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.
Nyon Film Festival 2009
Jared Bloch
The sound of dogs barking throughout sets the tone for this bleak film by Mathias Montavon and Marianne Thivillier. A bombed out or otherwise disintegrated Georgian infrastructure in a nameless city, serves as backdrop for the poetic text provided by Thivillier via a narrative voice.
Amazingly, according to Thivillier, the text was largely the product of spontaneous musings on the themes of war and destruction and was not written specifically as a counterpart to the imagery in the film, which is at least as bleak as the text. The dog howls add perfectly to the narrative depicting human regression to a feral state.