Garance Marillier as a cannibalistic student in Julie Ducournau's Raw
If you’re hungry for films about food, you’re in luck. Over the next few months, three films will hit theaters just in time to sate your appetite: Bitter Harvest, Raw, and Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent. So get ready to tuck in, and enjoy this cinematic chow.
Bitter Harvest
Release Date: February 24
Holodomor is a Ukrainian word that translates roughly to “to kill by hunger,” but it specifically refers to actions by Bolshevik leader Joseph Stalin in 1932-33 when he created an artificial famine, starving between 2.4 and 7.5 million Ukrainians. It’s a travesty that’s often glossed over in history books. In fact, to this day—in the wake of Russia’s attacks on the Ukraine—Russia denies the Holodomor was an intentional act, even though 25 countries (including the United States) believe otherwise. A handful of countries even recognize the Holodomor as a genocide perpetrated by Russia against the Ukrainian people. Bitter Harvest, starring Max Irons and Samantha Barks as lovers attempting to survive the famine, was filmed in Kiev and promises to be a great primer on a subject not many of us know about.
Raw
Release Date: March 10
At the 41st Annual Toronto Film Festival, one French film caused a ruckus by making people faint due to what The Guardian described as “realistic bite marks and lacerated extremities.” That film, Raw, chronicles a vegetarian whose hazing ritual in veterinarian school involves the ingestion of a raw rabbit liver, which causes her to go full cannibal. That’s the kind of synopsis that leaves us, erm, chomping at the bit.
Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent
Release Date: April 14
Jeremiah Tower doesn’t occupy the same space in the celebrity chef pantheon as, say, Anthony Bourdain or Masaharu Morimoto, but at one point, he did. In the 1980s, Tower ruled the restaurant world from the kitchens of Chez Panisse and Stars, but he exiled himself to the Yucatan Peninsula and, subsequently, became a forgotten ghost. Bourdain and producer/director Lydia Tenaglia thought it high time to dredge up his magnificent past and introduce his influence to a whole new generation of food lovers. So they tracked him down, and made a doc about him that has been described by Thrillist as a “complicated portrait of an essential chef.”
Watch the trailer here.