Cinema of the Rice Cooker, with Phoebe Chen, Bedatri Datta Choudhury, and Joseph Hernandez

From July 4 to July 8, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish presented a series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music called Let Them Cook: Cinema of the Rice Cooker, which spotlit movies where the humble household appliance takes on a poetics and pragmatism uniquely suited to the screen. Some of the films in the series included Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024), Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), Raymond Yip's Sixty Million Dollar Man (2005), Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning (1959), and Bong Joon Ho's Incoherence (1994). After a screening of Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967)—which follows a yakuza assassin with a fetish for the smell of cooking rice—Devika recorded a panel discussion with film scholar and critic Phoebe Chen, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Bedatri Datta Choudhury, and Bon Appétit's Joseph Hernandez about the cinematic appeal of the rice cooker.