Pressroom

Soul food is rich—not just in taste, pleasure, comfort, but also in history. And yet, as documentary filmmaker Byron Hurt asks in Soul Food Junkies, is this legendary culinary culture also poisonous?

— Oxford American

Director Byron Hurt sits with NBC 4 New York's Tracie Strahan to discuss his film Soul Food Junkies.

— NBC 4 New York Positively Black

Bernardo Ruiz was in Mexicali, Mexico in 2009 researching deported children living in a shelter when he stumbled upon another problem that left him with the burning sense that he had to capture it on film.

— Latino Fox News

Many of the documentaries short-listed for Thursday's Academy Award nominations are enjoying an extended theatrical life thanks to schools, churches and other nontraditional venues. And when director Eugene Jarecki sets up community screenings for his war-on-drugs critique, The House I Live In he tailors film footage as needed.

— San Francisco Chronicle

In the crowd of issue-oriented documentaries at last year’s Sundance Film Festival — about subjects such as hunger or nuclear energy or the national debt — Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In stood out.

— Salt Lake Tribune

Ice People, a documentary about scientific research in Antarctica, brings you to the frozen continent’s interior plains, where a team of geologists seek proof of climate change -- and find the evidence they’re looking for while filmmaker Anne Aghion’s cameras are focused on them.

— ArcaMax

For his latest film, "Soul Food Junkies," socially conscious writer, avid lecturer and award-winning documentary filmmaker Byron Hurt turns the lens on his family.

— Cuisine Noir

The Waiting Room Peter Nicks’ magnificent documentary, spends a day in the life of an over-crowded and under-resourced hospital emergency room in Oakland, Calif., where a staff of compassionate professionals provide care to a startlingly diverse population of patients. This subtle, compassionate tableau lifts the veil on a world often described in terms of squalor and despair, finding the inherent dignity and perseverance therein.

— Yakima Herald

After interviewing food historians, scholars, cooks, doctors, activists and consumers for his new film Soul Food Junkies, filmmaker Byron Hurt concluded that an addiction to soul food is killing African-Americans at an alarming rate.

— Reuters

The Revisionaries: This film follows a dispute at the Texas State Board of Education over changes to the science curriculum — and, in the process, it explains how one state board can affect what's taught in classrooms all over the country. Filmmaker Scott Thurman comes down quite clearly on the side of teaching evolution and against the changes in the curriculum that are proposed by some of the story's central figures, but he anchors the film around a fascinating discussion between two men who believe diametrically opposed things and will never, ever find any common ground no matter how hard they try. They're both courteous, they're both absolutely convinced they're right, and the absolute impasse at which they find themselves says a lot about how irreducible some of the conflicts that confront us actually are.

— NPR