Feb 12, 2009, 16:43 GMT
Berlin - The Culinary Cinema series, in its third year at the Berlinale, combined a celebration of gastronomy with unpalatable truths about the global food industry.
The sequence of five feature films, five documentaries and six shorts centred around the role of food, whilst carrying a strong political message about the sustainability of modern food production techniques.
The Culinary Cinema event that opened as part of the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday featured the European premiere of Food, Inc, a documentary film about industrial food production methods in the United States.
The film was applauded enthusiastically at the Friedrichstadtpalast, where guests included food activist and Berlinale judge Alice Waters, actor Gael Garcia Bernal and Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation.
Food Inc., directed by Robert Kenner, shows how a handful of companies control food manufacture in the US, using factories and production lines to achieve efficiencies at the cost of food quality, animal welfare and employee rights.
The documentary is not for the hungry, or the faint-hearted.
Scenes include cows standing knee-deep in their own manure and chickens reared so fast that they can't carry their own weight.
The film also wipes the smugness off the faces of vegetarian viewers, showing how potentially deadly e-coli bacteria were able to contaminate spinach production lines.
The vast variety displayed on supermarket shelves is exposed as an illusion, as the film explains that a large proportion of supermarket products is based on soya or maize derivatives.
Colourful graphics bring to life the statistics underpinning the film's message, while the illusion of wholesome, natural farming is shattered by scenes from the world's largest slaughterhouse and the manipulative methods of the corporations holding seed patents.
The Culinary Cinema screenings were each followed by a meal, prepared by celebrated chefs. The audience at the Berlinale screening was told that the vegetarian stew which followed had 'nothing in common' with the production techniques shown in the film.
The Culinary Cinema strand of the Berlinale is particularly important to Berlinale Director Dieter Kosslik, a member of the global Slow Food movement.
Slow Food originated in Italy 'to counteract fast food and fast life,' and the increased industrialization of the food industry.
This year's Culinary Cinema also included the Italian documentary Terra Madre, which perfectly combines Kosslik's interests in film and food.
Terra Madre is based on a biannual festival of the same name, during which traditional farmers from 150 countries come to the Italian city of Turin, to share knowledge and experiences.
For the film, celebrated Italian director Ermanno Olmi distilled hundreds of hours of footage from the Terra Madre conferences in 2006 and 2008.
He gives a platform to indigenous food producers from across the world, speaking about some of the challenges they face from industrialization, globalization and climate change.
The brainchild of Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement, the film emphasises the importance of preserving local tradition, regional variety and sustainable farming.
'We all live because we eat every day, some of us three times, some twice, some only manage to eat once,' Petrini says. Eating, he adds, is 'the main act that all living beings do.'
This heavy documentary digest is lightened up by cinematic delicacies such as Dieta Mediterranea, a Spanish film about a female chef who is torn between her family, the kitchen, and the two men in her life - her husband and the lover who fuels her culinary success.
Pranzo di Ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch) is an Italian film based loosely on the life of the director Gianni di Gregorio, who also plays the lead role of Gianni, a middle aged man who looks after his aged mother in Rome.
When his landlord and his doctor both foist their elderly relatives on him, Gianni is crushed by the dominant women, but gallantly attempts to meet their needs.
A deft hand in the kitchen, he nevertheless struggles to keep them fed when everything closes down for the August bank holiday.
The three elderly ladies are all played by women with no previous acting experience, while most other characters in the film are childhood friends of di Gregorio, playing themselves.
This year's Culinary Cinema also included productions from Bosnia, South Korea and France, as well as talks on eating responsibly.
Kosslick wants to show that it is easy to vote for changes in the food industry, by choosing what goes into the shopping basket.
At a special children's event, Gastronomic Director of the Culinary Cinema Alf Wagenzink was to teach Berlin school pupils to cook a balanced vegetarian lunch.
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