VIFF 2009 | Cooking History at Schema : more than ethnic

VIFF 2009 | Cooking History

Cooking History
Czech Republic/Austria/Slovakia, 2009, 88min
DIR: Peter Kerekes

Winner, Special Jury Award, Hot Docs 2009

Peter Kerekes' inventive new documentary is ostensibly about military chefs. Spanning most of the twentieth century and numerous European countries, it becomes clear early on that Cooking History intends to provide a lens through which to view conflicts of the twentieth century. The film also gives a clear-eyed meditation on war, complete with heavy-handed (but amusing) animal slaughter and sausage-making analogies. Not unlike our endless pursuit of food, it seems that no matter how much we fight, there's always another war around the corner waiting to start. The film begins and ends in modern-day Chechnya, where years of conflict between Chechen nationalism and Russian imperialism have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths on both sides. But interviews with surviving bakers, cooks and tasters of wars going back to WWII demonstrate that history has a way of repeating even its most brutal mistakes, that war may be an intractable part of civilization.

Kerekes has a tendency to stage his interviews in sometimes jarringly entertaining scenes (a former submarine chef literally becomes submerged in water, cooking his signature dish on a portal grill, during his interview), but that does nothing to detract from the quietly devasting effect of Cooking History. Improbably, Kerekes' interviews are incredibly intimate and frank. The film's power lies not in its cleverness but in the unwavering humanity of its subjects. Even a man who confesses to denying a dying girl's wish to taste sugar gets to tell his story with dignity. Maybe there's hope for us yet.

Schema Magazine's coverage of VIFF 2009 is sponsored by the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival