On April 7, Ithaca College hosted a festival to celebrate the achievements of some alumni in film studies, as well as the subject of their short films: coffee. In the basement of Center Ithaca—a now-remote destination, but one that once housed Cinemapolis—Ithaca College owns a small, well-equipped space known as The Studio. There, students can experiment with films and transmedia projects and present their creations to the public. It’s fairly difficult to find, and the event was under-attended for the amount of free coffee and pastries available, but the small theater space didn’t seem empty as two short films played.
Both films, Seed to Cup (McKinleigh Lair) and Coffee in the Cloud Forest (Daniel Masciari, Jacob Beil), were beautifully filmed and quite effective at exposing the challenges that South American coffee growers face. Neither film was over 10 minutes long. The former, filmed in Guatemala, eloquently illustrates the difficulty that comes with growing the specialty coffees we snobbishly consume in praise of the roast and not of the plant. Coffee in the Cloud Forest centers around a particular coffee-growing community in Ecuador dedicated to sustainable production but struggling with infringement on their resources by the mining industry. Its intimate focus on one community was appropriate for the length of the film; its lesson, though, is applicable to farming communities all over the world whose methods are being explicitly and implicitly hurt by encroaching multinational corporations. The short documentaries were also optimistic. There exists dedication to preservation of traditional and sustainable methods of coffee growing, and young people with journalistic skill are out there looking to build bonds between consumers and their producers.
Some local roasters sampled their goods in a schmoozing room outside the small theater, making the message of the films seem especially close to home as I watched, sipping coffee from Guatemala and Ecuador. Gimme! Coffee sampled a light brew, Ithaca Coffee Company featured its nitro cold brew (a trend of pumping nitrogen gas into coffee—a technique borrowed from breweries that makes the coffee taste and feel more like beer), and Argueta’s Coffee displayed a generous spectrum of coffees of all different roasts including the flowery special reserve “Elephant Bean” roast. We are often encouraged to disconnect the commodities we consume from the conditions of their production, so it is a privilege to drink coffee from roasters who care about and develop relationships with their growers such that we can counteract these pressures.