EXCLUSIVE – From May 7-11, Bologna’s Lumière and Arlecchino cinemas will be the venues for Slow Food on Film, the international festival of cinema and food, promoted by Slow Food and the Cineteca di Bologna, featuring over 60 screenings of films, shorts, documentaries and TV series aimed at promoting a new critical awareness of food culture.
The focus of the festival this year is the idea of gastronomic memory as a common heritage deserving of protection and the need to preserve the tastes that define our identity. Hence a reassessment of peasant civilization and a critique of contemporary society and its standardized industrial food system.
Today at 4pm, the Cinema Lumière will host the opening ceremony in which welcoming speeches by Slow Food international president Carlo Petrini, Italian comedienne Luciana Littizzetto, US cook and Slow Food international vice-prsident Alice Waters and the mayor of Bologna, Sergio Cofferati, will be followed by a screening of Storie di terra e di Rezdore, a documentary about small-scale farming the Italian region of Emilia.
Later in the evening, the first of the competing shorts and documentaries will be screened at the Cinema Lumière (from 7.45pm in the Sala Officinema/Mastroianni and from 8.15pm in the Sala Scorsese), after which all eyes will be on McLibel – The postman and the gardner who took on McDonald’s—and won, a documentary about a lengthy UK legal battle against McDonalds.
To end the opening evening, visitors will have the chance to taste perfect antidote to fast food: la Polpetta del Presidio, stewed meatballs made from the Slow Food Presidium White Modenese Beef.
For the duration of the festival, the courtyard of the Lumière cinema will be transformed by the Gli Amici di Babette association into a pleasant refreshments area and the space in front will be occupied by a farmers’ market.
To find out more
Victoria Blackshaw
[email protected]