Director Svatek has top chefs staff a soup kitchen
Peter Svatek’s Theater of Life reveals the possibilities of a shared meal
The title couldn’t sound loftier, and the film does feature many of the world’s finest chefs and is set in the foodie hotbed of Milan. So one might logically conclude that the documentary Theater of Life would be an elitist and calorific view of the universe. Hardly. The theater in question is in a disadvantaged part of Milan, and its basement serves as a makeshift soup kitchen — a “refettorio” — for the poor, homeless, and recent refugees from the Middle East. The top chefs providing the food and cooking are led by Massimo Bottura, whose Osteria Francescana, south of Milan, topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for 2016.
With Expo 2015 taking place in Milan, Bottura had a brainwave: recycle the surplus food from the expo and offer it to the needy. He had no problem convincing the 60 chefs participating in the expo — among them Alain Ducasse, Ferran Adrià, Mario Batali, René Redzepi, Newfoundlander Jeremy Charles and John Winter Russell of Montreal’s Candide — to take part in his plan. After all, the theme of Expo 2015 was Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.
Bottura and his wife, Lara Gilmore, created the Food for Soul foundation with the aim of opening more refettorios, ever mindful of the environmental impact of food waste: as noted in Theater of Life, 1.3 billion tons of food are thrown away annually around the world, which works out to one-third of all produced food.
Redzepi, whose two-Michelinstar Noma in Copenhagen has been named best restaurant of the year more than once, was particularly bullish about Bottura’s mission. “It’s such a simple gesture, and it’s natural for cooks to want to take care of people,” the chef says in the documentary. “That’s what we do: we feed people.”
Redzepi can relate to the plight of refugees: his father had been a Muslim immigrant to Denmark with next to nothing and no contacts.
So what seems like quite the paradox for Theater of Life is not one after all. Montreal director Peter Svatek captures the melding of two distinct worlds in this eye-opening, compelling film.
“Aside from the famous chefs, aside from the migrant crisis in Europe, aside from the problem of homelessness, it occurred to me there is something about people coming together over food that is just so universal,” Svatek says over coffee in a west-end boulangerie. “When the camera wasn’t rolling, (Bottura) said that a shared meal is the most ancient social gathering of mankind.
“So I thought that this presented an opportunity to go below the surface and touch the humanity of this situation. To me, that’s what this movie is all about.”
Documentaries are a change of pace for Svatek, who also co-produced Theater of Life with his wife, Josette Gauthier, and the National Film Board of Canada. Up until two years ago, he had primarily done fiction for TV, including the U.S. miniseries Everything She Ever Wanted and The Christmas Choir.
“What I love about documentaries is that it’s the opposite direction from which most fictional films go. Instead of having some dumb idea and spending a year trying to cram it all onto the screen, a documentary entails you undertaking some voyage of discovery where you don’t know where you’re going and where you don’t know where you’re going to end up. And you do it with three people, instead of 300 people,” Svatek says, quickly adding: “And I absolutely love that.”
Svatek, 68, has made up for lost time on the documentary front. He earned acclaim for the 2014 Georges St-Pierre film Takedown: The DNA of GSP. And since its debut at the recent San Sebastian Film Festival — where it won a prize — Theater of Life has taken the honours for best Canadian feature at Toronto’s Planet in Focus International Environmental Film Festival. It also heads to the prestigious Berlin film fest in February.
Svatek took a circuitous route to Theater of Life. His stepdaughter lives in Europe and is married to an Italian, who grew up with Bottura. Svatek and Gauthier became acquainted with Bottura as a result.
“Then out of the blue a couple of years ago, he and his wife, Lara, called to tell us they were doing something for Expo 2015 and that the theme was feeding the planet, with every national pavilion doing something with food.
“He had been invited by Obama and others to cook for them at the expo. But he decided he wanted to do something more meaningful, because in his mind that didn’t rhyme with feeding the planet. And so he came up with this idea of what to do with the waste food of Expo. Then he got the church involved. And he thought it would all make for a good film.”
As for the documentary’s title, Svatek says: “A theatre is a place where you represent life, and suddenly this abandoned theatre was a place where life was about to happen.”
What’s particularly remarkable about the film is the rapport between the chefs and those they are feeding.
“That’s what attracted me to the subject,” Svatek says. “These two worlds don’t go together at all. What could be more contradictory than the most elite chefs in the world and hungry, desperate people in a Milan soup kitchen? And I really didn’t know what was going to happen.
“At the beginning, I would ask myself if these chefs were for real. Are they doing this to polish their own star, or is something really happening here? I like films that leave things open, that are an emotional experience for the audience and let them draw their own conclusions. In order to do that, what I find most emotionally engaging is to follow people through some kind of process.”
Svatek does that deftly, both with the chefs and the needy they serve. One of the film’s most moving moments focuses on an elderly homeless man in a wheelchair, playing guitar and warbling Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, in Italian, outside the Milan refettorio. He puts particular emphasis on these lines:
You used to laugh about Everybody that was hanging out Now you don’t talk so loud Now you don’t seem so proud About having to be scrounging your next meal How does it feel? How does it feel? To be without a home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone
That hits like a sledgehammer. Even Nobel Prize winner Dylan would be struck by this rendition.
Svatek recalls Redzepi saying how people would tell him to shut up about the plight of the hungry and just go back into the kitchen.
“But Redzepi doesn’t buy that. He truly feels every human being has a responsibility to help those in need and that it is, after all, a chef ’s job to feed people. A lot of these chefs are for real, feeling the need to do something more significant with their lives than just creating 300-euro meals for the wealthy.”
Svatek makes it clear that he’s not a foodie himself, and that he initially knew next to nothing about the higher culinary arts.
“This was simply a subject I learned about while making the film. It’s also fair to say that (Bottura) got more and more into this as it went along. The next thing he and his wife did with their Food for Soul foundation was to set up another refettorio at the Rio Olympics. Then Robert De Niro heard about what they were doing and invited them to set up a refettorio in the Bronx next year. And even though it’s not the same world-class chefs working there, the refettorio in Milan has been kept going on the same level as before.
“Best of all, this concept seems to be catching on everywhere now.”
Svatek echoes the words of famed French chef Ducasse in Theater of Life: “He said there are a billion people on Earth who eat too much and there are a billion people on Earth who are hungry, and that, really, it’s just a question of balance. And that it is.”
It’s such a simple gesture, and it’s natural for cooks to want to take care of people. That’s what we do: we feed people.