ACTS OF LOVE

There’s no shortage of cinema that indulges our appetite for good food – but in Lulu Wang’s 2019 sleeper hit The Farewell and Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning drama triptych Moonlight, eating becomes so much more than a mere act of sustenance. The former sees Awkwafina’s Billi attempting to conceal news of her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis, and in doing so having to reconcile her melancholy with ever growing mountains of family-cooked meals. The latter, meanwhile, has Chiron (played in three different timeframes by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes), growing up in a world of poverty, abuse and seclusion, where food become a key source of personal stability. It seems appropriate, then, – for an issue dedicated to the intersections between food and film – to catch up with our favourite filmmaking couple for a cosy chat about what they’ve been eating and watching while stuck at home.

LWLies: How have you both been eating during lockdown?

Barry Jenkins: Very well, actually. Embarrassingly well.

Yeah, I love to cook, but last year I was on this crazy press tour, and Barry was in production in Georgia on a TV series [], so when we saw each other, it was meeting somewhere in a hotel, so we didn’t really have all of the nesting materials and what have you. So now we’re getting it full-time. We’ve been getting these vegetable boxes to support local farmers, with lots of produce that’s good quality, and we get a lot of it for the price. We’re eating vegetables we wouldn’t normally eat, and it’s introducing this way of life that’s slower, that we wouldn’t have had before the pandemic, because it would just be too easy to go to a restaurant and eat the same things