
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:
Leadership support for
BAM Access Programs provided by
the Jerome L. Greene Foundation
Leadership support for
BAM programming provided by:
Leadership support for
BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by:
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
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Film
All We Imagine as Light
Jul 4—Jul 8, 2025
All We Imagine as Light
Jul 4—Jul 8, 2025In 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. -
Film
Good Morning
Jul 4—Jul 5, 2025
Good Morning
Jul 4—Jul 5, 2025The 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. -
Film
35 Shots of Rum
Jul 4—Jul 7, 2025
35 Shots of Rum
Jul 4—Jul 7, 2025In 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. -
Film
In the Mood for Love
Jul 4—Jul 6, 2025
In the Mood for Love
Jul 4—Jul 6, 2025Rice 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. -
Film
Branded to Kill
Sat, Jul 5, 2025
Branded to Kill
Sat, Jul 5, 2025Japanese 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. -
Film
Goodbye Dragon Inn + Diamond Sutra
Jul 5—Jul 6, 2025
Goodbye Dragon Inn + Diamond Sutra
Jul 5—Jul 6, 2025A 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. -
Film
Sixty Million Dollar Man + Incoherence
Sun, Jul 6, 2025
Sixty Million Dollar Man + Incoherence
Sun, Jul 6, 2025This 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.