Rhymes with Hunger

When Professor Margie Karish and Dilpreet Jammu partnered to bring the Sikh tradition of Langar to the University of Denver campus, they created something that went far beyond a food event. The course they co-developed asked students to plan, organize, and serve a full Langar for the university community, learning about event management, cultural humility, and the Sikh principle of selfless service in the same semester. The students, almost none of them Sikh, found that preparing and sharing a meal with strangers at a long table had a way of making the abstract concrete very quickly.

The film captures the event and the conversations that surrounded it, drawing on student testimony that is honest and often surprised. They expected a class project. They didn't expect to feel genuinely changed by it. The Langar's radical inclusivity, its practice of welcoming everyone equally to the same table with no questions asked, landed differently in person than it did in a reading. Rhymes with Hunger is a film about the oldest form of community building there is and about what happens when young people encounter it for the first time.