Coming to PBS’s America ReFramed tomorrow, Tuesday, March 29: DOG DAYS
Laura Waters Hinson and Kasey Kirby’s look at street food vending in Washington DC debuted at the Austin Film Festival in 2013. It also screened at the Santa Barbara fest as well as at special events in DC.
After Coite, a newly-married industrial engineer, loses his job, he takes a gamble by starting an entrepreneurial venture: Providing more creative, healthier food options for DC’s street vendors to sell – despite having no kitchen experience or skill. Taking a crash culinary course thanks to his visiting aunt, Coite seeks out vendors who will test market his idea, and finds an early client in Eritrean immigrant Siyone, a divorced mother of four who has run her struggling hot dog stand for 22 years. While the film reveals how vendors like Siyone are subject to both stringent regulation and a suppliers monopoly, it stumbles in placing most of its focus on Coite. While affable enough, he’s far less compelling than Siyone, and, despite his unemployment woes, he awkwardly comes from a position of privilege as a white male seeking to enter a field he knows nothing about, hawking appropriated cuisine (Jamaican jerk chicken) he doesn’t even know how to make through the vehicle of still-beleaguered vendors who, at least as its represented here, are primarily female people of color. Still, Waters Hinson and Kirby succeed in demonstrating the bureaucracy, and the lack of advocacy, that has made it difficult for small business owners like Siyone to realize their American Dream.
what (not) to doc 