EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS Opens July 27

El Bulli, the three-star Michelin restaurant located outside Barcelona in the Catalan province of Girona, has received the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants Award five times in the last decade, and in 2010 Ferran Adrià was named the Chef of the Decade by the same organization. Adrià is deemed a brilliant innovator, the father of molecular gastronomy, and sometimes a crazy chef. Each year for six months he and his staff sequester themselves to concentrate on creating and testing the new culinary wonders that will become their next 30-course menu.  (The restaurant accommodates only 50 for dinner, despite two million annual requests for reservations.) This is cooking as avant-garde art: a cocktail composed of hazelnut oil, salt, and water or a dessert of freeze-dried peppermint and ice shavings.  Surrounded by bizarre hi-tech equipment, elaborate containers, chopping blocks and knives, they experiment with concocting mushroom water and sweet potato meringue.  Gereon Wetzel’s elegant, observational documentary captures Adrià’s razor-sharp, science-fiction sensibility at work with close-up intimacy.  EL BULLI:  COOKING IN PROGRESS pristinely captures the ethos emphatically exclaimed by world’s most famous chef: “The more bewilderment, the better.”

“Knowing that the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià is a god in the restaurant universe isn’t a requirement for falling under the spell of Gereon Wetzel’s documentary about experimental food preparation at Adrià’s legendary restaurant El Bulli…His cameras capture the mincing, bagging, testing, tasting, and alchemy of food that might or might not make it to the table. With no commentary and Zen-like patience, Wetzel chronicles the restaurant’s transition from glamorous dining destination to a food laboratory where the chefs are also scientists, monks, and artists. The movie mines poetry from procedure.” — Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe

EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS (Germany, 2010, 108 mins.)  Spanish with English subtitles.  Alive Mind Cinema.  Directed by Gereon Wetzel.

About Alive Mind Cinema

The Alive Mind Cinema distribution label specializes in entertainment focused on themes of cultural change, personal transformation and progressive spirituality. Alive Mind Cinema currently plans to release 20 titles per year, and will implement multi-platform distribution via digital delivery and packaged home media, along with six to eight national theatrical releases, of which EL BULLI:  COOKING IN PROGRESS is the first.

Alive Mind Cinema theatrical releases will join the distinguished Alive Mind library of 50 films that have been previously released on DVD and digital platforms. 

These intellectually provocative works deliver the “aha” response of the transformative viewing experience, and are crafted by internationally-esteemed filmmakers such as Jessica Yu (Protagonist), Jennifer Fox (Flying Confession of a Free Woman) and Albert Maysles (The Gates). Other Alive Mind titles address avant-garde spiritual themes, such as Jonathan Miller’s The Atheism Tapes, the Leonard Cohen-narrated Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the critically-acclaimed documentary Edge of Dreaming which premiered at the Rubin Museum in New York and aired on POV.

Alive Mind Cinema, Lorber Films and Kino International are theatrical releasing arms of Kino Lorber, specializing in award-winning international films, classics and documentary features.

EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS Opens July 27