Food Movies from the Berlinale Film Festival 2017

Having reached its 67th edition, last month the Berlinale film festival hosted Culinary Cinema, an event dedicated to food. For almost one week, from 12 to 17 February, full-length films and starred chefs took turns to animate evenings in which food played the leading role.

Eneko Atxa, Alexander Koppe, Tim Raue, Sebastian Frank and Christian Lohse were the five chefs who cooked and served dinners at the Gropius Mirror Restaurant inspired by the films being shown. “Passion Food” was the motto of this eleventh edition which spotlighted the relationship between food and culture. “Undoubtedly, passion – and its mastery – is a driving force behind the work of cooks and filmmakers, and simultaneously one of its themes,” states Dieter Kosslick, director of the Festival.

The programme was opened by the Spanish documentary Soul by José Antonio Blanco and Ángel Parra centred on three Michelin-starred chef Eneko Atxa and on his cuisine at the Azurmendi, as opposed to the traditional vision of Japanese chef Jiro Ono.

It was actually Eneko Atxa who personally created the menu which followed the film projection dedicated to his work. Numerous films and documentaries provided evening entertainment at the Culinary Cinema event, like the two episodes extracted from the third season of Chef’s Table, dedicated to chef and Buddhist nun Jeon Kwane and the two-starred chef Tim Raue, who then orchestrated and produced one of the dinners at the Gropius Mirror. The eleventh edition drew to a close with Theater of Life, a documentary film on the Refettorio Ambrosiano based on an idea by Massimo Bottura to mark the Expo Milano 2015 event and aimed at cooking and reprocessing surplus food for the needy and homeless. Subsequently, other chefs of worldwide fame supported the project, comprising Mauro Colagreco, Virgilio Martinez, Alain Ducasse and Daniel Humm.