It’s certainly a good time to be screening King Corn, the 2007 documentary which will be the opening program in the Food and Water series sponsored by the Salt Lake City Film Center, the City Library and KUED-TV. The free, public screening will be held Tuesday, April 15, at 7 p.m. in the City Library auditorium.

Corn’s commodity prices are at a record high — $6.05 per bushel at the close of business today on the Chicago Board of Trade for the most actively traded May contract. Just last week, corn topped $6 a bushel, representing a price increase of more than 30 percent since the start of the year.

The record prices reflect high-pressure demand for livestock feed and biofuel production along with government predictions that American farmers will plant eight percent fewer acres of corn this year than in last year’s growing season. And, with corn and corn syrup in an overwhelmingly large segment of food products, the cost of the typical American grocery purchase will eventually be significantly higher despite the conservative (and hopeful) estimates of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Consider that the average bushel price of corn in 2007 was just $3.40.

King Corn, therefore, is a prescient offering in this context. The 90-minute documentary follows two recently-minted Yale graduates who visit relatives in Greene, Iowa, plant an acre of corn, and then follow it as far as possible into the food chain. Generally praised by critics who note the film’s occasional touches of humor to soften the sobering intelligent impact of the subject, King Corn provides compelling evidence of corn’s central presence in the American diet and its attendant health risks. It’s a perfect video companion to Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which also discusses the deep reach of the corn industry into every corner of our diet.

The film includes interviews with nutritionists, agricultural policy experts, and the father of the farm subsidy — former U.S. Secretary Earl Butz, who just died earlier this year at the age of 98.

Shot in 2004 and 2005, the film was premiered at the 2007 South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. Directed and produced by Aaron Woolf, it features Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis and it follows the duo through 30 states and Mexico. Ellis and Woolf are cousins. Woolf’s artistic statement includes this money quote:

“Today the process of questioning our culture and agriculture is underway in many forms. If you ride a motorcycle through Iowa now, you will pass an increasing number of fields planted in organic corn, or grazed on by free-ranging cattle or buffalo, using farming practices that are safer for all of us. You will pass homes and greenhouses where heirloom varieties of vegetables are being preserved with great urgency and diligence. Maybe even you will get that feeling that Columbus had when he first set eyes on the New World, and wrote to Queen Isabela in Spain that he had found something more valuable than gold, a crop that could feed a continent.”

Cheney and Ellis are interesting characters in their own right. At Yale, the two campaigned extensively to bring local foods into the dining services on campus and regularly took incoming freshmen on trips to organic farms. They also earned a bit of ersatz publicity for releasing sheep on the central campus grounds.

The film’s strength, oddly enough, is its general self-effacing nature, quite a contrast to the crusading documentaries produced by the likes of Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore.

For more information, visit the SLC Film Center here.