Kitchen Dreams
film — Poland — 2009

7.5
This is an early review. Probably you can not even imagine, how proud it sounds to a humble guy like me who is not a film critic. Certainly I am aware that "Kitchen Dreams" is unlikely to become a world wide hit and get recognition at next year`s Academy awards (not that I wouldn`t like it to, but that is more than unlikely to happen).
So you may ask me - how on earth did you get access to this film that will be first screened at the Warsaw film festival next month? The answer is clear - I received a DVD with this film from Krzysztof Uminiski, one of its creators. This summer we hosted Krzysztof via Couchsurfing for a couple of nights in our apartment in Riga and the next day after he left Riga he sent us a message that "Kitched Dreams" was accepted for the Warsaw festival, for which we can congratulate him again.
Anyway, I should probably get on with the description of this film. Let`s take a look at its annotation:
Every Sunday an old woman cooks dinner for her large family. The tastes and smells of exotic dishes take her on a journey to remote places she has never visited. The kitchen window opens on unknown lands: Italy, Greece, the Middle East, India…

Actually, there`s not much more that I can say on the contents of this film - and it is no wonder, considering the lenght of the film (7 minutes, if I remember correctly). The film mostly shows its heroine in her everyday life (and - preparing the Sunday lunch), in a voiceover she tells the viewer about the origin of the family dinner tradition in her family, her preparations for it and what it has brought into her own life and in the lives of her children and grandchildren.
Damn, is this difficult to write. One thing is to say that I liked the film, but a completely different - to make this sound convincing and not just a twitter-like entry. Otherwise there`s no point in writing a longer description at all. One thing that I liked about the film was the feeling of "being there" it gave me. That is - I really felt that I was invited to the dinner and I really felt that the woman was talking to me, thus it was a believable film which is very important to me - to feel that this is real. And that was good. Yes, there were moments when you felt the pressure from the camera upon the heroine - for example, you feel in her movements in the kitchen, that she senses the presence of the camera, but I guess it`s quite difficult for a camera not to affect the person being filmed, unless the person is unaware of filming, of course.
The ending was a bit of a surprise - I did expect it to end in another way, but probably it was only logical as this is a film about the woman and not about the dinner.
So - thank you, Krzysztof, for the film, we liked it!
2009-09-17
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