IN SEPTEMBER, the San Sebastián International Film Festival, one of the longest-running cinematic showcases in Europe, included a delectable appetiser in its packed programme: food-related films matched with theme-appropriate post-screening dinners at some of the Basque city’s most acclaimed restaurants.

     Culinary Zinema organisers deserve credit for the audacious addition that cashed in on the host city’s gastronomic merits, even though the idea was introduced a year earlier at its more prestigious festival counterpart in Berlin. The Germans heralded its Culinary Cinema with the award-laden Italian film I Am Love, which depicts an icy Russian trophy wife realising her desires through rediscovering the pleasures of eating.

     The festivals underscore the leading role food has played in film, something Chinese film-makers have long emphasised in their visual and sociological allegories. They have dished up culinary references in everything from social-realist drama to martial-arts movies to comedy-of-manners flicks that have dissected, among other things, domestic schisms, class struggles and the battle between good and evil.

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