food as if it were a luxury item. The film, which is made from a very objective point of view, holds up a mirror to us consumers by asking a simple question: How is it that half of all food in Central Europe is thrown away?
Thurn’s film avoids pointing fingers and calmly depicts the disturbing waste of food in the westernized world. Thurn has skillfully assembled a multi-layered documentary from many short interview episodes and snapshots. Absolutely worth seeing!
Taking the Mystery Out of the “Big White Blob”
Tonight I was once again a guest at Samses and as is becoming a tradition, I ordered the super delicious TOFU ECKEN VINO BIANCO…and no, tofu is not mushrooms, cheese or a white cement block. I hope that this little movie will answer all your questions and that I will never, ever have to hear “Tofu, what’s that?” again.
Samses, Langstrasse 231, 8005 Zurich