Wisconsin Film Festival Food love (Mini-Fest #3)

The Wisconsin Film Festival's five-day, 192-film schedule can be tough for any one person to digest. To make it a little less overwhelming, The A.V. Club put together a few mini-festivals centered around strangely specific and not-so-obvious topics.

For every social station, food is an inescapable and nearly constant requirement. It's a thread that binds economic and political enemies as well as family (who can sometimes feel like the enemy) to the land. Food is now also being yoked to a host of cinematic themes, including family, social rebellion, and violence. In each of these four Wisconsin Film Festival pieces, cooking is more than a background motif—it’s an activity that helps define the characters and anchor the plots. The "Food Love Mini-Fest" explores the many ways food—for better or worse—ties people together.

Cooking History: April 15, 5:30 p.m., Wisconsin Union Theater
Synopsis: A series of interviews with military caterers from all over the world (Russian, German, French, Serbian) is interspersed with footage of the flavor of industrial cooking. Director Péter Kerekes punctuates the film with on-screen breakdowns of some of the recipes. The film is at turns playful—a shuffling version of "Ride Of The Valkyries" is the recurrent musical theme—and disturbing, as when geriatric Germans joke about invading Poland in 1939.
How it fits: The military cooks of Cooking History were simply trying to make it through their respective wars. The narrative tapestry combines threads of animal butchery, deep sadness over spilled blood, fond reminiscences for certain dishes made dear through repetition, Milo Minderbinder-style ration trading, and food-centric jingoism. The varied perspectives drive the drama: A German claims that, "German bread is the best in the world," while another insists that all bread is the same. And a starker view comes from a former concentration camp prisoner who tells the story of killing 300 S.S. officers via poisoned loaves.
If you like food movies, you'll like this because: The stories of officers swapping lard for booze, and the smiling recollections of recipes that call for, “25 tons of mushrooms, 100,000 washed bay leaves, and 200,000 red peppercorns,” all underscore the essential humor of a situation in which soldiers take a break from shooting at each other in the killing fields to retire for a nice coq au vin.

Mid-August Lunch: April 17, 2 p.m., Wisconsin Union Theater
Synopsis: Gianni Di Gregorio directs and stars in this semi-autobiographical tale of a middle-aged man who lives with his mother. Facing mounting bills, Gianni takes in three additional old ladies for several days in August while their sons take a vacation. They drink (Gianni is seldom without wine glass in hand), quarrel, watch TV, and prepare mouthwatering meals, including a macaroni casserole that one of the women secretly devours despite her doctor’s dietary orders. Nothing much happens, but the quirky women (none of them are professional actors) and their interactions make for a surprisingly engaging film.
How it Fits: Finding and preparing food is at the center of Gianni’s entertainment plan for his elderly house guests. They eventually find common ground around the table, despite some initial friction.
If you like food movies, you’ll like this because: Maybe you haven’t snuck a huge tray of macaroni casserole into your bedroom, but you know you’ve always wanted to.

Agrarian Utopia: April 18, 1:45 p.m., Chazen Museum of Art
Synopsis: Agrarian Utopia is a study of famished farmers in Thailand trying to eke out lives on a terrain that's lush with animal life and dense with vegetation, but controlled by unseen political entities forcing them into subsistence farming.
How it fits: Slowly bringing the viewer into the world of the farmers gives director Uruphong Raksasad the chance to dwell on gorgeous panoramas of green fields and rice paddies, delivering a vision of desperate lives suffused with natural beauty. Throughout the film, nature crowds in: Bird calls, wind, and the rush of water overwhelm the audio mix. The human gatherings—political rallies, huddles inside rudimentary shelters—seem tiny against the hugeness of the countryside, and are chiefly concerned with the burden of Thailand's caste system. The film patiently shows the lives of these farmers: The slow processes of sifting grains, washing animals, and wading through rice paddies lets us inside the world of the actors, who are mostly non-professionals more or less recreating their lives on camera in ways that never feel intrusive.
If you like food movies, you'll like this because: The film fills its scenes of eating with intense passion. Food is the core business around which all effort revolves, and eating is the too infrequent manifestation of success.

Oxhide II: April 18, 4:00 p.m, Frederic March Play Circle
Synopsis: Oxhide II shows us that Chinese dumplings take a very long time to make. Liu Jiayin both directs and stars in this film with her actual parents, and together they make dumplings and occasionally express concern over the father’s struggling handbag business. Everything happens in real-time—more than two hours to prepare, cook, and consume dumplings. The stationary camera set at table-level rotates through a set of fixed angles, which leads to long shots of headless torsos unless the characters bend over.
How it fits: The word “authentic” gets thrown around a lot in foodie circles, and this is authentic food at its best: Every ingredient is painstakingly assembled by hand. Jiayin's parents even gently mock her for her clumsy attempts to prepare some ingredients the old-fashioned way—a clear sign to the mother that the times they are a-changin’. But even amid the tension, the family unites via the practice of making and consuming food together, and the dumplings provide a connection between generations.
If you like food movies, you’ll like this because: In the right hands, food preparation can be high art. Watching the mother and father deftly prepare the dumplings into perfectly crimped packages is unexpectedly consuming and lyrical.