The Art of Eating- The Life of M.F.K. Fisher will have its East Bay Premieres Monday, Oct.16 at Grand Lake, Oakland at 4 p.m. and 7:10 p.m. Following the screenings will be a conversation with director Greg Bezat and special guests.
Buy tickets HERE
The film will also be shown Wednesday, Oct. 18 at the Elmwood Theatre in Berkeley at 4 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Following the screenings will be a conversation with director Greg Bezat and special guests including Garlic King L.John Harris at the 6:30 show.
Buy tickets HERE
Wednesday, Nov. 1 in Alameda (times to be determined). Following the screenings will be a conversation with director Greg Bezat and special guests. A special dinner at the Cinema Grill.
Buy tickets HERE
Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher elevated cooking from a domestic chore to a critical study of what it means to be human. She was called the “Poet of the Appetite.” Described by W.H. Auden as “the best prose writer in America,” Fisher helped introduce continental sensibilities to America’s burgeoning culinary world. Fisher wrote over thirty books (“An Alphabet for Gourmets”, “How to Eat a Wolf”, “The Gastronomical Me”, “Consider the Oyster”) and hundreds of articles for The New Yorker, Gourmet, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and many others.
Perhaps more importantly, she forever transformed the 1950s-era background figure of a woman in the kitchen into a living, breathing subject — with dazzling ideas, passionate emotions, and insatiable appetites.
“Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.”
The film covers her considerable time learning to cook in France, Hollywood, Napa, Sonoma, and some surprise destinations. Her sensual writing about food and wine becomes the film’s narration as we learn about Fisher’s passion for fresh food while warning about the industrialization of agriculture, frozen and fast foods; the challenges of raising two daughters as a single mother; unwittingly becoming an icon for the women’s movement; starting public wine-tastings in the Napa Valley, and co-founding the Napa Valley Wine Library.
The film weaves rediscovered archival interviews, images and footage with new commentary from chefs Alice Waters (Chez Panisse), Jacques Pepin, Katina and Kyle Connaughton (Single Thread), Tanya Holland (Brown Sugar Kitchen), L. John Harris, Gayle and John Clark (Foreign Cinema), John Ash, Dominica Rise-Cisneros (Bombera); Kennedy Freide Golden (Fisher’s daughter); writers Annie Lamott and Ruth Reichl; Celia Sack (Omnivore Books), Jack Shoemaker (Fisher’s Northpoint and Counterpoint Press publisher), Jerry DiVecchio (Sunset Magazine), Marsha Moran (personal assistant,) and others.