Following cities such as New York, London and Bologna, Amsterdam now has its own culinary film festival. The three-day Dutch Food Film Festival runs from March 18-20, 2011 in Studio K (East Amsterdam).
More than 20 national and international movies will be screened during the three-day, multi-sensory event. Highlights include Geroen Wetzel’s El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (2010) about Ferran Adría, the flamboyant chef behind the eponymous, three-Michelin starred Spanish restaurant and Kings of Pastry (Chris Hegedus, D. A. Pennebaker, 2009), a "culi-suspense" documentary about the world’s best pastry chefs who gather in France every four years for the chance to win the coveted "Collar."
Food for Thought
Focusing not on the frippery of cooking competitions but on the amount of food thrown away in the West is Taste the Waste (Valentin Thurn, 2010). Several other movies, such as Black Gold (Marc Francis, Nick Francis, 2006), a look at the inequalities in the global coffee trade where many coffee growers live in poverty while the industry itself is worth some $80 billion per year, also confront the flip side of modern food consumption.
"We wanted to show the problems we have with food production, but also how much fun good food is and how much fun it is to have food as a central thing in your life," said Samuel Levie, one of the organisers of the Dutch Food Film Festival.
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress was hard to get, Levie said, but ultimately the distributors were happy for the film festival to show it. "It's only the second time it's been shown in Amsterdam [the film premiered at IDFA last November ], so for us it was perfect because we wanted to have some really new films. It was sold out four minutes after we put it on our website."
Feel-Good Movie Bottle Shock
One of the film festival’s few fiction films – although based on real events – is the older Bottle Shock (Randall Miller, 2008). Not as iconic as Sideways , it is nevertheless a feel-good movie about Californian winemaker Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) and his son Bo (Chris Pike) who upset the French wine establishment in the blind Paris tastings of 1976.
Young Audience Tastes Slow Food
The Dutch Food Film Festival is organised by the Youth Food Movement (YFM) Netherlands, the youth branch of Slow Food, an organisation founded in 1989 by Carlo Petrini as a reaction to fast food. YFM is a network of students, young professionals, chefs, farmers and gardeners that aims to promote "good, clean and fair food." The Dutch Food Film Festival is an extension of the movement's current activities.
"Images stick with you. So if you see images of the food system and how it works, those images stick in your mind," said Levie, adding that the festival is not only about films. A programme of food-related lectures, debates and workshops will accompany the screenings.
Tickets for the Dutch Food Film Festival are available online or at the Studio K ticket office.
Cecily Layzell - Cecily Layzell is a food and travel writer and founder of restaurant review site www.eat-amsterdam.com.
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