An evening of experimental short films exploring food.
Food on Film serves up a series of experimental short films that explore food not merely as something that nourishes us, but as a provocation, a material and an element within the filmmaking process itself.
Probing the emotions associated with food and eating, this programme examines mealtimes as moments of connection as well as the politics of food products and consumption.
Beyond this, a number of selected works also make room at the table for pleasure, embracing food’s capacity for mess, play and self-expression.
Tuck in.
Programme:
Baked Goods for Norman
Roger D. Wilson, 2015, Canada, 4’00, 16mm
Baked Goods For Norman was created to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of pioneering Canadian experimental filmmaker Norman McLaren. The film’s unique colours and textures were created through the process of soaking the film in a variety of concoctions and then baking it in the oven.
Field
Dan Browne, 2016, Canada, 2’05, 16mm
Shot over a single afternoon picking fruit at an orchard, Field explores the orchard as a site of family connection. Slow-motion silent sequences invite the viewer to savour these small, precious moments, while hand-developed and scratched footage evokes the tactile, sensory experience of picking fruit from the trees on a summer’s day.
Chocolate
Megan Hattie, 2019, USA, 3’16, Super 8
Shot at Raaka’s chocolate-making facilities in Red Hook, Brooklyn, this short documentary weaves footage of the chocolate-making process with voices of women discussing their relationship to chocolate. Their accounts explore chocolate’s indulgent qualities and its role as a remedy in times of need, while also raising the question of whether the pleasure derived from eating chocolate is one that is gendered.
Soup
Meghann Artes, 2005, USA, 5’08, 16mm
Alphabet soup anyone? This film features all 26 letters, each with its own animation style and distinct comedic music. A variety of materials are used, including cake decoration, butter, ground beef, popcorn and more.
Anthology for Fruits and Vegetables
Dawn George, 2019, Canada, 14’58, 16mm
Footage of 26 fruits and vegetables is developed and tinted using eco-developing and eco-reversal hand-processing techniques, demonstrating the potential of plant-based products as an alternative to the harsh chemicals typically used in film development. Colours drawn from the produce itself ripple across the screen, accompanied by a playful sound design, offering a rather unconventional way to get your five a day.
Regressive Squirty Sauce Film (16mm film leader squirted and dripped with chocolate sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise & apple juice)
Jennifer West, 2007, USA, 3’36, 16mm film leader transferred to digital video
Regressive Squirty Sauce Film sees artist Jennifer West experiment with the materiality of the film itself, directly engaging with it by dripping food onto a clear 16mm film leader. Riffing on artist Paul McCarthy’s signature use of chocolate sauce, West turns to a wider range of condiments and sauces that deliberately evoke bodily fluids. As curator and writer Michael Ned Holte suggests, the work reflects West’s interest in ideas surrounding gender, particularly the behaviours and interests deemed by society as acceptable for women.
Food Fight
Thorsten Fleisch, 2010, Germany, 1’56, Super 8
Food Fight captures the spirit and energy of Berlin’s annual public food fight, the Gemüseschlacht, which ran from 1998 until its cancellation in 2022 amid concerns over mess, waste and organisation. Shot during the 2010 edition of the event, the film serves as a document of a short-lived Berlin tradition.
Overeating
Cécile Fontaine, 1984, France, 3’00, 16mm
Built from an anonymous found film, this détournement shows a man eating chicken gluttonously, his image looped and crumpled in time with the movement of his jaws. The result produces a hypnotic, stuttering rhythm that turns the act of eating into something closer to abstraction.
Eating at YT’s
Tong Yin, 2024, UK, 1’32, 16mm
This 16mm stop-motion film grew out of a knitting project made during the filmmaker’s placement year, living independently in a gentrified part of East London. As home cooking and dinner parties with friends became central to this new chapter, so did an awareness of their own role in the area’s gentrification. The film sits in the tension between personal growth and unconscious complicity.
Eating with YT
Tong Yin, 2025, UK, 2’20, 16mm
Tong Yin’s follow-up to Eating at YT’s is inspired by two memorable dates at gastro pubs in East London, where dining and dating became a way to reflect on gentrification, identity and desire. Text messages, pub interiors and shared meals fed into a body of textile research, translated into a set of conceptual knitted tableware. The film stages this tableware within an imagined dating scenario, showing how a gentrified environment can quietly shape lifestyle and self-image.
Nutrition Fugue
Péter Lichter, 2018, Hungary, 4’40, 35mm
Közért, meaning “for the public,” was a government-owned chain of stores in communist-era Hungary (1948 to 1989). The word remains in use in Hungarian today. This film by Péter Lichter is made from 35mm celluloid raw footage of a Közért advertisement, the strips buried in soil, left to rot with food and cut into pieces before being further reworked in the editing room. The result turns a once mundane advertisement into a frenetic, disorienting and vividly colourful experience of pure cinema.
Oudenk (Let’s Eat)
Minna Abalian, 2025, USA, 3’54, mixed media video
Oudenk (Let’s Eat) began as an animated dictionary of traditional Armenian food before evolving into a mixed-media experimental documentary exploring food as a thread connecting family and cultural heritage across generations. Made by the filmmaker in the wake of her grandfather’s death, the film draws on home videos and family photographs to trace how food carries memory, grief and love within one family’s Armenian identity.
Note: digital versions of the above films will be shown instead of the original analogue copies.
