Beloved New York City–based chef Natasha Pickowicz joins Metrograph to present a carte-blanche selection of some of her favorite films about communal eating, with a special tie-in menu at the Metrograph Commissary extending the beautiful union of cinema and food.
“Tampopo and Eat Drink Man Woman: is there a pair of films that more rapturously depicts the earthly pleasures of food? My cookbook, Everyone Hot Pot, intertwines the narrative power of hot pot with its unique power to build and sustain human connection and intimacy. At the table, hot pot ingredients—frilly greens, wobbly bean curd, curls of translucent lamb—form the connective tissue from one person to the next; our corporeal forms, bellies bulging and brows shimmering with sweat, become one with the communal broth, climaxing into a sort of heavenly transcendence. Tampopo explores this dynamic of consumption and obsession with absurdist humor and erotic fixation; Eat Drink Man Woman feels more tender, more breezy, while also zeroing in on the unique ways that rigid cultural tradition and individual obsession can define a family and a home through generations. Hot pot both lifts you out of your body and grounds you to earth and its pleasures; the best films play out this contradiction, too. Culinary ritual and technique become a conduit to access and understand our surroundings, which is how great film makes me feel—watching the lavish sequences of feasts play out on the screen, I dissolve into a kind of soupy, celluloid broth.” —Series curator Natasha Pickowicz, author of Everyone Hot Pot and More Than Cake
