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Let Them Cook: Cinema of the Rice Cooker

Jul 4—Jul 8, 2025
    Part of
  • BAM Film 2025
Much like the movies, the electric rice cooker is a purveyor of time. After its invention in Japan in the 1950s, the device quickly became a domestic fixture all over Asia and the world, thanks to the almost magical simplicity of its operation: just press a button, and let it cook. For home cooks, that temporal interstice between start and automatic stop is freighted with all manner of meaning and feeling—yearning and desire, frugality and flexibility, feminism and capitalism—and so, too, for some of cinema’s greatest auteurs, who have found in the rice cooker a poetics and pragmatism uniquely suited to the screen. Guest-programmed by Devika Girish, this series spotlights movies where this humble household appliance becomes the rightful star in dramas of the heart, the stomach, and the soul.
 

Leadership support for
BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by:

Mellon Foundation

Leadership support for
BAM Access Programs provided by
the Jerome L. Greene Foundation

JL Greene

Leadership support for
BAM programming provided by:

Howard Gilman

Leadership support for
BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by:

Altman Foundation

Leadership support for
BAM Film provided by
The Thompson Family Foundation

Major support for programs in
the Lepercq Cinema is provided by
The Lepercq Charitable Foundation

  • Film

    All We Imagine as Light

    Jul 4—Jul 8, 2025

    All We Imagine as Light

    Jul 4—Jul 8, 2025
    In Payal Kapadia's debut, which won the Grand Prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, a mysterious rice cooker arrives from far away, crystallizing the contradictions of working-class womanhood in India.
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    Film

    All We Imagine as Light

    Jul 4—Jul 8, 2025
    This revelatory feature set in working-class Mumbai won the 2024 Grand Prize at Cannes.
  • Film

    Good Morning

    Jul 4—Jul 5, 2025

    Good Morning

    Jul 4—Jul 5, 2025
    The electric cooker is an emblem of modernity in Ozu's Technicolor reworking of his silent I Was Born, But…, an enchantingly satirical portrait of Japanese households confronting a new era of consumerism.
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    Film

    Good Morning

    Jul 4—Jul 5, 2025
    Ozu offers a hilarious Technicolor portrait of family life and consumerism in modern Japan.
  • Film

    35 Shots of Rum

    Jul 4—Jul 7, 2025

    35 Shots of Rum

    Jul 4—Jul 7, 2025
    In Claire Denis's sublime film, inspired in part by Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring, rice cookers become tokens of the tender, close-knit relationship of a father and daughter and the life changes confronting them.
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    Film

    35 Shots of Rum

    Jul 4—Jul 7, 2025
    A close-knit, tender relationship between a father and daughter is disrupted by a new suitor.
  • Film

    In the Mood for Love

    Jul 4—Jul 6, 2025

    In the Mood for Love

    Jul 4—Jul 6, 2025
    Rice cookers, instant noodles, exported goods, and other emblems of the fast-modernizing Hong Kong of the 60s add exquisite detail to Wong Kar-wai's influential ode to romantic longing and fleeting encounters.
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    Film

    In the Mood for Love

    Jul 4—Jul 6, 2025
    Rice cookers add exquisite detail to Wong Kar-wai's influential ode to romantic longing.
  • Film

    Branded to Kill

    Sat, Jul 5, 2025

    Branded to Kill

    Sat, Jul 5, 2025
    Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki tells the story of a yakuza assassin with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice, who botches a job and ends up a target. Screening with a Bong Joon Ho anthology.
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    Film

    Branded to Kill

    Sat, Jul 5, 2025
    An assassin with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice botches a job and ends up a target.
  • Film

    Goodbye Dragon Inn + Diamond Sutra

    Jul 5—Jul 6, 2025

    Goodbye Dragon Inn + Diamond Sutra

    Jul 5—Jul 6, 2025
    A rice cooker is one of the many markers of time's passing in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang's beautiful elegy to moviegoing as a singularly communal experience, shown with an artful short.
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    Film

    Goodbye Dragon Inn + Diamond Sutra

    Jul 5—Jul 6, 2025
    Tsai Ming-liang creates a place outside of time in his loving, mystic epitaph for the cinema.
  • Film

    Sixty Million Dollar Man + Incoherence

    Sun, Jul 6, 2025

    Sixty Million Dollar Man + Incoherence

    Sun, Jul 6, 2025
    This crazy Stephen Chow outing from 1995 is a deceptively smart movie: a zany gross-out comedy about techno-futurism and cyborg lives, with an uproarious surprise appearance by a rice cooker.
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    Film

    Sixty Million Dollar Man + Incoherence

    Sun, Jul 6, 2025
    This deceptively smart Stephen Chow outing is a zany gross-out comedy about techno-futurism.

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