On Oct. 5, Professor Alexis Krasilovsky of California State University Northridge, debuted her award winning documentary Let Them Eat Cake in CSUSM’s USU ballroom.  

As the winner of the Best Documentary Feature in the 2015 Paris Independent Film Festival, the film delves into an international journey of the decadent pastry world.

As a director and professor, Krasilovsky integrated the ironies between pastry making and those who cannot afford to eat those pastries.

In Krasilovsky’s director statement, she proposed her vision for the film as an idea that started back in the 1980s. Until she began traveling around the world to film issues that coincided with her global documentaries, Krasilovsky put her poetic perspective on pastries to a halt.

“I began to think of pastry as the magical amulet that could seduce viewers into examining the stories behind the ingredients ‒ sugar, wheat, rice, corn and chocolate. [Images of] the farmers toiling in sugarcane fields of India and the flooded cornfields of Peru, workers rolling out the dough in a baklava factory in Turkey, children harvesting cocoa in West Africa and rickshaw drivers in Bangladesh who were on the brink of starvation.”

The documentary focuses on the underlying issues between global food production and consumption, revealing how this relationship connects to the crisis of global hunger.

The film focuses on the overconsumption of sugar, accounting for the fact that excessive consumption leads to people becoming overweight and having a weak immune system. This makes people more susceptible to malnourishment.

Let Them Eat Cake focuses on different global perspectives, stressing the need for nutrition education whether or not the country is industrialized or developing.

One of the main issues within developing countries the film brought up, questions our world and our actions. Certain countries are naturally abundant with resources that industrialized nations use in their everyday products. If developing countries produce a large amount of the ingredients used in making pastries, then why are those countries the most prone to suffer from hunger and starvation? How can a country be so rich with natural resources, but be so poor in terms of monetary wealth?

Let Them Eat Cake is eye opening film that focuses on such issues. It isn’t about the cake itself, but rather topics that pertain to a nation’s physical health, the wealth distribution among corporations, government and workers across the globe.