Young Caucasian Dan Dunne teaches history and coaches the girls basketball team at a Brooklyn high school populated primarily by black and Hispanic students. To the chagrin of his superiors, Dan bucks the outlined curriculum of historical facts in favor of the philosophy of historical events, generally discussing the concept of dialectics. As such, he captures the imagination of his students, at least in the classroom. Outside of the classroom, Dan's life is in shambles. He has a distant but cordial relationship with his family. He uses illicit drugs rampantly. Although his former girlfriend Rachel was able to clean up her drug habit, Dan believes that rehab will not work for him. Due to a combination of these issues, he treats women poorly. Thirteen-year-old Drey is a student in his class and a player on his basketball team. Drey has her own problems. Her parents are divorced, with her father a virtually non-existent figure in her life and her EMT mother generally absent as she is always working to provide for Drey. Her older brother Mike is incarcerated for selling drugs for a local dealer named Frank. Mike took the fall for Frank, who in turn protects Drey whether she wants to be associated with him or not. Dan and Drey's relationship changes when Drey catches Dan, believing he is alone, smoking crack in the girl's locker room bathroom. He is totally stoned. Their resulting friendship, which is seen as inappropriate by the few who know, is based on each being unable to deal with their own life, but feeling like they can be at least a minor salvation in the other's life.

In her signature serious-yet-quirky connect-the-dots style, Peabody Award winning filmmaker Judith Helfand takes audiences from the deadly 1995 Chicago heat disaster -- in which 739 people died, mostly black and in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, ties it back to the underlying man-made disaster of systemic structural racism and then goes deep into one of our nation's biggest growth industries -- Disaster Preparedness. Along the way she forges inextricable links between extreme weather, extreme disparity and the politics of "disaster," daring to ask: What if with a slight torque of the system and a re-frame of the terms disaster, preparedness and resilience we could invest in the most "vulnerable communities" now - instead of waiting for the next "natural disaster". COOKED is adapted from Eric Klinenberg's ground-breaking book, HEAT WAVE: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.

Nature, human nature, and  economies giving insights on what happens and how the world works.

How the world works

movie

Christine

Silly fun with good people

Movies about disastrous travel excursions.

Captivating Disastrous Travel movies

Learning and reflecting on what it takes to live in this world.

Learning to live

Good ol’ sociology. 
You are unique just like everyone else. 

Sociology

Not always historically accurate but an interesting glimpse into what times used to be like.

2013- 2017 TV series starring Adelaide Kane

Historical context

Just things I like & cant get enough of. Some quirky, some little known, some mainstream but all awesome!

Love it

Inspiring lawyer / community related activist movies

How the world works

More lists by Christine

Silly fun with good people

Captivating Disastrous Travel movies

Learning to live

Sociology

Historical context

Silly fun with good people

Love it

Grassroots community activist law movies