By Gary Meyer
For over a year few of us could go to a theater and enjoy movies the way they were meant to be seen. Audiences are slowly feeling comfortable returning as theaters have made a host of improvements to protect us and to my knowledge no new cases of Covid have been tracked to a cinema.
If you love them movies I hope that you will enjoy this entire article.
By C.J. Hirschfield
This meme regarding the controversial teaching of critical race theory in schools showed up in my Facebook feed this week: “If black and brown children are old enough to experience racism, white children are old enough to learn about it.”
By C.J. Hirschfield
On the day of this writing, 13,464 trays of strawberries were harvested in California, the state that produces 83 percent of the strawberries grown in the U.S. Who picks them? Kids as young as 12.
Poster by Maribel Martinez and Yen Tan
By John Bengston
There was hidden interplay between movies filmed in Hollywood and in San Francisco. Buster Keaton filmed scenes adjacent to several San Francisco landmarks, but in each case before they were actually built!
Hosted by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, I will be presenting “Silent Footsteps — From San Francisco to Hollywood” on Sunday, June 6 at 12:00 noon PDT, as part of its ongoing “Amazing Tales Online” series. The webinar is free (register HERE), but SFSFF welcomes new members and support.
BY C.J. Hirschfield
Writer Pearl S. Buck said that “To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.”
Two of the remarkable Bay Area women featured in the 10th annual Legacy Film Festival on Aging have seemingly done just that, and they’ve used their collective 200 (!) years of rich experience to arrive at a place where they now choose to enlighten and inspire.
By C.J. Hirschfield
When a 97 -year-old cookbook writer is called “the Mick Jagger of Mexican cuisine,” and the “Indiana Jones of food,” you know there’s gotta be a story there. There is, and a fascinating one at that. Directed by Elizabeth Carroll and screening at the Legacy Film Festival on Aging, the documentary Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy shares the life and work of an impatient, antisocial, cranky, profane, opinionated woman—whose life has been driven by her enthusiasm and curiosity about authentic Mexican regional cooking. She is an absolutely marvelous force of nature.
By Patricia Unterman
To tell you the truth, my dear film buffs, I’m a reader, not a moviegoer, and I only read fiction. If I watch a movie, it has to be in a movie house on a big screen and it has to promise a good story, ideally involving sex. Documentaries, for me, are a bore.
But despite all odds, I was mesmerized by a new documentary on the life of Diana Kennedy, the grouchy, 97-year-old writer of regional Mexican cookbooks, by first-time movie director Elizabeth Carroll. The film felt novelistic to me—nuanced, revealing, true. It picked me right up from a desk chair in front of my little computer screen and dropped me in the upland forests of Michoacán. Continue reading
by Gary Meyer
At 94, Diana Kennedy has a youthful spirit and energy. She lives on her own, completely off-the-grid in a solar-powered house that she designed in the mountains of Michoacán. She has shared a few favorite recipes with EatDrinkFilms readers.
Elizabeth Carroll’s feature documentary Nothing Fancy: Diana Kennedy is showing at the Legacy Film Festival, May 24-31, 2021, as part of a program on food, “Savory Traditions.”
To celebrate the film’s release there was a celebration and discussion between the filmmaker and several celebrated chefs who have learned from Kennedy.
The entire conversation can be watched anytime by clicking here.
By C.J. Hirschfield
In 2018, the film BLINDSPOTTING, co-written and starring Oakland natives and lifelong friends Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs, explored the intersection of race and class, set against a rapidly gentrifying Oakland. In addition to being critically acclaimed, the film was a love letter to the city in which it was set.
By Andrea Chase
SXSW 2021 went virtual. The group experience was missing, but the films were just as compelling. There were the headliners and award-winners that grabbed a lot of attention, and rightly so. Megan Park’s narrative THE FALLOUT won the narrative feature competition for laying out the impossibility of feeling secure in a world where violence can erupt at any time and any place, while Jeremy Workman’s LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD, winner of the feature documentary award, shares the virtual community surrounding the sheer pleasure of watching the dominos so carefully set up by its subject line topple with giddy, clacking rhythm.
