Dive
Jeremy Seifert spends a year raiding supermarket dumpsters across Los Angeles, filming the food that grocery chains throw out while still packaged, unspoiled, and often untouched. He climbs into bins behind chains that refuse to comment on camera, hauling out cereal, produce, and meat still cold from refrigeration, and totals up what a single store discards in a week. Seifert brings his young daughter along on some of the runs, using the family angle to ask why edible food gets tossed rather than donated, and interviews people who feed themselves and their neighbors this way. The film lays out figures on how much food America wastes annually and contrasts that number with hunger statistics, pushing the two side by side without much narration needed. It stays close to the dumpsters and the people who use them rather than widening into policy debate, and it closes with the specific practical fixes, composting, donation programs, better store policy, that came out of the film's own festival run and the campaign it helped start.