The Ultimate Guide: 40 Films About Cooking and Food

In the vast universe of cinema, food is more than mere sustenance; it is a language. It is the vehicle for romance in a comedy, the center of conviviality in a family drama, or the pure joy of a masterpiece like Ratatouille. The collective imagination is filled with iconic scenes that use gastronomy to evoke comfort and celebration.

But food is also a battlefield. It is a site of cultural clash, a vehicle for repressed desires, a fierce critique of consumer society, or a silent meditation on life. A meal is never just a meal. It can tell of nostalgia for a lost homeland, heal deep family wounds, or ignite a passion that subverts the established order.

This guide is a journey across the entire spectrum. It is a path that unites the most famous films of gastronomic cinema with the most obscure independent works. From the almost religious devotion of a sushi master to the cannibalistic protest against bourgeois vacuity, we will discover how directors of all nationalities have used the universal structure of the “meal” to tell unique and powerful stories.

Tampopo

Two truck drivers, the laconic Goro and the young Gun, help Tampopo, a widow running a modest diner, in her obsessive quest for the perfect ramen recipe. Their adventure is interspersed with a series of surreal and sensual vignettes that explore the infinite facets of the relationship between man and food.

Defined by its director, Juzo Itami, as the first “ramen western,” Tampopo is an unclassifiable and brilliant work. More than a film, it is a hedonistic and philosophical celebration of the act of eating. The main narrative serves as a pretext for an almost anthropological investigation into the rituals associated with food, from the proper way to taste a bowl of noodles to the sensuality of an oyster. Itami transforms the search for culinary perfection into a metaphor for the search for perfection in life, blending social satire, slapstick comedy, and eroticism into a unique and unforgettable cinematic dish.

Babette’s Feast

In a remote 19th-century Danish village, two elderly sisters, daughters of a Protestant pastor, lead an austere and devout life. Their routine is disrupted by the arrival of Babette, a French refugee who fled the Paris Commune. When Babette wins the lottery, she decides to use the entire sum to prepare a sumptuous French dinner for the small community.

Based on a short story by Karen Blixen, Gabriel Axel’s film is a delicate and powerful parable about grace and the transformative power of art. In a community where sensory pleasure is viewed with suspicion, Babette’s feast becomes an almost sacramental act. The food, prepared with an artistic devotion bordering on the sacred, not only nourishes the body but also dissolves old grudges, rekindles dormant loves, and reconnects the austere diners with the earthly joy of life. It is a demonstration that a meal can be a gift, a sacrifice, and a form of redemption.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

This documentary follows the life of Jiro Ono, an eighty-five-year-old sushi master and owner of a tiny, ten-seat restaurant in a Tokyo subway station, the first of its kind to receive three Michelin stars. The film explores his work ethic, his relationship with his sons, and his relentless pursuit of perfection.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is more than a culinary documentary; it is a profound meditation on dedication, sacrifice, and the Japanese concept of shokunin—the artisan who dedicates their life to perfecting their craft. David Gelb captures the almost monastic routine of Jiro and his team, where every gesture, from cooking the rice to massaging the octopus, is performed with meticulous precision. The film explores the tension between tradition and innovation and the weight of legacy, posing a universal question: what does it mean to dedicate one’s entire existence to a single, unattainable ideal of perfection?

Big Night

In 1950s New Jersey, two Italian immigrant brothers, the pragmatic Secondo and the brilliant chef Primo, struggle to save their restaurant, “Paradise.” Their authentic, uncompromising cuisine clashes with the Americanized tastes of their customers, who would rather have spaghetti and meatballs. Their only hope is to organize a “big night” in honor of the famous singer Louis Prima.

Directed by and starring Stanley Tucci, Big Night is a bitter and touching reflection on the conflict between artistic integrity and commercial success. Food is the battlefield where two cultures collide: the Italian, which sees cooking as a sacred art and an expression of identity, and the American, which reduces it to a consumer product. The sumptuous and complex Timpano, prepared for the evening, becomes the symbol of a culture that refuses to sell out, a masterpiece destined for an audience that may not be able to appreciate it.

The Taste of Things

In 1889 France, the extraordinary cook Eugénie has been working for the famous gastronome Dodin Bouffant for twenty years. A deep understanding exists between them, a love expressed through the creation of sublime dishes. Their relationship, based on mutual respect and a shared passion for the culinary arts, is nourished by the slow, precise gestures performed in the kitchen.

Directed by Trần Anh Hùng, this film is a visual symphony that celebrates cooking as the highest form of intimacy. The preparation of food is not a prelude to the action, but the action itself. The camera dances among the stoves, capturing the sensuality of each ingredient, the delicacy of each gesture. It is a cinema to be savored, where food becomes the most eloquent language of love, a silent conversation between two souls who have transformed their kitchen into a temple dedicated to beauty and flavor.

God of Cookery

An arrogant and corrupt “God of Cookery” is exposed as a fraud and loses everything. Fallen from grace, he joins a group of street food vendors and, through humiliation and surreal adventures, rediscovers the true meaning of cooking. His path to redemption will lead him to challenge his usurper in an epic culinary competition.

Stephen Chow, master of Hong Kong’s mo lei tau (nonsensical) comedy, directs and stars in a wild and irresistible satire of the world of celebrity chefs and television competitions. God of Cookery dismantles the idea of high cuisine as a status symbol with grotesque humor, contrasting it with the honesty and heart of street food. Between parodies of martial arts films and zany gags, the film celebrates the idea that the greatest cooking is born not from technique, but from sincerity and emotion.

Eat Drink Man Woman

Mr. Chu, an elderly master chef in Taipei who has lost his sense of taste, lives with his three adult daughters, each facing their own romantic and professional crises. The only time the family comes together is during the elaborate Sunday banquet that the father meticulously prepares, a ritual that becomes the stage for unexpected announcements and latent tensions.

Ang Lee, before conquering Hollywood, directed this masterpiece that explores family dynamics through the universal language of food. The preparation of the dishes, filmed with almost documentary-like expertise, is an act of paternal love that struggles to find a verbal channel of communication. Food becomes the center of a family universe in transition, a place where tradition and modernity clash and merge, just like the flavors of a complex recipe.

Sweet Bean

Sentaro, a lonely and melancholic man, runs a small stall selling dorayaki, Japanese sweets filled with red bean paste. His life changes when he hires Toku, an elderly woman with deformed hands but an extraordinary talent for preparing “an,” the sweet bean paste. Her secret recipe attracts a crowd of customers, but a cruel prejudice threatens to destroy everything.

Naomi Kawase directs a film of heartbreaking delicacy, using the almost meditative preparation of food to address profound themes such as marginalization, memory, and the transmission of knowledge. The process of creating the perfect “an,” which requires “listening to the voice of the beans,” becomes a metaphor for looking beyond appearances and connecting with the essence of people and nature. It is an ode to patience, care, and the beauty that can be found in the simplest gestures and the most invisible lives.

The Lunchbox

In Mumbai, a mistake in the famous lunchbox delivery system (dabbawala) causes the meal prepared by Ila, a young housewife neglected by her husband, to arrive at the desk of Saajan, a grumpy widower nearing retirement. Intrigued, Ila includes a note in the next day’s lunchbox, beginning a correspondence that will nourish their lonely souls.

The Lunchbox is an epistolary love story as unlikely as it is touching, built entirely around food as a vehicle for emotions. The lunchbox becomes a container of hopes, confessions, and flavors that fill the void in the two protagonists’ lives. Ritesh Batra’s film beautifully captures the frenzy and alienation of modern urban life, showing how a carefully prepared meal can create an oasis of intimacy and human connection in the heart of a chaotic metropolis.

Like Water for Chocolate

In early 20th-century Mexico, young Tita is condemned by a cruel family tradition to never marry, so she can care for her mother. Her beloved, Pedro, marries her sister to stay close to her. Confined to the kitchen, Tita discovers she has an extraordinary gift: she can infuse her emotions into the dishes she prepares, unleashing uncontrollable reactions in those who taste them.

Based on the novel by Laura Esquivel, Alfonso Arau’s film is a cornerstone of magical realism applied to gastronomy. The kitchen becomes the realm where Tita’s repressed passion transforms into a powerful and subversive force. Every recipe is a spell, every dish a vehicle for desire, sadness, or joy. It is a celebration of the sensuality of food and its power to communicate what words cannot, turning the act of cooking into an act of rebellion and self-affirmation.

Soul Kitchen

Zinos, a Greek-German owner of a run-down restaurant in Hamburg, is going through a crisis. His girlfriend has moved to Shanghai, his regular customers don’t appreciate the new gourmet chef, and a herniated disc torments him. When he decides to temporarily leave the restaurant to his unreliable ex-convict brother, things can only get worse.

Fatih Akin abandons the dramatic tones of his previous films to give us a chaotic, energetic, and heartfelt comedy. Soul Kitchen is a modern “Heimatfilm” (homeland film) that celebrates the restaurant not just as a place to eat, but as a multicultural microcosm, a refuge for outsiders, and a bastion of authenticity against gentrification. The food, which ranges from frozen fried food to aphrodisiac dishes, is the engine of a story about community, friendship, and the search for a place to call home.

East Side Sushi

Juana, a single Mexican-American mother, has worked for years at a fruit cart. Seeking stability, she takes a job in the kitchens of a Japanese restaurant. Fascinated by the art of sushi, she teaches herself how to prepare it, dreaming of becoming a sushi chef. However, she must confront the rigid traditions of a world dominated by men and Japanese culture.

East Side Sushi is an inspiring story of determination that delicately addresses themes of cultural and gender barriers in the restaurant world. Anthony Lucero’s film shows the passion for cooking as a force capable of overcoming prejudice. Juana’s struggle to assert her talent in an environment that rejects her for her origins and gender becomes a powerful metaphor for cultural fusion, where tradition can be honored and, at the same time, enriched by new perspectives.

Today’s Special

Samir, a talented sous-chef at an elegant Manhattan restaurant, dreams of studying haute cuisine in France. When he is passed over for a promotion, he quits. Due to a family crisis, he is forced to take over his family’s dilapidated Indian restaurant in Queens. Completely ignorant of Indian cuisine, he finds a mentor in a taxi driver who turns out to be a former chef and a food philosopher.

Today’s Special is a warm and intelligent comedy that explores the theme of rediscovering one’s cultural roots through food. Samir’s journey from French cuisine, codified and impersonal, to Indian cuisine, chaotic and passionate, is a journey of returning home and accepting his own identity. The film celebrates cooking not as a technique to be learned, but as a heritage to be embraced, a connection to family and community.

Ramen Teh

Masato, a young ramen chef in Japan, finds a diary of his Singaporean mother, who died when he was a child, after his father’s death. He decides to go to Singapore to reconstruct his family’s history and discover his roots. There, he learns to cook Bak Kut Teh, a pork rib soup, and tries to create a dish that unites the two cultures.

Ramen Teh (also known as Ramen Shop) is a delicate film that uses culinary fusion as a metaphor for reconciliation and the healing of historical and family traumas. The dish Masato tries to create, combining Japanese ramen and Singaporean Bak Kut Teh, represents the attempt to heal the rift between the two parts of his identity, marked by the pain of World War II. Food becomes a bridge between generations and cultures, a way to understand the past and nourish the future.

In the Mood for Love

In 1962 Hong Kong, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Both with frequently absent spouses, they begin to suspect that their respective partners are having an affair. Brought together by this painful discovery, they develop a platonic bond, made of fleeting encounters, silent dinners, and nightly walks to buy noodles.

In Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece, food is not the protagonist, but it is a fundamental element for expressing the inexpressible. The meals eaten together, often in silence, and the solitary trips to the noodle stall become the choreography of their growing intimacy and profound loneliness. Every gesture, from sharing a meal to carrying a thermos, is laden with repressed desire and a poignant melancholy, making food a silent witness to a love that cannot be consummated.

The Scent of Green Papaya

In 1950s Saigon, the young Mui is sent to work as a servant for a wealthy family. Through her eyes, we observe domestic life, daily rituals, and family dynamics, with a particular focus on the slow, meticulous gestures related to food preparation. Years later, now a young woman, Mui goes to work for a pianist with whom she is secretly in love.

The Scent of Green Papaya is a film almost devoid of dialogue, a purely sensory work that immerses the viewer in the sounds, colors, and, almost magically, the smells of Vietnamese life. Director Trần Anh Hùng, inspired by his mother’s memories, films the preparation of food with hypnotic grace. The cutting of the papaya, the cooking of the rice, the grinding of spices become a dance, a form of meditation that sets the quiet and poetic rhythm of existence, evoking a world of sensations and memories.

I Am Love

Emma Recchi, a Russian immigrant, lives a comfortable but passionless life as the wife of a powerful Milanese industrialist. Her bourgeois existence is turned upside down by her encounter with Antonio, a talented young chef and friend of her son. A prawn dish prepared by him ignites a sensory and emotional awakening in her that will lead to an overwhelming affair and cause her to question her entire world.

Luca Guadagnino directs a sumptuous and Visconti-like melodrama, where food is the detonator of a long-repressed passion. Antonio’s cuisine, creative and rooted in the land, represents everything that is missing in Emma’s life: authenticity, vitality, pleasure. The film captures the experience of taste with almost erotic close-ups, transforming a simple meal into an epiphany that pushes the protagonist to break free from her golden cage to pursue the true flavor of life.

A Touch of Spice

Fanis, a Greek astrophysics professor, reflects on his childhood in Istanbul, where his grandfather, a spice shop owner, taught him the philosophy of life through spices. Forced to move to Athens during the 1964 deportations, Fanis grows up using cooking as a way to keep the connection with his past and cultural identity alive.

A Touch of Spice is a nostalgic and bittersweet film that uses spices and gastronomy as a metaphor for memory and cultural identity. Every spice has a meaning, every dish tells a story. Cooking becomes a tool for the protagonist to navigate the complexities of his dual identity, Greek and Turkish, and to process the trauma of uprooting. It is a touching tale about how the flavors of childhood can shape an entire existence.

Shiwase no Pan (Bread of Happiness)

A young couple moves from Tokyo to Toyako, Hokkaido, to open a bakery-cafe called “Mani.” He bakes the bread, and she prepares the accompanying meals. Their establishment, nestled in nature, becomes a haven for various customers, each with their own story of loss or melancholy, who find comfort in the warmth of freshly baked bread and the tranquility of the place.

This Japanese film is a perfect example of the “slice of life” genre, a cinema that finds beauty and meaning in the small rituals of daily life. Bread of Happiness is a gentle and soothing film where the simple, ancient act of kneading and baking bread takes on a therapeutic quality. Food is not a source of drama or conflict, but a means to create community, offer comfort, and celebrate the slow passing of seasons and life.

Boiling Point

Andy Jones, the chef of a trendy London restaurant, is having the worst night of his life. Late for service, he discovers that a health inspector has downgraded his establishment. Throughout the evening, he must deal with demanding customers, staff tensions, personal problems, and the pressure of a food critic at one of the tables. All of this unfolds in a single, grueling tracking shot.

Boiling Point is a technical and acting tour de force that immerses the viewer in the hell of a professional kitchen. Director Philip Barantini uses the single take not as a stylistic flourish, but as a tool to generate almost unbearable anxiety. The nervous, constantly moving camera captures the chaos, stress, and psychological precarity of a high-pressure environment, offering a realistic and devastating portrait of mental health in the restaurant industry.

Dinner Rush

In a single evening, Louis Cropa’s Italian restaurant in Tribeca, New York, becomes a crossroads of destinies. Louis, an elderly restaurateur and bookie, wants to hand over the restaurant to his son Udo, an emerging chef whose innovative cuisine clashes with tradition. Meanwhile, two gangsters arrive to claim a piece of the business, a food critic is dining, and a drunk artist is causing a scene.

Dinner Rush is a tense, ensemble thriller set almost entirely between the tables and the kitchen of a restaurant. Bob Giraldi’s film uses the restaurant setting as a stage to explore the power dynamics that link the worlds of crime, art, and high cuisine. Food is the catalyst for generational and cultural conflicts, an element that both unites and divides the characters on a tension-filled night.

Sideways

Miles, a depressed English teacher and aspiring writer, is a passionate oenophile. He decides to treat his best friend Jack, a soap opera actor about to get married, to a week-long trip through the wineries of California’s Santa Ynez Valley. The trip, which Miles intends as a meditative tasting journey, turns into a chaotic adventure due to Jack’s quest for escapades.

Although focused on wine, Sideways deserves a place on this list because it uses wine culture exactly as other films use food: as a language to explore character, relationships, and existential crises. Miles’s passionate dissertations on Pinot Noir become a metaphor for his own fragile and complex personality. Wine is not just a drink, but a pretext to talk about life, love, failure, and the hope of one day finding the perfect vintage.

First Cow

In 1820s Oregon, a lonely cook and a Chinese immigrant on the run form an unlikely friendship. Together, they start a successful small business selling sweet fritters (“oily cakes”). The secret to their success is milk, which they secretly milk at night from the only cow in the territory, owned by the richest and most powerful man in the area.

Kelly Reichardt’s cinema is made of minimal gestures and profound humanity. First Cow is a gentle yet sharp parable about the birth of American capitalism. The simple, communal act of cooking and selling fritters becomes a fragile enterprise, a small dream of independence in a nascent economic system already based on exploitation and inequality. Food represents a hope for connection and sustenance in a harsh and unforgiving world.

A Tale of Two Pizzas

In a small town, two Italian families run rival pizzerias located across the street from each other. A long-standing feud, fueled by pride and secret recipes, prevents any kind of relationship. The situation gets complicated when the children of the two families, a boy and a girl, fall in love, creating a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story with a pizza base.

A Tale of Two Pizzas is a charming and unpretentious independent comedy that uses one of the world’s most beloved foods to explore classic themes like family rivalry, tradition, and love overcoming obstacles. The film celebrates the pizzeria not just as a business, but as the heart of a community, a place where family and cultural identities are defended with the same passion used to bake a margherita.

La Grande Bouffe

Four bourgeois friends—a pilot, a judge, a restaurateur, and a television producer—gather in a Parisian villa with a single, precise intention: to eat themselves to death. Surrounded by mountains of delicious food and in the company of some prostitutes, they indulge in an orgy of gluttony, sex, and self-destruction, pushing their bodies beyond all limits.

Marco Ferreri’s grotesque and provocative masterpiece is one of the most controversial films in cinema history. La Grande Bouffe is a fierce and nihilistic critique of consumer society, a powerful allegory in which food, the symbol of bourgeois well-being, becomes the instrument of a collective suicide. The act of eating, stripped of all necessity and transformed into pure, nauseating excess, reveals the existential void of a social class condemned to consume itself.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

Albert Spica, a vulgar and violent gangster, owns the luxurious restaurant “Le Hollandais.” Every night, he dines there with his sophisticated wife, Georgina, whom he constantly humiliates. Exasperated, Georgina begins a clandestine affair with an intellectual, consummating her passion in the restaurant’s kitchens with the complicity of the cook. When her husband discovers the betrayal, the revenge will be terrible and cannibalistic.

Peter Greenaway directs a baroque, theatrical, and visually sumptuous work. The film is a ruthless allegory of the vulgarity of power and rampant consumerism, set in a single, claustrophobic location. Food, from a sublime artistic creation to an instrument of pleasure and, finally, a horrific weapon of revenge, is the common thread of a story that explores the boundaries between civilization and barbarism, art and brutality. The final dinner is one of the most shocking and unforgettable scenes in arthouse cinema.

Festen (The Celebration)

An upper-class Danish family gathers at a large hotel to celebrate the patriarch’s sixtieth birthday. During dinner, the eldest son, Christian, stands up to make a toast and, in front of all the guests, accuses his father of sexually abusing him and his twin sister, who recently committed suicide.

The first film of the Dogme 95 manifesto, Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen uses the rigid structure and rituals of a formal banquet to create an unbearable psychological trap. The food and courses, which continue to be served despite the emerging horror, underscore the hypocrisy and the family’s desperate attempt to maintain appearances. The lavishly set table, a traditional symbol of unity, becomes the cruel theater of a devastating truth, subverting any idea of comfort and family communion.

Delicatessen

In a post-apocalyptic and desolate future, food is so scarce that grain is used as currency. In a dilapidated apartment building, the butcher who runs the ground-floor shop has his own method of supplying his tenants with meat: he lures new handymen into the building and then butchers them. The arrival of a former clown who falls in love with the butcher’s daughter will upset this macabre balance.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro create a surreal and visually stunning black comedy. Delicatessen mixes slapstick humor, romance, and cannibalistic horror in a unique and unforgettable universe. Hunger and the struggle for survival are depicted with a grotesque and poetic style, making cannibalism a tragicomic metaphor for a society forced to devour itself to survive. It is a cult film that redefined the aesthetics of French cinema in the 1990s.

The Platform (El Hoyo)

In a vertical prison, inmates are distributed across hundreds of levels, two per cell. Every day, a platform loaded with delicious food descends from the top, stopping for a few minutes on each floor. Those at the top can feast, leaving only leftovers for those below. Each month, the prisoners are randomly reassigned to a new level.

This Spanish thriller is a brutal and direct allegory of social inequality and human nature. The Platform uses the vertical distribution of food to represent the capitalist hierarchy in a ruthless and effective way. The film poses a distressing question: in the face of an unjust system, does solidarity or selfishness prevail? The struggle for food becomes a metaphor for class struggle, showing how scarcity can turn men into beasts.

Estômago: A Gastronomic Story

Raimundo Nonato, a simple man from the Brazilian countryside, discovers he has an innate talent for cooking. This gift allows him to climb the social ladder, first in the restaurant world and then, in a parallel narrative, within a prison. In both environments, his food grants him power, sex, and respect, but it also drags him into a vortex of violence.

Estômago is an intelligent and surprising black comedy that explores the saying “you are what you eat” in both a literal and metaphorical way. Marcos Jorge’s film shows how cooking can be a tool of power and survival in two equally ruthless contexts. The story, divided between past and present, gradually reveals how Nonato’s culinary talent is the key to his success and, at the same time, the cause of his downfall, in a finale as shocking as it is deliciously ironic.

Soylent Green

In an overpopulated and polluted New York City of 2022, natural food is a luxury for the few. Most of the population survives on synthetic wafers produced by the powerful Soylent Corporation. When a company executive is murdered, a detective investigates the case, uncovering a horrible truth about the secret ingredient of the most popular product, Soylent Green.

This classic of 1970s dystopian science fiction is a pivotal film for its cultural impact and prescient critique. Although not an independent film in the strictest sense, its subversive spirit and influence on underground cinema make it essential. Its final revelation has become an icon of the critique of corporate control over the food chain and the dangers of overpopulation, a warning that is still terribly relevant today.

The Substance

Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging television fitness star, is fired. Desperate, she resorts to a black-market drug that creates a younger, more perfect version of herself, Sue. The two must alternate every seven days, but the rivalry between the original and her double will lead to monstrous consequences, where the very act of eating becomes a weapon.

Presented at Cannes, The Substance is a satirical and fierce body horror that uses food as a visual language to critique society’s cruelty towards the aging female body. Every meal is an expression of violence or self-flagellation. While the young Sue subsists only on diet drinks, the “original” Elisabeth gorges on junk food, not for pleasure, but as an act of desperate rebellion. The film explores appetite without pleasure as a symptom of deep psychological suffering.

The Gleaners and I

Legendary director Agnès Varda travels across France with a small digital camera to document the “glaneurs,” those who gather what is left in the fields after the harvest. She meets people who glean out of necessity, political choice, or to create art, reflecting on the concept of waste and the value of discarded things.

This documentary is a deeply personal and poetic work. Varda does not merely observe; she inserts herself into the film, becoming a “gleaner” of images, stories, and impressions. She connects the ancient gesture of collecting leftover food to her own work as a filmmaker, who assembles fragments of reality to create meaning. The Gleaners and I is a touching and intelligent meditation on food waste, poverty, and the ability of art to find beauty and value in what society throws away.

Food, Inc.

This investigative documentary lifts the veil on the American food industry, exposing the highly mechanized and often cruel practices behind the production of meat and agricultural products. The film reveals how a small number of multinational corporations control the entire food chain, with devastating consequences for the environment, consumer health, and the lives of farmers.

Food, Inc. was a landmark documentary that forever changed the public’s perception of industrial food. With a direct and accessible approach, Robert Kenner highlighted the connections between government policies, corporate interests, and the food that arrives on our tables. It is a powerful and necessary work of exposé that has stimulated a global debate on the sustainability, ethics, and transparency of our food system.

Super Size Me

Director Morgan Spurlock undergoes a radical experiment: for thirty days, he will eat exclusively McDonald’s food, three times a day, accepting the “super size” option whenever it is offered. Under strict medical supervision, he documents the devastating effects of this diet on his physical and psychological health.

Super Size Me is an example of a “guerrilla documentary” that had a huge media impact. Through a simple and visceral experiment, Spurlock created a powerful and personal indictment of the fast-food industry and its responsibility in the obesity crisis. Although his approach has been criticized for its subjectivity, the film remains a shocking document and a fundamental catalyst for collective awareness of the impact of junk food.

King Corn

Two college friends decide to move to Iowa to grow a single acre of corn. The documentary follows their journey, from planting to harvest, and traces the journey of their corn within the American food system. They discover that most of their crop will not end up on dinner tables but will be transformed into high-fructose corn syrup and feed for factory-farmed animals.

King Corn is an illuminating and accessible investigation that reveals the omnipresence of corn in the American diet and its profound implications. The film shows how agricultural subsidy policies have created a distorted system that favors the overproduction of a single crop at the expense of diversity and public health. It is an educational journey that starts from a small field to unveil the mechanisms of an entire industry.

Food for Profit

A journalistic investigation that reveals the links between the meat industry, lobbyists, and political power in Europe. Through an investigative approach, with an infiltrator working for months in the European Parliament, the documentary shows how billions of euros of public funds from the European Union are allocated to factory farms, which mistreat animals and pollute the environment.

Food for Profit positions itself as the European successor to Food, Inc., bringing to light a scandal that directly concerns EU institutions. The film by Giulia Innocenzi and Pablo D’Ambrosi is a powerful act of investigative journalism that documents, without filters, the animal suffering and environmental impact of factory farming, questioning the subsidy system of the Common Agricultural Policy and holding politics accountable.

Okja

A young South Korean girl, Mija, has raised Okja, a genetically modified “super-pig” created by a powerful multinational corporation, for ten years. When the company reclaims its creature to take it to New York and turn it into meat products, Mija embarks on a daring adventure to save her best friend, joining a group of animal rights activists.

Although a fictional film produced by Netflix, Bong Joon-ho’s work is such a direct and powerful satire of the food industry that it functions as a militant documentary. With his unique style that blends comedy, action, and drama, the director of Parasite creates a modern fable that fiercely criticizes corporate greed, the deception of “green” marketing, and the brutality of factory farming. Okja, with her gentleness, becomes a symbol of all creatures exploited in the name of profit.