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An East Coast vegetarian marries an Alaskan, moves to Sitka and asks, "What's for dinner?"
That set-up runs through Ellen Frankenstein's documentary "Eating Alaska," which follows her struggle to come to terms with clubbing salmon, shooting deer and pulling the heads off live shrimp. The film explores issues like: What do we know about our food? Where does it come from? How does our eating affect the rest of the world? "Eating Alaska" will be screened in Anchorage on Sunday as part of the Alaska Local Food Film Festival, taking place Friday through Oct. 8. The festival, sponsored by the Alaska Center for the Environment and other groups, will include discussions about what constitutes responsible consumption and showings of nationally distributed movies on the topic, including "Fresh," about sustainable agriculture, and "End of the Line," about over-fishing. Frankenstein's film has a distinctly Alaska angle. Between sumptuous cinematography of tundra and rain forests, she takes the audience to a Tlingit community dinner where subsistence is discussed between courses of seaweed and fry bread, on hunting trips with other women and to a meeting of Mat-Su vegetarians. She touches on the problems of toxins, shrinking farmlands, the price of transporting food to grocery stores and the cost of living off the land in the modern world. Particularly insightful moments come as she helps her husband, "a professional hunter/gatherer AND a hippy environmentalist," a commercial fisherman and seafood diver. "We've used 100 gallons of fuel to catch sea cucumbers to send to Korea," she reflects as she helps him with his gear. The waste contradicts her sense of connection with food, the way "eating from the place you live makes you part of it." It's a philosophy that, over the past 15 years, has supplanted her former vegetarian ethos. But resolutions are elusive and imperfect, especially in Alaska, suggests Frankenstein, who has won several awards with her previous documentaries, like "Carved from the Heart." "It is a film I made with the intention of raising questions, not preaching," she told the Daily News. "(I'm) encouraging viewers to ask themselves questions and think about complexities and what they can do to have less impact, be more local and, for some of us, not to be overwhelmed by ... a kind of horrible feeling that we have doomed our planet."