This Benefit for Gregory Bezat's feature documentary will raise much needed completion funds for the movie plus help with distribution and marketing plans. A portion of your ticket is tax-deductible.
For more about the movie and how you can help, visit https://www.mfkfisherfilm.com/mfk/ .
Chefs, friends and admirers featured in the film include Alice Waters (Chez Panisse), Jacques Pepin (chef and writer), writers Ruth Reichl and Annie Lamott. Also telling her story are Fisher's daughter Kennedy Friede Golden, Celia Sack (Omnivore Books) and chefs John Ash, Gayle Pirie and John Clark (Foreign Cinema), Kyle and Katina Connaughton (Single Thread), Tanya Holland (Brown Sugar Cafe), Michele Anna Jordan, L. John Harris (garlic king), and Dominica Rice-Cisneros (Bombera) to name a few.
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher elevated cooking from a domestic chore to a critical study of what it means to be human. She was called the "Poet of the Appetites." Described by W.H. Auden as “the best prose writer in America,” the intrepid Fisher helped introduce continental sensibilities to America’s burgeoning culinary world.
Perhaps more importantly, she forever transformed the 1950s-era background figure of a woman in the kitchen into a living, breathing subject — with dazzling ideas, passionate emotions, and insatiable appetites.
“Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.”
The film covers her time in France, Hollywood, Napa, Sonoma, and some surprise destinations. Her sensual writing about food and wine becomes the film's narration as we learn about Mary Frances' passion for fresh food while warning about the industrialization of agriculture, frozen and fast foods; the challenges of raising two daughters as a single mother; unwittingly becoming an icon for the women's movement; starting public wine-tastings in the Napa Valley, and co-founding the Napa Valley Wine Library.
She wrote over thirty books (An Alphabet for Gourmets, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, Consider the Oyster) and hundreds of articles for The New Yorker, Gourmet, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and many others, continuing into her 80s.
“And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly ourselves.”
The film is in English | 88 minutes. Produced by Gregory Bezat and Gary Meyer.
The Art of Eating- The Life of M.F.K. Fisher has been five years in the making. Even when a movie is completed it isn't always finished. There are bills to pay, making digital prints, plus distribution and marketing costs. Additionally, audiences will enjoy stunning historic footage and photos, much of it never before seen. There are rights fees to be paid for using many of these images. The film is a non-profit 501(c)3 and further donations are much appreciated.
For more about the movie and how you can help, visit https://www.mfkfisherfilm.com/mfk/ .
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We thank our Premiere Partners: Cinema SF, Bi-Rite Family of Businesses, Merriam Vineyards, Thos. Moser Furniture, the Literary Trust of M.F.K. Fisher and Last House.