Dinner Time!

Les Merguez de Zeitoun by Jean-Louis Cap (France – 1987) © CANAL+

It’s the festival’s 40th anniversary, and it’s Dinner Time!

To celebrate the event, we have cooked up a delicious retrospective celebrating the art of gastronomy and the pleasure of dining in all its forms, from the most unpretentious to the most sophisticated, by way of a few curiosities.

It is an incredibly mouth-watering theme that lends itself to spoonerisms and other wordplay (we will avoid any turkeys). Above all, it is a theme that is representative of our idea of the festival: a moment of conviviality, sharing, and discovery.

We shouldn’t need to hand out Milk of Magnesia at the theater exit. Instead, we plan on building up your appetites so you can prolong the cinematic pleasure at one of the many good tables Clermont has to offer. And there will be many reasons to salivate!

There are a few televised nuggets from Canal+, with Eric Roux’s Journal du goût (1998), never aired but full of flavor, which describes among other things the subtleties of preparing octopus, in collusion with French rapper Akhenaton (IAM) or comedian Jules-Édouard Moustic (Groland celebrates 25 years). Even better than the Alien saga, Les Nuls take us back to 1987 aboard the Libérator, millions of burosse-years away from Earth with one heck of a crew – Zeitoun, Panty, Syntaxeror, the Mercenary, and Captain Lamar – as they set out on a very important mission: the discovery of merguez, the speciality of “Chef” Zeitoun (Bruno Carette).

Your curiosity will be piqued as we offer your taste buds more exotic flavors: O-Bento by Itabashi Motoyuki, with his meals served in the very popular compartmented boxes, or the samosas delicately prepared by British Indian director Nilesh Patel in A Love Supreme. Also, a somewhat offbeat exotism with an odd place to encounter the Michelin-starred chef of Septime, Bertrand Grébaut, who prepares a metropolitan beefsteak tomato in the entrails of Paris.

The choral film Table Manners is a gem in the filmography of Swiss director Ursula Meier, nominated for a César award in 2012 with her latest feature-length film, Sister.

You’ll also be licking your chops before a smorgasbord of animated films, full of color and not only meant for the young urchins: the inimitable voice of François Morel in Saint Feast Day, as well as Sunday Lunch, the animated French film that won all the awards from Clermont to the Césars, carried by the voice of Vincent Macaigne, a key figure in French theater who is also carving out a place in French cinema not only as an actor (he can also be found in the retrospective for comedians) but also as a director with his film Pour le réconfort which appeared in cinemas last year.

Also on the menu is the fascinating Next Floor by Canadian Denis Villeneuve, director of Blade Runner 2049. Eleven minutes of ravenous diners who frantically eat, shred, suck, swallow, and gobble cats, armadillos, rhinoceroses, and other magnificent atrocities until they end up disappearing into the abyss.

One final bit of advice from the squad of film selectors to those who plan to feast upon this three-star retrospective… plan on a snack! Watching Full English Breakfast at the end of the morning with empty stomachs and parched throats caused us more than conspicuous grumblings and unbridled salivating. The discovery of this “quasi-scientific” study by the BBC on the secrets of the traditional full English breakfast practically compelled us to devour a ton of bacon, sausages and eggs: as sustenance, of course, but also for the pleasure of sharing a magical moment at the dinner table together!