Film festival offers movie-related food and drink tasting

That people from São Paulo love to eat, no one doubts. But, until next week, the residents of the most gastronomic city in the country will be able to take a long immersion in their favorite subject in an unprecedented way: in the cinema.

From Wednesday (5) to October 12, São Paulo hosts the first edition of the SP Food Film Festival. With 48 films from 15 countries, the hybrid and free programming, part in person and part online, includes 17 fiction films and 31 documentaries, between old productions that we love to review and other brand new ones.

All works of fiction will be shown in face-to-face sessions, divided between the Espaço Itaú de Cinema rooms, on Rua Augusta, and the Cinemateca Brasileira, on Vila Clementino. Just arrive an hour earlier to get your ticket, which will entitle you to taste, at the end of the film, the drink or dish related to the story.

There will be boeuf bourguignon after “Julie & Julia” (United States, 2009), strawberries with whipped cream after “Vatel – A Banquet for the King” (France, United Kingdom and Belgium, 2000) and pasta à putanesca at the end of “Estômago” (Brazil, 2007).

Those who watch “Tampopo – Brutes Also Eat Spaghetti” (Japan, 1985) will eat ramen at the end of the session, while those who go to “Fried Green Tomatoes” (USA, 1991) will try… fried green tomatoes. To toast “Sideways: Between Ones and Others” (USA, 2004), glasses of wine will be served after the film.

For children who watch the animation “Ratatouille” (United States, 2007), the pasta tasting is accompanied by a stop motion workshop.

The purpose of the event, however, is not just to worship good food. October is Food Month, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the curatorship of the films aims to draw attention to topics related to culture, the environment and food insecurity.

“At a time when there is so much talk about hunger, we need to raise these important discussions. Five documentaries shown online will be followed by debates on agriculture and hunger, gender in the kitchen, ancestral food, waste, conscious consumption and solidarity economy”, points out André Henrique Graziano , who signs with Daniela Guariba the creation of the festival.

While fiction entertains and whets the appetite, documentaries represent an opportunity to get to know the food traditions of deep Brazil and their close relationship with the food that arrives on our plate — and even observe famous chefs in very different situations from the usual ones.

The documentary “Claude: Além da Cozinha”, directed by Ricardo Pompeu, follows a vacation trip by French chef Claude Troisgros. By motorcycle, he travels to remote places in four states in the Northeast, along the São Francisco River. He eats and cooks in the houses while sharing humorous snippets of his trajectory.

The images were captured over 15 days by a motorcycle cameraman, who accompanied him for 2147 kilometers. They show Claude exchanging his helmet for a cangaceiro hat, his motorcycle for a horse and preparing goat meat in wine.

“The deal was not to have much production. A lot of things happened in a real, improvised way”, the chef told Folha.

André Mifano, chef at Donna restaurant and presenter of the program “Sabor em Jogo” (GNT), also left the kitchen to record a documentary trip. “In Search of Essence in the Kitchen”, directed by André Barmak, follows the season he spent in Enseada da Baleia, a caiçara community on Ilha do Cardoso, south coast of São Paulo.

Over the course of two months, in 2019, Mifano had the chance to participate in seine fishing, cut cane to prepare rapadura and debone a pig to make meat in a can. “I like to have contact with the world of food that is not the world of gastronomy. I came back more humble, admiring these people even more”, says the chef.

Produced in 2014, the documentary “Agricultura Size Família”, by Silvio Tendler, couldn’t be more current – eight years ago, the filmmaker already defended that agribusiness is not more important than family farming to guarantee Brazilian food security.

“We continue to mistakenly think that the agro produces food in Brazil. I am not prejudiced, the two movements must coexist, but the agro produces on a high scale for export. Who puts food on our table is the small farmer.”

Much more recent, the documentary “Agricultura Guarani”, by Fellipe Abreu and Patrícia Moll, was produced in 2022 and tells the story of the indigenous people of the Guarani ethnicity. In the extreme south of the city of São Paulo, on the fringes of the largest Brazilian metropolis, they managed to recover land degraded by the monoculture of eucalyptus through the cultivation of more than 200 varieties of vegetables.

From the same duo, “Dois Riachões: Cacau e Liberdade” shows how residents of the settlement in southern Bahia escaped slavery-like labor and launched their own brand of chocolate.

As of 2021, the short has already won nine awards at festivals in Brazil, Italy and Argentina.

The social theme also serves as a backdrop for the documentary “A Grande Ceia Quilombola” (Brazil, 2017), by Ana Stela Cunha and Rodrigo Sena.

After living for almost two years in Quilombo de Damásio, in Maranhão, Ana Stela was scared when industrialized foods began to threaten the traditions of the quilombo.

“They had memories of foods they no longer ate, and things they no longer grew, because whiteness imposed itself on several occasions throughout the quilombo’s history,” he says.

“Once, Italian priests encouraged the planting of eggplants as a way of earning income, but in the end the quilombolas did not know what to do with so much eggplant. It was a food that meant nothing to them. Food has to involve affection and memory.”