Nyon Film Festival 2009

Jared Bloch

Visions du Réel Film Festival

Peter Kerekes’ film, “Cooking History,” opens with an elderly German baker and World War II veteran proclaiming, “German bread is the best in the world.”

The film then cuts to the baker and three other war veterans trekking through the forest and singing battle hymns.

The “history” as it turns out, is a series of staged monologues by and interviews with army veterans of various nationalities, relating their experiences through the lens of food and eating. The characters Kerekes has selected range from the German baker in the first scene, to a cook from the Soviet Army who offers her opinion that “bread is bread, regardless of nationality,” to an active duty Croatian officer who proclaims he would only cook with a Serbian “over my dead body.”

Writer and Director Peter Kerekes

In between, we are introduced to a French gourmand who spent part of the Algerian war in prison as a conscientious objector, a veteran paratrooper from the same conflict, a Hungarian sausage maker, two women who cooked for Serbian armed forces, and a Russian mushroom picker sent to quell the 1968 uprising in the Czech Republic.

The film uses bracingly graphic imagery such as the butchering of live animals and closeups of meat grinding, to illustrate the morbidity of the subject matter, while portraying the mundane reality of soldiers carrying out often nonsensical orders.

The formulations might seem forced in the hands of another storyteller, but writer and director Kerekes leavens the enterprise throughout using theatrical staging of individuals and dramatic musical accompaniment.

Festival Audience

Kerekes’ ability to draw out the humor inherent in these otherwise dark accounts shines throughout the film, as when we listen to a personal aide and taster for General Tito describing a cook off between the Tito and Tudjman regimes. The two camps were involved in a series of dialogues on national sovreignity, each ending in banquets with increasingly nationalistic themed menus foisted on their counterparts; the cook off ended in the separation of the respective republics.

Each of the vignettes is punctuated by screen text providing recipes ranging from ingredients for sustaining an army platoon, to one for poisoning 300 SS Officers.

Fittingly, the epilogue to this finely balanced movie transcends the narrative of conflict between warring parties, and points to the more general relationship between food and survival itself. In the final and maybe most tender vignette, a cooking instructor for the German Navy describes his near miraculous survival of the sinking of a Submarine in the North Sea. As the instructor recounts this experience for the camera, he prepares pork chops on a makeshift grill set in a rapidly filling tidal bay.  Waist deep in surf, and watching his pork chops float away, he proclaims, “There is no recipe against fear, everyone has to deal with it in their own way.”

Further information on the film: Visions du Réel Film Festival

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