Food for the activist’s soul

As an angsty, food-obsessed adolescent who secretly harboured hopes of becoming a pastry chef, I was drawn to films from the 80s and 90s that depicted food with an unexpected brazenness and spirit. There was Tampopo, considered by many to be the greatest food film ever, where, in a sultry love scene, a couple seductively passes an egg yolk from one mouth to the other. Tita, the protagonist in Alfonso Arau’s 1992 film, Like Water for Chocolate, cries into her sister’s wedding food while preparing it, causing all the guests to feel great emotional distress after their meal. Later, in the noughties, we were treated to films like Ratatouille that evoked nostalgia.

Despite exceptions like the 2017 Sundance breakaway, Call Me By Your Name — where 17-year old Elio uses the peach as a sexual stimulant — and the sinister role of mushrooms in the Oscar-winning Phantom Thread, egdy depictions of food are a minority today. A glance at the Berlinale’s Culinary Cinema line-up or a look at the food films at Cannes reveal an activist impulse instead. Interspersed with alluring shots of edible items is usually a call to action — sometimes overt, at other times more subtle.

Eat and act

Filmmaker Kireet Khurana is not a foodie. Yet his upcoming film, T for Taj Mahal, whose trailer was unveiled at the Cannes’ India pavilion last week, tells the story of a man who starts a roadside dhaba in his village. In exchange for his dal makhani and butter chicken, he does not accept fiat currency as payment; instead, customers are required to teach the local children lessons in subjects like English and mathematics.

Vivien Killilea Best  

Not far from where Khurana unveiled his trailer, American filmmaker Thomas Morgan screened his documentary, Soufra, at the Cannes Positive Week. Weaving in and out of the narrow streets of the Burj el-Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut, we meet Mariam Shaar, the kind-faced and sometimes obstinate founder of a catering business that she runs with her fellow women refugees. Engaging in friendly banter and arguments about whose grandmother’s recipe is more authentic, the women boil cabbage leaves and stuff them with minced meat, roll out grape leaves for dolmas and spread shredded chicken atop glistening saffron rice. When she is not cooking, Shaar is trying to obtain a license to operate a food truck in Lebanon, no easy task for non-citizens, especially refugees.

Morgan, like Khurana, hopes his film will stir audiences to action, by helping them perceive the women as not just refugees, but also entrepreneurs. “Awareness without something to do is just frustrating,” he explains. Executive produced by Susan Sarandon, Soufra — which was screened at the 2018 Berlinale’s culinary cinema showcase — is accompanied by a cookbook whose proceeds go towards building a school in the Lebanese camp.

Healing old wounds

In stark contrast to Khurana’s indifference towards food, is Eric Khoo’s infectious love for it. “It’s just something that I actually love [and] in one way or the other, I’ve always incorporated food into my works.” For instance, in My Magic, Khoo’s 2008 Tamil-language feature, the frayed relationship between an alcoholic father and his irate son is temporarily assuaged by a chicken curry made with grandma’s recipe.

And yet, Khoo has his own activist bent. In his most recent feature, Ramen Teh, which was screened with Soufra at the Berlinale, he uses food as the unifying character to commemorate 50 years of diplomatic relations between Japan and Singapore. After his father’s death, Masato, a young Japanese chef, goes to Singapore to meet his late mother’s family. While there, he is introduced to a vista of local food, including bak kut teh, the humble pork dish that Khoo “literally [eats] every weekend.” Masato’s culinary experiment — a dish that fuses the Japanese noodle dish, ramen, with bak kut teh — serves as a metaphor for unity in a country where scars from the Japanese occupation still remain. Celebrity ramen chef Keisuke Takeda is even serving a limited edition ramen teh at his Tonkotsu King Matsuri in Singapore till May 31.

The cook’s wisdom

Marathi filmmaker Sachin Kundalkar is also a food lover. After the release of his feature, Gulabjaam, in February, he is now researching bread, including its Indian varieties, and believes it might form the basis of a future film. “[As a child,] my family couldn’t afford to go to restaurants, so whatever we have seen and eaten and dreamt of, everything was made at home,” he reveals.

Gulabjaam features Sonali Kulkarni as Radha, an ill-tempered Pune-based home cook, who mentors Aditya, an NRI who is keen to open an Indian restaurant in London. With brightly-lit shots of curry leaves splattering in oil, and gulab jamun floating in sugar syrup, the film stemmed from the impulse to recreate the memory of food, but soon evolved into a larger mission: to preserve local recipes that are fast disappearing from our culinary lexicon. “When I was living in London, and would go to an Indian restaurant, I never found my native food. It’s a specific kind of food, mostly North Indian, that is celebrated [abroad] as Indian food,” Kundalkar explains, adding, “I am a cook [myself], and I am fascinated by how knowledge is preserved and passed on. If not, a kind of wisdom, a health wisdom, dies.”

A character on its own

Now more than ever, food films are intent on using their primary protagonist to communicate a message. A message meant to spark action or to highlight how much we have in common. One of the most stirring scenes in Soufra is when Mariam Shaar, dejected after another food truck license refusal, organises a screening of the 2014 Jon Favreau-starrer Chef, for her colleagues. With furrowed brows, the women carefully observe and discuss the knife techniques and searing methods. “It was quite beautiful, the way food brought these people together,” Morgan tells me, “[They revealed things] they may not have ever had an opportunity to talk about [otherwise].”

Morgan, currently in Cannes to showcase Soufra, credits the film with helping him see food differently. “Not just as something that sustains us and gives us nourishment, but something that tells us a story and something that reminds us of a place and marks time for us,” he smiles.

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Often, the food we see on the silver screen is not fully cooked nor entirely edible. “To make the colours pop and make the food look good, we use underdone dishes,” explains Gupta. But do these creations still take inspiration from real food? “Absolutely,” says Kundalkar. “For Gulabjaam, my friend and food blogger, Sayali Rajadhyaksha, sat with me and jointly mapped out the food diary of the entire film.” For Ramen Teh, Khoo consulted with Singaporean food blogger Leslie Tay, and their collaboration with Jason Lim of The Eureka Lab, which provides professional ramen-making courses, led to the winning ramen teh recipe featured in the film.