The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York opened its 'Documentary Fortnight' on February 16, 2011. The annual, two-week film festival focuses on recent, non-fiction works that examine the relationship between contemporary art and documentary film. Included in the line-up of 20 feature-length movies this year is Gereon Wetzel’s El Bulli: Cooking in Progress.
‘El Bulli: Cooking in Progress’ Adds Flavor to International Film Selection
It was almost impossible to get tickets for El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (2010) when it screened at IDFA in Amsterdam last November, and the recent announcement by head chef Ferran Adria that the three Michelin-starred restaurant in Spain would be closing its doors permanently at the end of the year to become a culinary academy will no doubt make tickets even harder to come by.
A few diners will be able to savor Ferran Adria’s 30-course dinner of parmesan crystal, vanishing ravioli and other culinary wizardry when El Bulli opens for its final six months on June 15. After that, fans of the Spaniard’s brand of culinary art will have to satisfy themselves with seeing the master at work on celluloid.
Independent Chinese Movies Screen in New York
Also included in the film festival’s international line-up is a selection of independent Chinese movies, which often only reach limited audiences in their own country due to government censorship.
Xu Xin’s Karamay (2010), for example, examines the details of the 1994 fire that broke out in a theater in Urumqi. The fire killed more than 300 people, most of whom were schoolchildren. Like several of the movies in the Chinese line-up, the six-hour epic – it will be screened with an intermission - is inspired by Frederick Wiseman’s observational ‘Direct Cinema’ style.
Rule Britannia: British Films Bookend MoMA Film Festival
MoMA’s film festival opened with British filmmaker Gillian Wearing's Self Made (2010). The 'do-it-yourself' feature debut by the Turner Prize-winning artist blends reality and fantasy, as seven non-professionals are shown attending method acting workshops, before starring in their own short movie.
The Brit flick closing the New York film festival is The Arbor (2009). Directed by artist Clio Barnard, the movie is based on Andrea Dunbar's semi-autobiographical play about her life in Bradford, a poor town in northern England. It weaves together fictional scenes shot in Bradford, with sound recordings of people from Dunbar's past, whose words are in turn lip synched by actors. The result is a multi-layered story that is part documentary, part fiction.
Latin American Films Head North
MoMA has also joined forces with Cinema Tropical and Abulante, the traveling documentary film festival co-created by Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, to screen new work from South America in North America. Appropriately, one of these is entitled El Ambulante (2009). Directed by Argentinians Eduardo de la Serna, Lucas Marcheggiano and Adriana Nidia Yurovich, ‘The Peddler’ profiles the charming wandering filmmaker Daniel Burmeister, who travels from village to village across Argentina making movies featuring the locals in exchange for board and lodging. After the film has screened, he packs up his camera and moves on.
Austin’s SXSW film festival has announced it will also show El Ambulante in March.
MoMA's Documentary Fortnight runs until February 28, 2011.
Cecily Layzell - Cecily Layzell is a food and travel writer and founder of restaurant review site www.eat-amsterdam.com.
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