It’s bad manners to play with your food, but maybe it’s acceptable to watch your food. Or, at least, to watch films about food. Colorado’s Flatirons Food Film Festival brings cuisine, movies, and social issues together for a one-week virtual film festival, beginning Thursday, Jan. 28.
The schedule for the festival includes feature narrative films, documentaries, short films, panel discussions, a trivia night, and an opening night performance by Opera On Tap. Panels will cover subjects like food waste and the pandemic’s impact on restaurants.
Usually, the festival is an in-person event that draws more than a 1,000 people to screenings and events in Boulder, Colorado, but the pandemic has made that kind of schedule impossible. “We’ve been doing virtual programs since April,” says Julia Joun, festival founder and director. “We started a series called Dinner and a Movie, and it was an immersive experience. ... We’d partner with restaurants who would offer dinner related to the movie.”
The program proved successful enough that it’s been integrated into the full festival schedule.
The event kicks off with the Gerard Depardieu film Vatel (2000). The actor plays a chef in France during the reign of King Louis XIV. Filmmakers “captured the whole spirit of what banqueting was like. It was a multimedia event in the 17th century with fireworks, pageants, and big stage sets,” says Ken Albala, a food historian and host of Audible’s Food: A Cultural Culinary History. Albala will lead a discussion after the screening.
In selecting the score for Vatel, though, famed film composer Ennio Morricone took some liberties. “He chose music from a later period,” says Eve Orenstein, director of the Colorado Chapter of Opera on Tap. “It wouldn’t have been the same time as this beautiful French opera from about 50 years later. The film’s score includes [ Jean-Phillipe] Rameau and [George Frideric] Handel for the fireworks scene. Opera was a huge part of the court of Louis XIV, who was a big opera fan.” The Sun King actually helped found the tradition of French opera by hiring Jean-Baptiste Lully, often regarded as the creator of the French operatic style. Member of Colorado’s Opera on Tap will open the festival by performing selections from Lully’s operas.
Other highlights include director Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019), an Academy Award hopeful, and Funke (2018), a documentary that follows master pasta maker Evan Funke. First Cow will be followed by a discussion featuring Albala. “When Lewis and Clark went across the continent, they brought a lot of provisions with them, [but] they ran out very quickly. They ended up eating the dogs,” Albala says. “They had to eat the food they found along the way, like camas roots and things like that. I’m guessing that by the time other settlers reached Oregon, they too would have had to subsist on the food that the Native Americans did because there wasn’t anything else to eat. They planted crops, like wheat, as quickly as they could. The arrival of the first cow is what this film is about.”
At 8 p.m. on Feb. 1, Sara Brito, president of the Good Food Media Network, will mediate a panel on restaurants during the pandemic that will include Bobby Stuckey of Frasca Food and Wine and Caroline Glover of Annette. Among other things, they’ll discuss the fate of those involved in restaurants. “As 2020 was nearing an end, even after the election, it became clear to me that the federal government was not going to provide restaurant-specific relief,” Brito says. “The very people who feed us, [like] farmworkers, food service workers, restaurant workers — the people on the front lines of 2020, serving us throughout the pandemic — were at risk of being hungry and food insecure in the cold winter months ahead.”
One way to help might be to replicate the dinner and a movie experience at home. Joun suggests that viewers outside out of Colorado can mix and match their own movie nights with local restaurants. For Vatel, for instance, French food would be a match. “People could do this everywhere,” she says.
Miller thinks that the pandemic, which has stranded many at home, could be an opportunity to be creative with to-go orders. “I tell people that restaurants need the help right now. So, if you have the resources, it’s a great time to explore the different cuisines of your city,” he says.
Or, Albala says, “Open up some old cookbooks and cook from them. People are generally discouraged because there aren’t cooking times and things like that, but if you cook intuitively it’s really very easy to do. The vast majority of recipes don’t need measurements at all.”
All screenings and panels are available live but will also be recorded and made available on demand afterward. Some programs, including a trivia night and puppet-making course for children, are offered free of charge. All other events are available from $22 for two tickets to $100 for all-festival passes. To watch the films, check the schedule, and buy passes, go to flatironsfoodfilmfest.org. ◀
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