THE STORY BEHIND THE FILM

Laura: I've been thinking about the food system for most of my life. One of my grandmothers was a subsistence farmer and the other one ran a wholesale grocery business, so knowing how food gets to the people who eat it has always been a big part of how I see the world. My parents were both excellent cooks, as were many of my relatives and, since I grew up in the American South in the middle of the last century, I saw what happens to regional cuisine when processed foods enter the market. (Potato chips get crumbled on top of casseroles, for one thing.) I organize a lot of my time around growing and cooking food and teaching anyone who will listen to me about either.

Also, I've inherited a lot of fancy plates and so on from my relatives. All that dishware both reminds me that I have privileges that I did absolutely nothing to deserve, and that having access to beauty is still important to me. Those dishes are a source of conflict in the way I try to understand my responsibilities to the past, the present, and the future. I am most interested in how to live in the present.

Kevin: Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” which is transferable to “No surprise for the filmmaker, no surprise for the viewer”— so the notion of discovery and ‘film as event’ (as opposed to telling a narrative or retelling a narrative) needs to be central to my art. 

My interest in this film comes from an abstract place. Text is important to me, so we decided to incorporate etymological intersexuality of words, by way of intertitles, that relate to things on the table or abstract concepts. Yes, the words themselves create a subtext. Since we decided to not have faces in the film, this gave license to my imagination to deviate and sometimes returned with forage. Since there is no dialogue in this film there is more pressure on the script itself, the action and how the action is described. Laura, a dancer, was great at envisioning the physical choreography, which fired-up my imagination. We compliment each other and this is certainly a part of how I became interested in this film.