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Food Film Festivals
A growing number of film festivals are taking "dinner and a movie" to the next level.
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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.
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This story was published in the Summer 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Food for Thought
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