70 minutes / Color
English; French / English subtitles
Release: 2017
Copyright: 2014
On the same DVD as MINA'S RECIPE BOOK!
Available on DVD for the first time, IMAGINARY FEASTS and MINA'S RECIPE BOOK tell little-known, but fascinating stories of imagination and resilience in the face of the worst kind of deprivation
IMAGINARY FEASTS explores how in Nazi concentration cmaps, Soviet Gulags and Japanese prison camps, starving prisoners shared and recorded favorite meals and recipes. By examing how these objects of survival, the film shows quiet acts of incredible resistance.
The film is a testament to the strength of women and men who, even in the most dire circumstances, created a unique form of resistance.
Read "Hell's Own Cookbook," a New York Times article about the book that inspired the films here.
"Explores notebooks filled with fantasy recipes that prisoners left behind under unimaginable circumstances as proof of a remarkable kind of quiet resistance… IMAGINARY FEASTS turns the camera on writers, philosophers, cooks, psychiatrists, historians, language specialists and neurologists to explain a baffling yet apparently widespread occurrence." —Agence France Presse
"The recipes were written from memory…bear in mind that these are not the cookies the prisoners ate in the camps-but the ones they remembered and dreamed of eating."—National Post
“A disturbing documentary… tackles the world of concentration camps (in Germany, but also in Russia and Japan) from an unexpected and original angle: that of the hunger that haunted the inmates so much that, remembering, they came to write down their favorite recipes… on sheets of paper or stolen tissue. at the risk of their lives.” —Le Blog Documentaire
“A breathtaking metaphor. The poetic strength of the recipes is intact.” —Telerama
Select Accolades
Why did a prominent group of Holocaust survivors and philosophers oppose the death sentence for Adolf Eichmann?
Florence Jammot | 2015 | 60 minutes | Color | English | Closed Captioned
Holocaust survivor Simone Lagrange vividly recounts her experiences in Auschwitz, and the role she played in bringing Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie to justice.
Elisabeth Coronel, Florence Gaillard, and Arnaud de Mezamat | 2011 | 88 minutes | Color | French | English subtitles
Marcel Ophuls' Academy Award winning examination of the Nazi officer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon," weaves together 40 years of footage and interviews.
Marcel Ophuls | 2010 | 114 minutes | Color | English subtitles
In Geneva, Switzerland, film directors Marcel Ophuls and Jean-Luc Godard meet for a surprisingly intimate and sometimes contentious dialogue.
Frederic Choffat and Vincent Lowy | 2011 | 44 minutes | Color | French | English subtitles
In 1996, the German nuclear engineer Karl-Heinz Schaab was accused of selling secret information to Iraq. But was Schaab a shrewd traitor or a simple pawn in a much more extensive network?
Eric Nadler and John Friedman | 2015 | 95 minutes | Color
The noted historian's lifelong quest to describe the extermination of the European Jews.
Frank Diamand | 2014 | 65 minutes | Color | English
