Short film looks at ‘beautiful correlation’ between food and music
Vicki Van Chau received good advice when she was looking for a subject for her second film: do what you love.
“Well, I love food and I love the culture that I was raised up in,” she says, which led her to Pulled Strings, a short film capturing Chau’s chef uncle Ken and his efforts to pass on the tradition of hand-pulling noodles to his daughter, all set to a soundtrack of traditional Chinese music.
“I felt it was a really beautiful correlation between the strands of the noodles and the strings of the instruments and I really wanted to create a film to capture that,” Chau says.
The film is a “combination of past lives” for Chau, who played in the Calgary Chinese Orchestra when she was younger. Meanwhile, Ken worked the kitchen of Fire Kirin, a restaurant off Macleod Trail in the city’s southeast.
“He’s been pulling noodles I don’t even know how long, over 10 years. Passing down this tradition to his daughter was something that he really wanted to do. Capturing that relationship and that dynamic between the two of them in the film is what I really wanted to do,” Chau says.
The soundtrack, selected by the Calgary Chinese Orchestra’s artistic director Jeffrey Chao, is an old folksong, Spring is Coming.
“It had a really nice flow. I think Chinese music is really great,” says Chau. “You have this beginning, this climactic turn in the middle and then ending on a really beautiful note. I liked the idea that I could match my story to the song. A lot of the shots I was taking was inspired by the song.”
The Calgary premiere on Nov. 4 features a performance by the Calgary Chinese Orchestra and the Harmony Guzheng Ensemble, as well as a pulled noodle demonstration by Ken and chefs from Calan Beef Noodle, Calgary’s only hand-pulled noodle restaurant.
“Because it’s a food film, I found a lot of people afterwards were really interested in trying the noodles,” she says.
Audience members will sample the noodles in a savoury sauce made by Ken.
Hand-pulling noodles is difficult and time-consuming; Chau admits to having never tried it.
“It’s a simple process, it just takes a lot of skill to get it to where you want,” says Chau. “You’re kneading it and you’re twisting it and you have to get a certain consistency in the dough to be able to pull it without breaking.”
The results are worth it. “The texture of hand-pulled noodles is so much different than machine-made because the process creates a lot of air in the noodles, so then when you eat it it’s a lot more chewy and it has this really nice texture and bounce to the noodles you wouldn’t get with a machine,” Chau says.