Cesar’s Last Fast
California is more than Hollywood. L.A. is not the state’s capital – the bureaucratic and farming town of Sacramento is. The endless Central Valley fields produce 80% of America’s fruit and vegetables. However, for low paid farm workers, the Golden State is no promised land, but a place of backbreaking physical labor in the desert heat. Their right to unionize is owed to Cesar Chavez, the protagonist of this film by Perez and Parlee. Chavez spent his entire life fighting to improve the conditions of farm laborers. His ultimate act of protest was a hunger strike designed to raise awareness of pesticides so carcinogenic they affect entire families. If lettuce does not stick in Americans’ throats after watching Food Inc., Cesar’s Last Fast should do the trick, because the working conditions of farm workers differ little today from those 50 years ago.
Richard Ray Perez
A producer and director of films and documentary series whose father spent 22 years as a farm worker in the difficult conditions which Cesar Chavez sought to change.
Filmography
2002 Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (doc.)
2006 Sierra Club Chronicles (serial Tv 6 odc. / TV series 6 episodes)
2014 Ostatnia głodówka Cesara / Cesars Last Fast (doc.)
Lorena Perlee
A producer and director. In the 1980s she worked as a United Farm Workers volunteer and became Cesar Chavez’s spokesperson during his hunger strike. In 1986 she began work on a film about Chavez, recording materials incorporated into Cesar’s Last Fast. She died of breast cancer in 2006.
Filmography
2000 Mexico (short doc.)
2014 Ostatnia głodówka Cesara / Cesars Last Fast (doc.)
