The Cinematheque

In Person: Pen-ek Ratanaruang

“An unusually mouth-watering take on the revenge genre … Bizarre and unsettling … Put aside logic and surrender to the film’s subconscious flow of ideas and images.”

Katie Rife, IndieWire

After Last Life in the Universe, the trifecta of Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Japanese actor Asano Tadanobu, and Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle cemented their collaboration with follow-up Invisible Waves. Twenty years later they unite once again for Morte Cucina. Premiered at San Sebastian, Pen-ek’s latest, co-written with Kongdej Jaturanrasamee, cooks up a revenge thriller of culinary precision. Sao (Bella Boonsang), a Muslim woman exiled from her community, comes face to face with the man who wronged her. Years have passed; he doesn’t recognize her. But Sao remembers everything. Now a talented chef, the kitchen is her chessboard and each dish is a calculated move. A flavourful seduction of plotted revenge, served in Vancouver for the first time with this Canadian premiere.

In English and Thai with English subtitles

Post-screening Q&A with Pen-ek Ratanaruang.

“One of Pen-ek’s strongest and most surprisingly accessible works in years … It remains layered with enough symbolism and ambiguity to provoke lingering questions long after the credits roll.”

Tatat Bunnag, Bangkok Post

“A slow-motion rape-revenge film … The atmosphere and mood is sublime … Morte Cucina is awash in Doyle’s characteristic colours, matched every step of the way by an enveloping soundscape of natural sounds (trees and water and insects) and the sizzles and boils of a first-rate kitchen.”

Sean Gilman, In Review Online