Up on the Mountain – Now Streaming on Docuseek
Essential documentary films for higher education
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52 min. | Closed Captioned
A film by Olivier Matthon
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"Powerful, riveting, and aesthetically beautiful. This calls to mind the way in which our Western society largely sees nature and humanity as separate from one another. Wild mushroom harvesting offers a beacon of a different paradigm.”
Fa-Tai Shieh, Professor, Food Studies, The New School
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Up on the Mountain follows three different groups of commercial mushroom pickers as they travel on the “mushroom circuit”—a year-round migration that can take them anywhere from Alaska to California, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming—to harvest wild mushrooms from public forests.
When commercial mushroom picking took off in the 1980s, it immediately attracted some of the most disenfranchised groups of society: Southeast Asian refugees from the Vietnam war who had difficulty finding work because of poor English skills and discrimination; Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants escaping poverty from their countries only to be taken advantage of by U.S. employers; rural Americans out-of-work due to the decline in the logging and fishing industries; and back-to-the-landers who didn’t fit in the 9-to-5 lifestyle. Having little to lose, they took to the woods hoping to regain control over their lives. They have created a subculture of outcast gatherers who depend on a deep knowledge of nature and, most importantly, on one another.
Despite evidence of the sustainability of the harvest, commercial mushroom pickers are repeatedly denied access to public forests. The Forest Service is understaffed and lacks the funding to manage the resource. Forest managers often find themselves overwhelmed by the sudden arrival of hundreds of independent pickers, many of whom think they should have the right to harvest freely from public land. They accuse the Forest Service of privileging the logging industry and of racial profiling.
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In a direct cinema style, Up on the Mountain, from Collective Eye Film, offers an observation of some of the power dynamics that structure our society, and is streaming exclusively on Docuseek.
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Docuseek streams essential independent, social-issue and environmental documentaries to colleges and universities, providing exclusive access to content from Bullfrog Films, Icarus Films (including The Fanlight Collection and dGenerate Films), Women Make Movies, Kartemquin Films, National Film Board of Canada, First Run Features, KimStim, First Hand Films, MediaStorm, Scorpion TV, Terra Nova Films, Viewpoint Productions, Film Movement, Deckert Distribution, The Films of Anand Patwardhan, Cinétévé, Tecolote Films, Strange Attractions, Clarity Films, AndanaFilms, 371 Productions, Dutch CORE, Autlook, Collective Eye Films, Distrib Films, and GOOD DOCS. Licenses are available for single titles or collections for periods ranging from one year to Life of File. Interested in a trial for your campus? Contact Elena Wayne, Sales and Marketing Manager, 847-537-0606 or at ewayne@docuseek2.com.
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