We Are Not Making a Film About Hunger

I AM HUNGRY IN PHILADELPHIA is applying to the People’s Media Fund Community Voices program, and whatever comes of the application I want to say something about why that particular fund, and why this particular film is being built the way it is.

Start with the sentence the whole thing rests on.

We are not making a film about hunger. We are making a film to show that hunger is not a reality Philadelphia has to accept any longer.

Those are different projects. The first one ends when the credits roll and everybody feels something for a while. The second one is supposed to start when the credits roll, which is a much harder thing to design and the reason the application exists at all.

The number, and why one number is not enough

Here is the part that should stop anybody who loves this city.

Estimates of food insecurity in Philadelphia sit between roughly 13 and 18 percent depending on the source and the year, which is somewhere between two hundred thousand and two hundred and eighty thousand of our neighbours. Feed Philly Coalition puts the Feeding America figure at about 17.6 percent, roughly 278,000 people. Other counts for 2024 land nearer 13.6 percent and 210,000. As of the middle of 2024, close to a third of the city, around 496,000 residents, were on SNAP.

I am giving you the range rather than picking the scariest number, because I think the range is more honest and because the argument does not need help. Around a fifth of Black households and a similar share of Hispanic households in this city lack reliable access to good food. Roughly a quarter of Philadelphia’s children do. Philabundance and The Philadelphia Citizen have both been laying this out for years, and City Council now has a task force on it.

So the information exists. Everybody with a professional interest already has it. And the numbers have not moved nearly enough, which tells you the shortage in this city is not a shortage of data.

What is actually missing

I have spent enough time around this work to have a theory about that, and it is not a comfortable one.

Philadelphia does not lack organisations working on hunger. It has an extraordinary number of them, many of them very good. What it lacks is a shared story that gets a room of people who do not already work on this to stay in their seats and then do something on Monday.

That is a media problem before it is a food problem. A report can tell you a number and a good report can tell you why the number is that shape. What neither can do is put you in a kitchen with somebody deciding which meal to skip, and then leave you in a room with your neighbours immediately afterward while you still feel it. That is the specific thing a film can do, and it is why we are making one, and why the plan deliberately does not stop at the film.

Why this fund

The People’s Media Fund used to be the Independence Public Media Foundation, and it renamed itself around what it actually does: back media that shifts who gets to tell the story.

Its Community Voices open call puts $775,000 into grants between $10,000 and $30,000, aimed at Greater Philadelphia media makers, at small organisations, at new ventures still finding their feet, and at creators from communities that get talked about far more often than they get to speak. In 2025 it moved $770,000 the same way. Its grant list is public.

And here is the detail I keep telling people about, because I think it is the most interesting thing in the whole structure. The funding decisions are made by an independent review panel of community members and media makers. Not by the fund’s staff. Not by its board.

Think about what that means. A fund about narrative power gave away its own narrative power over who gets money. That is not a press release. That is a governance decision with teeth, and it is rarer than it should be.

So applying there is not only about the money, and I would say this even if we were not applying. It is a statement about the kind of company we want to be in, and about who we think should be deciding which stories this city hears.

What the film is built to become

The documentary is a beginning. That has been the plan from the first conversation.

What we are building toward is community screenings in neighbourhoods rather than in a theatre downtown, small enough that the room can actually talk afterward. Facilitated conversations that end on what people are going to do rather than on how the film made them feel. Original Philadelphia jazz written for the material, because this city tells its hardest truths through its music and always has, and because a score by Philadelphia musicians makes the film belong to the place it is about. And short pieces that partner organisations, teachers and advocates can use long after the screenings are over.

The question at the end of a screening should never be did you like the film. It should be what are we going to do now.

The people

I want to name the people rather than let the project be a they.

Kaloni Davis is directing. David J. Greenberg has done the writing and the research. I am producing. And a long list of Philadelphians have given this project their voice, their time, their expertise and, in a lot of cases, their own experience of not having enough food in the house, which is not a small thing to hand to a camera.

Those are the people the film belongs to. If it works, the credit is theirs. If the campaign around it works, that will be because a lot of Philadelphians decided their own city could do better than this, which is a thing I have watched happen here before and expect to watch happen again.

Art can do more than entertain

That is really the whole argument, and it is the reason a fund like this one deserves saying thank you to whether or not it says yes to us.

Art can educate. Art can connect. Art can organise. Art can move people. And art can help change a city, not by itself and not quickly, but as the thing that gets enough people looking in the same direction at the same time for the slower work to become possible.

Philadelphia is one of the great food cities in the world. Hundreds of thousands of the people who live in it cannot reliably eat.

Both of those are true at once, and only one of them has to stay true.

LFG Philly.