Traders Wall Street workers film showing tonight (more info see sidebar)
Supermom Monday 27 16:00 Salle de la Colombiere
Cooking History Monday 27 14:00 Salle Communale and Wednesday 20:00 Capitole 2 Fellini
Supermom
Three candidates from Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Indiana in preparation for the national final round of “Young Mother of the Year”. Candidates must be “married to a man, belong to a religious community and demonstrate a heightened commitment to her children”. Hillary Clinton was once Super Mother of Arkansas.
Cooking History is a portrait of military cooks from different countries in Europe, all of them who have served in armies during different wars in the 20th century; whether this is a German cook or Jewish baker in the Second World war, a French chef fighting in Algeria, or a Russian soldier fighting in Chechyna having only porridge to eat “the meat had been stolen back in Russia”. There are many stories here, all told through their recollections, anecdotes and recipes.
These stories often are harrowing, sometimes amusing. The personal chef of Tito recalls how after his leader’s demise (showing us the book that recorded Tito’s last meal ) how “the nationalist games began” when the new leaders were in negotiations and at lunch together.
The first lunch in Split was Dalmatian ham with olives and Croatian village pasta, dishes he says “they knew Serbs would not normally eat”. For the second lunch “the Serbs struck back” when Milosevic served a typical lunch of sour curds and Serbian polenta. He carries on in this vein, a light relief to the other stories.
The say that an army marches on its stomach and you need a strong one to view this film as there is old film footage of of war atrocities. There are also present day metaphoric scenes of animals and chicken being slaughtered. Director Peter Kerekes obviously marched his film crew far to make this documentary there are many case studies across Europe, accompanied with renactment scenes of war survivors’ stories.
The ironic recipes at the end of each person’s story “Russian Blini Pancakes for 11 million fallen Russian soldiers”, “Poisoned bread for captured S.S men”, “Pickled mushrooms for Soviet Occupiers ” add a black humoured touch. At 88 minutes it is long, but the director has cooked up a good film here, it is not for the squeamish, but it has all the right ingredients to make the film a success.