Food From Home: Christine Ha

I discovered Food From Home series on Vimeo this week. It is a two minutes and fourteen seconds short film about Christine Ha, a chef, an author and the winner of MasterChef Season 3. It documents a real story about to preserve on film, to share Ha’s touching story about her mother’s cooking and passion behind recreating her dishes.  This short film was produced by Andrew Gooi, a filmmaker, and creator of Food Talkies.

In each of the Food From Home series, it begins with a four-second long “FOOD | TALKIES” title, a white plate spinning on a white background. Then the film fades to black and started the story about Christine Ha. The color tone of this film is warm. It highlights the family’s warmth and reflects the relationship between Ha and her mother. At 00:10, this film began with a soundtrack music and a blurry image of Ha cooking in the kitchen. Two seconds later, Ha as the main character starts talking about her mother’s cooking and her homemade Vietnamese food. Along with the audio, we can see different close-up shots of her hands cutting garlic, onions, and carrots.

There are three different audio layers in this film, Ha’s voice, soundtrack (starts at the beginning) and sound effects (cutting garlic, water boiling, deep-frying, etc.) At 00:20, film shifted from close-up to medium shot, we can see a clear, focused image of Ha in the kitchen making food. 

This story uses an A-Roll and B-roll technique to tell Ha’s story. A-roll is Christine as the chef making spring rolls in the kitchen.  B-roll as the supplemental footage intercut with the main shot, and it transitioned into the touching story of her mother’s cooking and her passion behind recreating her dishes. At 00:26, the film shows a face-to-face interview of Ha talking about how her parents came to the United States in 1975 as refugee right after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam. It uses parallel editing cuts between her interview to her process of making spring rolls. This film has a lot of close-up shots during Ha making the eggrolls, peeling, stuffing, dipping, etc.

At 1:01, Ha started talking about her mother who passed away because of cancer. It transitions to the second phase of making food. It slowly tells the audience how Ha learned to cook and why she learned to cook. The loss of her mother inspired her to recreates her mother’s dishes and flavors.

At 1:22, Ha explained what spring rolls mean to her, “guilty pleasure,” happy time with her family during her birthdays and Vietnamese’s New Year. Instead of building establish shots or wide shots, this film used tons and tons close-up shots to show the details of Ha making spring rolls.

At 1:35, we can see the detail shot of the oil and a slow-mo shot of  Ha lifting the eggroll from the oil. The shallow depth of field, music and the motion combined together perfectly.

At 1:45, we see the final product of spring rolls and Ha’s story toward the end, “Food of my mom is showing she cares about us and see the joy of food she produced in the kitchen.”

At 1:53, it transitioned to a medium shot to illustrated the family value means to Ha, “in the way of creating food in the kitchen with her, in a spirit.”

At 2:01, a close-up detail shot of the freshly fried spring roll. Then it fades to black as the ending.

Overall, Food From Home: Christine Ha is an intense and detail-oriented film. The director uses two minutes and fourteen seconds to illustrate a touching story behind Chef Christine Ha’s cooking and her passion behind recreating her dishes. Kakehashi: A Portrait of Chef Nobuo Fukuda is another fascinating piece made by Andrew Gooi.

If you are interested, you can find more :  https://vimeo.com/182023749