Food And Film: A Retrospective

Like every college course, this class has had it’s ups and downs. There were some things I enjoyed, and some things that were a bit more challenging. Obviously, my favorite part of this class was watching the films. There were a few that I knew, like The Hundred Foot Journey, some that were new to me but I thoroughly enjoyed, like Mostly Martha, and Big Night, and some that missed the mark for me, like Woman On Top and Like Water For Chocolate.

Through watching these different films, I learned a lot about different film themes that I had never heard of before, like the prevalence of magical realism in Mexican/Latin-American film, and the concept of “the falcon” of a film, which makes it stand out from other films. On top of all of that, I had never even considered “Food Film” as a film subgenre before. In the films we watched, the food itself became its own character of the story.

The film viewing combined with the assigned readings allowed me to improve my ability to analyse film themes and the significance that food can hold in a story. While the readings did take some time and focus that I didn’t always have, it was always worth it to have a deeper understanding of the films we studied, and to be able to participate in the group discussions we had in class. I did find the writing assignments particularly challenging, as writing is not a particular skill of mine, but it was good practice to grow my writing abilities in general.

Overall, I’m very glad I took this class, even though there were challenges, and despite the fact that world events changed the direction of the course implementation. But at the end of the day, this was a class where I was able to learn about things that interest me, the two main things that I’m passionate about: food and film.

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