Watch These Best Scandinavian Movies If You Love Cinema
There’s a distinct mood that we experience while watching Scandinavian movies. Some unique elements involve snow-covered streets, grey skies, and characters carrying heavy emotional weight.
Food has a great way to connect, inspire and drive human emotions. It also carries memory, identity, conflict, ambition, and survival. A person visiting distant lands may find it difficult to communicate due to language barriers but food always helps in overcoming awkwardness.
In fact, food helps in bridging the barriers and nurtures new relationships. As they say, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And this list of best movies about food exactly finds a way to your heart.
It has movies on food that are inspiring, innovating and connecting. And most important of all, to inspire you to try new dishes, learning from other cultures.
Tampopo is one of the best Japanese movies by the director, Juzo Itami. It blends satire, parody, and social observation. And many people call it a “ramen western” because of the way it portrays American Westerns. It remains one of the best movies about food.
Goro is a truck driver who stops at a ramen shop of a widow, Tampopo. After tasting her mediocre ramen, he helps her transform the shop into the best in town. And that means studying ramen masters, analyzing broth, noodle texture, pork slices, and customer service.
Alongside the story, we also see a dying mother cooking one final meal for her family and a wealthy gourmet exploring sensual pleasure through cuisine. Each of these subplots reinforce the idea that food is ritual, status, desire, and identity.
Apart from great ramen, Japan also has cutest cat fiction books and some other great Japanese books.
Estômago is a Brazilian dark comedy and it blends culinary storytelling with crime drama, where food is a metaphor and survival tool. The film is taken from a short story by Lusa Silvestre.
Raimundo Nonato is a migrant from Brazil’s Northeast who arrives in São Paulo with no money or skills. He finds work in a small bar, where he unexpectedly reveals a natural talent for cooking.
That means more customers and, eventually, a job in an Italian restaurant.
But there’s also a prison narrative where he ends up incarcerated. Inside prison, he again uses his culinary skills to prepare meals for the prison boss Bujiú to secure protection. And there’s even more to his prison time.
But how did he end up in prison? That’s what makes this a great watch.
Since we are talking about a movie from Brazil, here are some of the best Brazilian movies and some Brazilian books that inspire these movies.
El Hoyo is one of the best food movies on Netflix by the director, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia. It was the winner of the People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness. The movie is about a food distribution in different social classes.
The setting is a vertical prison with hundreds of floors, two inmates per level. Each day, a descending platform carries a luxurious multi-course meal. Prisoners on the upper levels eat first and often overconsume or waste food.
By the time the platform reaches lower floors, little food remains. Every month, organisers send inmates to new levels to move anyone from abundance to starvation. This naturally breeds violence and desperation.
People resort to cannibalism, suicide, and food hoarding as survival strategies. Overall, a great movie on what food abundance and scarcity does to humans and how food also has a class hierarchy.
Since this movie is in Spanish, so why learn Spanish, so you can bargain in Spanish when you visit the best book stores in Barcelona.
The Menu is an American dark comedy–thriller food movie, starring Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy as Margot. It satirizes culinary obsession and luxury exclusivity in elite fine dining. It was also nominated for multiple Golden Globe.
Chef Slowik runs an ultra-exclusive restaurant Hawthorn, serving a multi-course menu to exclusive wealthy guests. Each course is shown as a conceptual art. The diners include tech investors, a food critic, a movie star, and Tyler.
Slowik reveals that he invited the guests because they represent how his art has been commercialized, misunderstood, or exploited. And the staff willingly participates in the deadly performances. Tyler is humiliated when he tries to cook and fails.
But the movie’s centre of attention is Margot, a date of Tyler, who survives by rejecting the elaborate tasting concept and asking for a simple cheeseburger. Eventually, only Margot leaves alive before a deliberate fire that kills everyone.
This great movie on food was also in my best movies of 2023 list.
The Lunchbox is one of the best movies about food, which won the Grand Rail d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The film stars the great actor Irrfan Khan and revolves around Mumbai’s highly efficient dabbawala system, delivering thousands of lunchboxes daily.
Ila prepares an elaborate lunch to rekindle her distant husband’s attention and sends it through the dabbawala system. Due to a routing error, the lunch reaches Saajan, an accounts clerk nearing retirement, who’s also a widow.
Expecting his usual bland meal, he instead receives spicy dishes. When Ila finds the lunchbox empty, she assumes her husband enjoyed it, but realizes something is wrong.
Eventually, daily correspondence begins between them.
In these letters, Ila shares her struggling marriage and her husband’s affair. Saajan shares his grief over his late wife and his frustration with training his replacement at work.
They eventually plan to meet at a café, but Saajan watches Ila from a distance without meeting. When Ila later leaves Mumbai with her daughter, Saajan reconsiders his priorities.
If you want to explore more from India, check out more Bollywood movies and some best Indian novels, of course.
Babette’s Feast is a Danish drama film, which is the adaptation of a story by Karen Blixen. It was the first Danish movie to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Babette is a French refugee who arrives in a 19th-century Protestant village in Denmark and is taken in by two aging sisters, Martine and Filippa. The villagers live austere lives, eating simple meals of dried fish and bread.
Babette works as their housekeeper, cooking plain food. After unexpectedly winning a large lottery prize, she asks to prepare a French dinner to honor the late pastor. The sisters reluctantly agree, fearing indulgence will be sinful.
Babette imports expensive ingredients from France and prepares a multi-course gourmet feast. The guests initially don’t comment, yet conversations around food softens grudges and the community experiences joy and unity.
Recently, I also wrote about more Danish movies, which you can check in Scandinavian movies.
A Touch of Spice is one of the best movies about food that connects politics with cuisine from Constantinople. The film covers the 1964 expulsion of ethnic Greeks from Istanbul. And also, how cultural overlap, especially in food, coexists with political conflict.
Fanis is a Greek boy who lives in Istanbul with his parents and his grandfather Vassilis, who owns a spice shop. Vassilis teaches Fanis about cooking Politiki-style dishes that share culinary traditions of Greeks and Turks.
Meanwhile, he’s also in love with a Turkish girl, Saime.
When the Turkish government ordered the deportation of Greeks in 1964 over the Cyprus crisis, Fanis and his family left Istanbul for Athens.
In Greece, Fanis is taken as an outsider. His dishes are taken as foreign. Years later, when he returns to Turkey, only food is his past and present.
Since we are talking about Greece, here’s why you should read Greek classics.
Like Water for Chocolate is one of the best movies about food from the same novel by Laura Esquivel. The film has romance and magical realism, with food as the drama centre. This food movie was one of the highest earning Spanish-language films in the US.
Tita is the youngest daughter in a traditional family, who can’t marry because of a family rule of to care for her mother until death. When she falls in love with Pedro, he marries her older sister Rosaura to stay close to her.
Confined to the kitchen, she channels her emotions into cooking. So, she prepares many spicy Mexican foods that directly affect those who eat them. At Rosaura’s wedding, Tita’s tears fall into the cake batter, causing sadness and physical illness to guests.
So what Tita cooks does not stay in the kitchen but changes lives. If you want a movie where food controls fate as much as love does, this is one to watch.
Here are some of the best Mexican movies that you can watch while having the best tequila from Mexico.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary, which profiles Jiro Ono, the owner of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a small sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station. It brought attention to Jiro’s work ethic, discipline, and the apprenticeship system behind traditional sushi mastery.
Jiro Ono, then in his 80s, as he continues to work daily despite international acclaim. It documents the process behind selecting fish at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market, massaging octopus for nearly an hour, controlling rice temperature and vinegar balance.
The documentary also examines succession and pressure within the family. Jiro’s eldest son, Yoshikazu, is to inherit the restaurant. So, this food documentary shows sushi as a fine repetition process in pursuit of perfection.
Little Forest is one of the best movies about food from South Korea. The film is an adaptation of a Japanese manga but relocates the story to rural South Korea. Unlike high-pressure chef films, this one focuses on everyday food preparation.
Hye-won is a young woman who leaves Seoul after failing her teaching exam and returns to her rural hometown. With no clear plan, she begins living off what she can grow, harvest, or store.
She cooks seasonal foods in all four seasons from her harvests in the fields. As she lives her life cooking, she remembers her mother. We get to know that her mother left home years ago, unable to endure rural hardship alone.
So, her cooking helps her understand her mother’s choices and her own uncertainty about adulthood. By the end, she chooses to remain in the countryside.
South Korea has a great literary scene and you can explore more from these South Korean movies and modern Korean books.
I hope you find the list of best movies about food interesting. Because these films show that food can be a source of connection, of courage, or of love.
They show us how preparing or sharing a food can shape lives and relationships. If you have any other favourite food movies, do share. And keep visiting CulturalReads!
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There’s a distinct mood that we experience while watching Scandinavian movies. Some unique elements involve snow-covered streets, grey skies, and characters carrying heavy emotional weight.
It’s almost the end of the year, which makes it a good moment to look back. I’ll share my favorite reads from last year soon,
I have frequently talked on CulturalReads, Hollywood gets the limelight, even though many actors and directors are surprisingly from other countries. The Revenant, for example,
