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MEN'S COOKING

LA CUINA DELS HOMES

By Sílvia SUBIRÓS

Documentary - Post-Production 2020

Through her personal history, Sílvia Subirós uses her family history as a springboard to construct a critical and searing interpretation of culinary tradition and the way women's roles in it have been rendered invisible.

- Year of production
- 2020
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- SPAIN
- Languages
- SPANISH, CATALAN
- Duration
- 93 mn
- Director(s)
- Sílvia SUBIRÓS
- Writer(s)
- Sílvia SUBIRÓS
- Synopsis
- In my family, cooking has always been the most important thing. My grandfather, Josep Mercader, was a famous chef and started a culinary tradition that culminates in the cuisine of Ferran Adrià. He became a cook during the Civil War to avoid starvation and, after working in several restaurants, he convinced some Swiss to invest in an establishment in Figueres. Thus he created the Motel, which began as a roadside restaurant and which, over the years, became an emblematic place of Catalan culture. His culinary creations went around the country and earned him one of the first Michelin stars in Spain. When he was at the height of his career, he died suddenly. In his will, he bequeathed the Motel to his daughters: my mother and my aunt.
  
  Digging through the family archives, I find the 8mm camera and the domestic tapes that my grandfather filmed throughout his life. This is how I discover the figure of my grandmother, Anna Baret, who has always been an anonymous character for me. I know that she worked alongside my grandfather in the early days of the Motel, that she had two daughters and that she died very young. My mother has never told me much about her. I decide to ask her about my grandmother, but she is evasive and suggests me to talk to my father. He has always been better at talking, she tells me.
  My father started working at the Motel at age 11, in exchange for food and tips. He soon gained the trust of my grandfather, who led him to work with him in the kitchen. Thus began, he too, his culinary career. At the age of 25 he married my mother and, on the death of my grandfather, my father took over as chef and took over the Motel. I know many things about my grandfather’s life that my father has told me. Although when I ask him about my grandmother, he doesn’t know how to tell me much about her either. People who knew my grandmother have always given me a veiled and contradictory image of her.
  
  My three brothers have continued with the tradition of my grandfather and my father, in a context where cooking has become art and the cook an artist. I am the only one of the four siblings who has not dedicated herself to cooking and who has not carried on the legacy of the men in the family. I started this documentary trying to recover the anonymous figure of my grandmother. Although her story, like that of many women, does not respond to the epic of the hero. What tools does cinema offer to tell stories of women that do not fit this narrative?