» Lunch time screenings: No fighting at the dinner table

No fighting at the dinner table looks to filmic depictions of the humble family meal where, through food and taste, gender and generational dynamics are fought and defended, conceptions of national identity disrupted, and the familial discourse shifted away from concrete and predetermined family entities towards a family always in the making. Expanding on In Stranger Lands: Cocoa’s Journeys to Asia and its explorations of taste memories, this four-week screening program – a collaboration between Nguyen Art Foundation and Ném Space, curated by Thái Hà – uncovers how the act of sharing food reveals entangled webs of social and power relations, but also creates complicit cultural knowledge between those present at the table.

Across Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam via France, the family table in cinema is comforting; is dreaded; is tense. In the sumptuous classic Eat Drink Man Woman (dir. Ang Lee, 1994), over banquet-like spreads every Sunday, a father and his three daughters take turns to reveal unexpected news that, one by one, removes them from the unit. As father and daughters struggle to reconcile their personal desires with family unity, from the round table spirals Taiwan’s larger contention with the disintegration and rebuilding of its community as it globalizes its economy during the 1990s1. The shorts Ông Ngoại and Malabar (dir. Maximilan Badier-Rosenthal, 2017 and 2020) see two grandfathers distribute small gifts of food as gestures of much greater care – a way to find and hold onto connection in the Parisian metropolis, where older people fight loneliness as the intergenerational household breaks down. Meanwhile, Shoplifters (dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2018) details the bitter underbelly of Japanese society, where its poorest members lean on one another over cheap meals of curry ramen and korokke, and questions whether blood is always thicker than the socio-economic forces that led them to cobble together their makeshift family. Closing with Little Forest (dir. Yim Soon-rye, 2018) and its gentle poetry and recipe book pacing, as a daughter searches for her mother she cooks her way through the seasons, and in the process regrounds herself in the land that nurtures her.

For the titles in this program, the family table is the site of societal transition. In conjunction with the screenings, No fighting at the dinner table invites viewers to reflect on the impact of such shifts over a series of shared lunches, co-hosted Hieu and Phu of Ném Space. Phu, the program’s resident chef, is inspired by the recipes and flavors of her family’s hometown – Bac Giang. Eating together in a common space, the program extends the films’ gestures of care to then craft new understandings of being individuals within families within imposed and chosen social structures.

Screening schedule:

‎*With special thanks to the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute, Don Quichotte Films, and Nouvelle Toile Productions

The screenings are part of a series of public and education programs in association with In Stranger Lands: Cocoa’s Journeys to Asia, an exhibition organized by Nguyen Art Foundation.