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Filmmaking Collective Meerkat Media Makes a Better Bee Movie


The Eighth Annual Media That Matters Film Festival, presented by Arts Engine, kicked off on Wednesday night, its mission to use the short film medium to engage audiences and inspire them to take action about a range of important issues. One of our favorites of the bunch, the Meerkat Media Collective’s Every Third Bite, tackles a topic we’ve heard a lot about in recent months but still find a bit hard to understand: colony collapse disorder (CCD), the unexplained phenomenon of worker bees abruptly disappearing from hives in Europe and the United States. This could make for a very alarmist narrative, of course — without bees we’d pretty much all starve. But Every Third Bite takes a different approach. After giving us a brief overview of CCD, it introduces us to a number of individual beekeepers who are doing their part to battle CCD, some in the most unlikely places. Of particular interest to readers will be David Graves, who operates twelve hives on the rooftops of New York City and sees the city as an untapped resource for beekeeping. —Bilge Ebiri

Filmmaking Collective Meerkat Media Makes a Better Bee Movie