In her signature serious-yet-quirky connect-the-dots style, Peabody Award winning filmmaker Judith Helfand takes audiences from the deadly 1995 Chicago heat disaster — in which 739 people died, mostly black and in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, ties it back to the underlying man-made disaster of systemic structural racism and then goes deep into one of our nation’s biggest growth industries — Disaster Preparedness. Along the way she forges inextricable links between extreme weather, extreme disparity and the politics of “disaster,” daring to ask: What if with a slight torque of the system and a re-frame of the terms disaster, preparedness and resilience we could invest in the most “vulnerable communities” now - instead of waiting for the next “natural disaster”. COOKED is adapted from Eric Klinenberg’s ground-breaking book, HEAT WAVE: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.