The Coronado Island Film Festival teamed up with the San Diego Food + Wine Festival to present the 2024 Culinary Cinema series as part of this year’s festival. This unique collaboration was a fusion of film, food, and wine featuring film screenings, tastings, panel discussions, meet & greets, and more.
“Buddha Jumps Over the Wall” is not just the name of the culinary documentary shown this weekend at the Coronado Island Film Festival (CIFF), it is also the name of an extremely complex Cantonese recipe. Depending on the chef, the dish can include a wide array of unique ingredients which can include shark fin, pig feet, abalone, chicken testicles, ham, lamb, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, eggs, and more. This film allows you to have a culinary experience vicariously through chefs, as they savor not-so-familiar dishes.
Set in various parts of Taiwan and Spain, Michelin star Chefs David Yarnoz and Kai Ho explore their cultures as they visit night markets, farms, and exquisitely prepared cuisine from fancy restaurants and hearty staples from street stalls. Honoring family traditions, sourcing local ingredients and cooking from the heart are traits they share, as they go on a culinary fusion journey. From peeled frogs, churro sandwiches, snake soup, glow-in-the-dark pintxo, this film showcases a wide variety of ethnic delicacies.
Delayed due to the pandemic, when Chef Yarnoz couldn’t visit his Taipei restaurant for three years, this subtitled film has screened at a variety of European Film Festivals, with this as its West Coast premiere. After the movie, CIFF CEO and Artistic Director Merridee Book and Publisher and Editor in Chief of Edible Magazine Katie Stokes were in conversation about the film and showcased the importance of knowing the source of food, which often gets lost in mass production. They pointed out that San Diego has the largest number of organic farms in the U.S. and highlighted the various food ethnicities and farmers markets throughout the county.
Prepared to be amazed by Marcella Hazan, a feisty, non-nonsense Italian woman with two doctorates, a permanently injured right hand, and someone who didn’t know how to cook until she was expected to put meals on the table for her husband. The Godmother of Italian Cooking and the First Lady of Pasta are just a few of the names associated with Hazan, who is credited for helping bring extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and sundried tomatoes to mainstream cooking here.
A self-taught chef, she was famous for her simple, yet exacting recipes. For example, her classic red sauce recipe has just four ingredients: tomatoes, salt, butter, and an onion, for flavor only and must be removed when the sauce is ready. Now that’s a recipe I must try! She never tasted food while cooking but insisted that the smell told her what she needed to know to enhance the flavor.
Throughout her life she published six cookbooks, with help from Victor, who wrote elegant and funny introductions. Although she never measured anything, Victor would follow behind her doing the calculations, so her recipes would be precise. Her books have sold millions worldwide and she’s received seven James Beard Awards.
She’s also known for her cooking schools both in Italy and the US, where guests from around the globe got to experience buying fresh ingredients and then cooking them. One of her sayings was “Italian food is simple, but it is not easy.”
Emmy and Peabody-award winning Director Peter Miller shared after the film that he and his wife had been cooking Marcella’s recipes for decades. Six years in the making, this film was brought to fruition with the help of the cinematic and fundraising team, and Marcella’s husband Victor and son Giuliano, who carries on her legacy. The film showed many clips of Hazan cooking, and also highlighted other well-known chefs making her recipes to showcase their delicious simplicity.
The packed room held the first audience to watch this movie during its U.S. premiere. Watch for it to be released in theaters, son treaming channels, and on PBS. The CIFF Culinary Cinema Series was just one of the many featured movie genres, and was enhanced this year by a partnership with the San Diego Food & Wine Festival. Watch for upcoming CIFF events throughout the year at coronadofilmfest.com.
