Indie film director Nick Bertelsen didn’t know what to expect when his six-minute short, The Coffee Shop, was invited to screen at the Tucson Slow Food & Film Festival this past January. Bertelsen had stumbled across the niche festival’s call for entries while browsing through listings on Withoutabox.com. “It sounded kind of interesting,” explains Bertelsen of the festival, which combines food-themed films with culinary events. “After all, it was being held in Arizona in January and I live in Iowa.” The possibility of escaping the Midwestern winter weather, if only for a few days, seemed worth the $20 entry fee.

It was a gamble that paid off: Bertelsen walked away with a $500 Audience Award and a full belly. Over the course of four days, he hop scotched from screenings of famous foodie features like Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985) and Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat (2000) to some of Tucson’s finest restaurants, where he indulged in complimentary gastronomic experiences like a Japanese noodle brunch and a chocolate molé-themed dinner buffet. For closing night, the festival’s organizers even arranged to have a local French bistro recreate the elaborate meal depicted in Gabriel Axel’s 1987 Danish classic, Babette’s Feast. “We got treated like royalty,” says Bertelsen.

The Tucson Slow Food & Film Festival, now entering its third year, is the brainchild of retired corporate PR and communications executive Bob Berzok and his wife Linda, a food historian. “It touches a nerve,” says Berzok of the food-film combo. “People love to eat and people love to watch movies. When you have a good film about food and a strong storyline, it’s a natural fit.”

Both active volunteers in the Tucson chapter of Slow Food USA—a nonprofit organization that promotes biodiversity and locally-grown, sustainable food production—the Berzoks created a festival that is among an emerging crop of events worldwide taking the tried-and-true combo of dinner and a movie to a whole new level.

While some of these nascent fests have a clear consciousness-raising mission to present films that educate people about weighty subjects such as the food supply and the threat of corporate agro-business (think Fast Food Nation and Our Daily Bread), others are using food as a way to catalyze audiences to connect with each other beyond the last credit roll.

“Food is the great organizer,” says Brian Pu-Folkes, a Queens, NY-based immigrant advocate and community organizer. “It brings people to the table.” In September 2006 Pu-Folkes launched the 7 International Arts Express Jackson Heights Film & Food Festival.

After running for city council in 2005, the civic-minded Pu-Folkes learned that residents were craving art and cultural experiences in their own backyards. When he lost the election, Pu-Folkes decided to put together a series of monthly screening events last fall at a historic movie theater, now occupied by a popular local Colombian restaurant.

Rather than market his festival exclusively around food-oriented movies, Pu-Folkes used universal themes such as “family” and “love” as umbrellas for the mostly short works. Instead, he threw a party and invited scores of local ethnic restaurants to donate their culinary riches.

“We thought we would market our neighborhood and help it become a destination,” says Pu-Folkes. Together the Jackson Heights and Elmhurst sections of Queens comprise the most ethnically diverse zip codes in the United States. “Here you can get great, authentic food,” enthuses Pu-Folkes. “The clusters of people we have here are new immigrants who are catering to their brethren… It’s one of the things that’s so rich about our community.”

While Jackson Heights and Elmhurst may be chock full of Burmese immigrants sharing sidewalk space with Ecuadorians and Tibetans, not to mention the urbanites who have flocked to these neighborhoods in recent years for cheap(er) rents, the diverse compatriots don’t necessarily interact much. Pu-Folkes thought that a food-oriented film festival might spark a change.

His festival experiment got off to a good start. With 2,000 in attendance last year and an expansion planned for 2007 that will include an afternoon food fair, ultimately Pu-Folkes would like his festival to be “sustainable” so that he can give back to the local restaurants that helped transform his vision of community-gathering into a reality.

Four years ago, Slow Food International began organizing a multi-day food and film festival at its headquarters in the tiny northern town of Bra, Italy. Carmen Tedesco, a staffer at the San Francisco chapter of Slow Food USA, had the opportunity to attend this past year. “It was very exciting to see a whole town embrace a film festival centered around food,” says Tedesco. “After the films, everyone went to local bistros and espresso bars.”

Inspired, Tedesco decided to replicate his own version of a Slow Food and film program back in the Bay Area. Now he promotes quarterly educational food-themed film events, with post-screening receptions where audiences can imbibe locally-produced delicacies such as artisanal cheeses and wines. “We make sure to have a communal experience in having receptions afterwards,” notes Tedesco. “I think that’s so important. With so many festivals, people go into the film and then they disperse. They’ve had this emotional experience and there’s no time to talk.”

This all makes for a natural fit between the Slow Food ethos and indie moviemaking. The goal of Slow Food is to embrace local gems and items that people might not know of,” says Tedesco. Which means the Bay Area’s trove of local moviemakers can be viewed as a kind of local indigenous crop that the Slow Food organization can help bring to market.

Indie moviemaker Taggart Siegel has experienced the tangible benefits of a Slow Food endorsement first-hand. Siegel’s documentary, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, about the travails of a struggling Midwestern farmer, won the Golden Snail Award at the Slow Food on Film Festival in Italy this past year. Like other indies new to the food film festival experience, Siegel says he didn’t know what to expect when he arrived. “A festival about food—it could be a lot of really boring films,” laughs Siegel. “It turned out there were great films—lots of fun, humorous films about food… from every culture around the world.”

Upon his return to the United States, Siegel hooked up with Slow Food’s San Francisco chapter to organize a Bay Area screening of his doc at the historic Castro Theatre (with Al Gore delivering the film’s introduction). As he prepares for his film’s theatrical release, Siegel says he’s continuing to work with Slow Food to help get the word out. “We’d like to organize events around the film and have food be a part of it,” says Siegel. “It goes deeper into the community—it’s not just a flash in the pan.”

For moviemakers, Slow Food is clearly stepping up as an organization that can leverage a film’s marketing and distribution potential. “There’s a beautiful but delicate relationship between Slow Food and distributors,” explains Siegel. “Distributors want to make money and so do we to survive, but they often don’t spend enough time developing that rich world of grassroots marketing that really empowers the film.” That’s why maintaining a good relationship with Slow Food remains a priority for Siegel.

As a testament to its emerging clout, Slow Food co-sponsored a “Eat, Drink, See Movies—Celebrating Culinary Cinema” program at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival. Next spring, Slow Food San Francisco will kick off a Slow Food Nation Summit, which will include, among other events, a multi-day film festival. Fifty-thousand people are expected to attend, with Tom Lundy, founder of the renowned Telluride Film Festival, spearheading the event’s inaugural film program.

“When you go to eat with people, it’s a communal act,” says James Parrish of the Richmond Moving Image Collective in Virginia. “It’s intimate. A filmgoing experience can be intimate, too… It’s an incentive to get people to come together.”

Four years ago, Parrish teamed up with a local Italian restaurateur to promote the Italian Food & Film Festival in Richmond, which pairs Italian cinema with fine Italian eats. For the bargain basement price of $10—the proceeds of which benefit Parrish’s nonprofit film collective—ticket holders get treated to an Italian flick accompanied by an all-you-can-eat buffet. Parrish describes the vibe as one of “a family reunion—like you’re in this big, Italian family.”

“We’re bringing people together in a time when mainstream culture is moving away from public spaces,” says Parrish. “If all else fails, a glass of wine and some good Italian food can make any film experience that much better.”

At the end of the day, I think we can all drink to that.