French-Uruguayan filmmaker Juan Pittaluga is well known in the world of food for his collaboration with Jonathan Nossiter on the Cannes-selected documentary Mondovino (2003). He is now working on both a feature fiction film, Punta del Este, and Miracolo del gusto, a border-crossing documentary about taste.

In 1973, Cannes jury president Ingrid Bergman condemned La Grande Bouffe as the most sordid and vulgar movie she had ever seen.

La Grande Bouffe was directed by Marco Ferreri and written by himself and Rafael Azcona, the scriptwriter with whom he worked for 20 years. In 1965 they had already written L'uomo dei cinque palloni, the story of a man who wants to know how much air a globe can contain, becoming obsessed by this idea and ending up faking the suicide. This interest in knowing what the limit was, at which moment things exploded, is what they finally ended up developing again - and with more depth - in La Grande Bouffe.

Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, names that every kid knew. If solving how to get astronauts into space was not enough NASA had to feed them too. On their website one can find information about the nutritional aspects and eating in a weightless environment. But we do not need to look to outer space to hear that “the future is ready”. This is not a quote from Marshall McLuhan but the advert line for Monsanto’s Roundup Ready herbicide product.

In The Future of Food Deborah Koons Garcia takes a look how gene modified products, genetically engineered food are affecting the change that the agricultural industries are going through. Today a satellite can be used to determine the best place for planting and pretty much like you pimp a car or do stylistic makeover farming too is headed for some major tuning. Not just a tomato but a super tomato. Farming is not so much anymore about growing as it is about selling when people in cities consider a supermarket the place where food comes from. The productivity of America’s farms, the sheer success of them has also created problems with excess crops and what to do with them.  

Dutch documentary about the diversity of food and especially seeds and beans which are more and more lost. Dutchman Ruurd Walrecht was collecting them for many years without any support from the government – then he gave up and moved to Sweden. The films shows the work of his assistants and adherer's and what happened to his seed collection after he left: it is now stored in a so-called gene bank.

 A woman who moves heaven and earth. 

Marie-Monique Robin is one of those women who never stop… fighting. While she finished the shocking documentary The World According to Monsanto back in 2007, she continues to promote the movie as well as the eponymous book - an investigation into the disastrous results of pressure directed towards the growing of genetically-modified wheat by the American corporation Monsanto.

Dynamic, enthusiastic, persevering, this journalist is invited everywhere to debate on her pet subject: the stakes of biodiversity. She reaches her public with simple words, concrete and terrifying examples. This strength of conviction, this faith, animates a woman who is a role model for investigatory journalism. As a reporter she has travelled a lot, particularly in Latin America, and has always unearthed hot potatoes such as organ theft.

After “Our daily bread”, Austria comes back with another not so yummy documentary about the industrial production of the food we chow down every day. It features interviews with alter-globalization protagonist Jean Ziegler and former CEO of the Nestlé Group Peter Brabeck. In this 96 minutes documentary, Wagenhofer takes the spectators on a journey that goes through France, Spain, Romania, Switzerland and Brazil.