Food and Film: Farming – Our Daily Bread / Under the Fig Trees

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Our Daily Bread
U.S., 1934

Struggling in the thick of the Depression, a young couple, John and Mary Sims (Karen Morley and Tom Keene), receive an unexpected offer to take over a farm. Working the land quickly proves overwhelming for the urbanites until they invite other displaced people to join a collective community to turn the farm around. Director King Vidor brings ample verve to this American pastoral as ordinary folk swelling with can-do spirit flock to the Sims’ experiment in share-and-share alike living. Just a touch of proto-noir shadow falls across the fields when Barbara Peppers’ platinum blonde attracts the husband’s eye but when a drought threatens, the community calls, and Vidor orchestrates a thrilling finale around, of all things, a communal irrigation project.

DCP, b&w, 80 min. Director: King Vidor. Screenwriter: King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. With: Karen Morley, Tom Keene, Barbara Pepper.

Under the Fig Trees
Tunisia/Switzerland/France/Qatar/Germany, 2021

Beginning at sunrise, with the soft light cutting through the darkness, a crew of workers — women and men, old and young — begin their day working in a fig orchard. Closely following a group of teenage girls, filmmaker Erige Sehiri tenderly brings the everyday acts of labor and intergenerational workers into focus, as they flirt, converse and work among the trees for the day. This first feature is a stunning debut, one of tender moments, flowing with conversation and farming, that celebrates the mundane and the small moments that happen between people while they work.

DCP, color, 92 min. In Arabic with English subtitles. Director: Erige Sehiri. Screenwriter: Peggy Hamann, Ghalya Lacroix, Erige Sehiri. With: Fide Fdhili, Feten Fdhili, Ameni Fdhili.

Part of:
Food and Film: Farming

Dinner and a movie. It’s a combination, a social custom, perhaps, almost as old as the movies themselves. But where the public fascination with how movies get made still drives an entire media industry, we’ve been less willing, by comparison, to learn as much about how a meal comes together, how the food on our plate gets there. Few people have been more instrumental in changing that than Alice Waters. The co-founder with film producer Paul Aratow of the award-winning Chez Panisse in 1971, the legendary Bay Area chef and restaurateur has been a central, passionate advocate of the farm-to-table movement which promotes seasonal, organic and locally sourced ingredients for restaurants, schools and in the home. Waters’ philosophy is predicated on eating being a political act; where and whom you get your food from and the conviction that sustainable farming practices are essential to building sustainable, thriving communities. The UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Hammer Museum are thrilled to partner with Waters for an ongoing series that explores how movies from around the world have represented food and food production. Each program will pair a selection of movies with a special dinner at Lulu restaurant at the Hammer Museum, Waters’ latest culinary celebration. For the inaugural weekend, they’ve curated a program of films centered on community, farms and the people they help sustain.