Peter Svatek’s unflinching documentary offers a balanced account of the trials and tribulations of the Italian chef’s ambitious soup kitchen project
In the Italian city of Milan, Expo 2015 was a six-month celebration of technology and culture built around the theme “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”, which showcased evolving innovations and attitudes relating to food, nutrition and health. Ironically, the event ended up producing enormous quantities of food waste.
Every day, tons of excess food—mostly bread and vegetables—were discarded and would have gone to waste were it not for the intervention of one man. Massimo Bottura, head chef at three-Michelin-starred restaurant Osteria Francescana in Moderna, devised a unique project to redirect this food into the mouths of those most in need, in an imaginative and invigorating way that would leave a profound impact on all who experienced it.
Theater of Life, a new documentary from Czech-born filmmaker Peter Svatek, chronicles Bottura’s creation of the Refettorio Ambrosiano, a soup kitchen in the bowels of an abandoned theatre in Milan’s dilapidated Greco district. Run in collaboration with church foundation Caritas Ambrosiana, Bottura and a team of 60 world-renowned chefs worked every day to create traditional, gourmet cuisine for the city’s homeless, using only leftover food from the Expo.
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Svatek follows culinary maestros including Rene Redzepi and Alain Ducasse as they embrace this unique challenge, while simultaneously following the trials and misfortunes of some of the refettorio’s regular patrons. The chefs, who hail from every corner of the globe, are clearly passionate about the project; but even so, their efforts are not uniformly embraced. Even the hungriest patrons can be sheepish to try some of the more adventurous dishes. These hardened veterans of rough living know what they like and can be defiantly set in their ways.