One of the four episodes from the California and the American Dream Series, this fascinating documentary explores the intersection of food and politics in California over the last 30 years. It illuminates the complex forces struggling for control of the future of California’s agriculture, and provides provocative commentary by a wide array of eloquent farmers, prominent chefs, and noted authors and scientists.

Through the “window” of food and agriculture, Ripe for Change reveals two parallel yet contrasting views of our world. One holds that large-scale agriculture, genetic engineering, and technology promise a hunger-less future. The other calls for a more organic, sustainable, and locally focused style of farming that reclaims the aesthetic and nurturing qualities of food and considers the impact of agriculture on the environment, on communities, and on workers. Ripe for Change was produced by Jed Riffe and directed by filmmaker Emiko Omori.

Deluxe Edition includes six extra videos: Oil and Agriculture, Globalization and GMOs, The Triple Bottom Line, The Edible Schoolyard, Atrazine and the Environment, and An Immigrant's Story.

Waiting to Inhale: Marijuana, Medicine and the Law pioneered the movement towards the legalization of marijuana as the first documentary in the US to document the struggle for medical marijuana use, following the movement from 2000 to 2006 and offering exclusive footage of the first major scientific study of medical cannabis to take place in over thirty years.

Waiting to Inhale examines the heated debate over marijuana and its use as medicine in the United States. At the time, twelve states have passed legislation to protect patients who used medical marijuana. Yet opponents claimed the medical argument was just a smokescreen for a different agenda– to legalize marijuana for recreation and profit.

The documentary takes viewers inside the lives of patients who have been forever changed by illness—and parents who lost their children to addiction. The film sheds new light on how this controversy developed, serving as a historical watershed for the debate over the medical use of drugs that are otherwise considered dangerous and lacking medical benefits.

Ishi, the Last Yahi begins in 1492 when there were more than ten million Native Americans in North America. By 1910, their numbers had been reduced to fewer than 300,000. In California, massacres of Indians in the 1860s and 1870s had nearly exterminated the Native peoples in the state. Therefore the sudden appearance in northern California in 1911 of Ishi, “the last wild Indian in North America,” stunned the nation. For more than 40 years, Ishi had lived in hiding with a tiny band of survivors. When he walked into the white man’s world, he was the last Yahi Indian alive.

For young anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, Ishi’s appearance was a windfall. Kroeber had been searching for years to find “wild, uncontaminated Indians” who could document their traditional way of life. Through Kroeber’s invitation, Ishi left a jail cell and lived out the remaining four years of his life as an informant and teacher at the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. Ishi dedicated those years to relating Yahi stories and demonstrating the traditional way of life he knew so well. His quiet dignity and remarkable lack of bitterness toward the people who had destroyed his tribe greatly impressed everyone who met him.

One of the four episodes from the California and the American Dream Series, this fascinating documentary explores the intersection of food and politics in California over the last 30 years. It illuminates the complex forces struggling for control of the future of California’s agriculture, and provides provocative commentary by a wide array of eloquent farmers, prominent chefs, and noted authors and scientists.

Through the “window” of food and agriculture, Ripe for Change reveals two parallel yet contrasting views of our world. One holds that large-scale agriculture, genetic engineering, and technology promise a hunger-less future. The other calls for a more organic, sustainable, and locally focused style of farming that reclaims the aesthetic and nurturing qualities of food and considers the impact of agriculture on the environment, on communities, and on workers. Ripe for Change was produced by Jed Riffe and directed by filmmaker Emiko Omori.

One of the four episodes from the California and the American Dream Series, California’s ‘Lost’ Tribes weighs the impact of casino gambling on Native American self-determination, explores the historical underpinnings of Tribal sovereignty, the evolution of Tribal gaming, and its effects on California’s Native peoples and their non-Indian neighbors.

In a few short years, some American Indian Tribes in California went from being the poorest people in the state to the richest – gaining extraordinary wealth from casino gaming. However, California Tribal members must still contend with a legacy of racism that thrives in the twenty-first century. In California’s ‘Lost’ Tribes, the first documentary to go beyond today’s sensationalistic headlines, tribal leaders tell their own stories of abundance, attempted genocide, survival, and resistance.

The final decades of the twentieth century brought unprecedented changes for American Indians, especially in the areas of human rights and tribal sovereignty. In 1990, after a long struggle between Indian rights groups and the scientific establishment, the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act was passed.

For American Indians, this was perhaps the most important piece of civil and human rights legislation of this century. Skeletons and grave goods that had been gathering dust in museums around the country could come home again, and Indian graves would be protected from further desecration.

But a case tested these claims, and Who Owns the Past? focuses on the controversy that emerged. The discovery of a 9,000-year-old skeleton on the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, reignited the conflict between anthropologists and Indian people over the control of human remains found on ancestral Indian lands. Anthropologists insist that these remains hold the key to America’s past and must be studied for the benefit of mankind, while many Indian people believe that exhuming and studying them is a desecration of their ancestors.

Kennewick Man has become a test case for NAGPRA and all that it symbolizes for American Indians. To a large extent, its outcome will determine Indian sovereignty over their past and their future in the 21st century. Who Owns the Past? examines how two ways of seeing the world – scientific versus traditional – are clashing in the case of Kennewick Man.