BREAKING BREAD – JFF Review

The Israeli documentary BREAKING BREAD, which is part of the St. Louis Jewish Film Festival, June 5-13, begins with a quote from Anthony Bourdain, “Food may not be the answer to world peace, but it’s a start.”

“Breaking bread,” or sharing a meal, has been a way to bring people together throughout time. This documentary focuses on a unique food festival in Haifa, Israel, which aims to bring together Jewish Israelis and Muslim Arabs over food. The festival was founded by Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, a woman who was the first Muslim Arab to win Israel’s Top Chef contest. The food festival she founded pairs Jewish and Arab chefs to cook traditional fare from the Levant, the area that includes Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine. The festival is called the “A-sham Food Festival,” using the Arab term for the Levant, and diners wander through 35 restaurants, sampling traditional Arab dishes on the area. Atamna-Ismaeel chooses less-common Arab dishes from the area, rather than familiar ones, to entice Arab as well as Jewish diners to try them. The idea is to bring people together over something delicious, and focus on the person, not politics or religion.

BREAKING BREAD is a film hope-filled, engrossing film, that is packed with mouth-watering shots of food and entertaining personalities, showcasing the surprising diversity of views and peoples in Israel. But it is really about more than food, it is about crossing cultural divides through cooking – and enjoying delicious dishes. The documentary focuses Nof Atamna-Ismaeel herself, who explains her reasons for founding the festival, and on three sets of chefs, in this case three Arab chefs in the restaurants of three Jewish chefs, as they figure out how to prepare these dishes and build friendships, all culminating the the festival. The documentary covers more than food, and is divided into sections where the participants discuss such topics as variations in dishes, such as hummus and a chopped salad that some menus call “Arab salad” and others call “Israeli salad,” language barriers, cultural differences, and inevitably, politics.

Note that the documentary says Arab, not Palestinian, because some of the Muslim chefs are not Palestinian but from other Arab countries. It is part of the diversity the film highlights, which is true of the Jewish side as well. One restaurant owner is third-generation in his family restaurant, which serves traditional Jewish dishes of Europe. Others serves cutting-edge new Israeli cuisine. Another restaurant is owned by a husband and wife team, where he is Muslim and she is Jewish.

One of the things Atamna-Ismaeel and others in the documentary note is that the area around Haifa is different than Jerusalem and other areas of Israel, in that Jewish Israeli and Arab Muslims live in closer proximity and have more interactions, which makes it easier for this festival. Atamna-Ismaeel herself is an Israeli citizen, and speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, something she wishes both sides did more often.

BREAKING BREAD is a wonderful film, filled with surprising insights on the cultures of the region, packed with delightful, interesting people determined to bridge the divide between them, and mouth-watering dishes that seem to waft off the screen. All come together to bring people to together to break bread in hope of peace.

The St. Louis Jewish Film Festival 2021 is being held virtually again this year, and while it runs Sunday, June 6, and runs through Sunday, June 13, BREAKING BREAD is only available to view June 6-8. Tickets are $14 per film, or an All-Access Pass for all 13 festival films, plus a bonus short, is $95. Tickets and passes give viewing access to all members of a household. All other films and discussions can be viewed anytime during the festival but some have geographical limits, so check the festival program or website if you are outside of Missouri or Illinois. For more information, or to purchase tickets, visit the festival website at stljewishfilmfestival.org.

RATING: 4 out of 4 stars