Food for Thought

My City, Pizza by Ala Mohseni is about the world standardisation of tastes. Apparently, in the Iranian capital of Tehran, pizza restaurants are beginning to provide stiff competition for the traditional kebab houses, particularly amongst young people. Meanwhile on the other side of the world, in Montreal, Canada, young people are preoccupied with an entirely different issue. Surfing the Waste: A Musical Documentary About Dumpster Diving by Paul Aflalo, Sandra Lombardi and Tomoe Yoshihara, follows a group of friends who get their food out of dumpsters and try to confront the rising throw-away consumer mentality.

This mentality is starkly represented in one of the first scenes of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread, which shows trailers carrying tons of bread from the previous day to the rubbish dump. The film is known for its complete absence of commentary to accompany images which are often difficult to digest: Geyrhalter presents the mass production of vegetables, but also of livestock. The viewer can easily get the impression that the cows and chickens are as treated with the same detachment as tomatoes. One can understand why Geyrhalter chose Le Sang des Bêtes (1949) by Georges Franju as part of his Top 10 IDFA selection. Franju was one of the first to show images of sliced-up animals, which was even more shocking because he represented them in a very neutral way. Whilst Franju shows the butchers whistling and singing, half a century later in Geyrhalter’s documentary we only hear the sounds of machinery. The slaughtering process has become faster and less personal, though the basic cruelty of the act remains.

While these last films focus primarily on food itself and not on personal portraits of the people shown, two other films at IDFA do exactly the opposite. Pressure Cooker by Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman is a film which presents the American Dream in a heart-warming, positive way. Wilma Stephenson is the teacher of a culinary arts class at Frankford High School in a difficult neighbourhood in Philadelphia. During preparation for the finals of the top national culinary schools, she teaches Erica, Tyree and Fatoumata not only the basics of cooking, but also about life and success. These students have to prepare the same meal again and again: the ingredients for big chefs are much more exclusive. The Chicken, the Fish and the King Crab by José Luis Lopez-Linares focuses on the “Bocuse d’Or”, a top competition for the best chefs in the world that takes place in Lyon, France. That year, the chefs had to cook meals around the French “Bress” chicken, halibut and the king crab. Both the students and the chefs are pressed for time, but their ambitions are different.

As our attitudes towards food are often used as a kind of societal barometer, one can get the impression at this festival that today’s spectator – now that he is enlightened about the food production processes – is more interested in the cultural and social factors involved in the way we eat.

Nina Henke