Slow Food: Fast Times
(DOCUMENTARY - Running Time: 56 minutes, 46 seconds)
Joe Murphy

This film documents Joe Murphy's two-year, seven-state journey through barbecue culture.  It is a light-hearted exploration of smoked meat as a unique Southern phenomenon that permeates the social, religious, economic, political, culinary, and athletic life of the region. Through countless interactions with well known (Alexander Julian, Rufus Edmisten) and ordinary barbecue fanatics, Murphy presents barbecue as much more than food; its a celebration. 

In this hour-long program we see that the rituals and rhetoric surrounding the preparation and consumption of BBQ provide physical, as well as psychic, nourishment for a society consumed by fast-food franchises and mass-marketed restaurant chains.  Smoked meat maintains enormous popularity in spite of the fact that it runs counter to many of the current trends of our health conscious, politically correct times.  Murphy includes himself and the crew interacting with the subjects and with each other in order to force the audience to questions the way reality is presented through the video medium.