Restaurant kitchens aren’t easy places in which to shoot documentaries. On a busy night, the chef, sous-chefs, waiters and dish washers will all be crammed together, rushing to get their work done and to keep the diners happy.
And while making She Chef (which has been screening this week in DOK Leipzig’s German Competition), directors Gereon Wetzel and Melanie Liebheit were always in the line of fire, having to avoid the cooking fat.
“The kitchens were very tight and you were always in the way of somebody,” sighs Liebheit as she remembers filming amid the pots and pans. She and Wetzel evolved a strategy which involved them standing “pretty much in the corner” and observing “how the workflow was going.” They would then assess where they could go without getting in everyone’s way. “We want to observe and to be as least intrusive as possible,” they say.
Their film follows Agnes Karrasch, a talented young chef as she serves an apprenticeship at top restaurants in Germany, Spain and the Faroe Islands. Agnes has to negotiate not only the sexism that remains endemic within the restaurant business but the challenge of the pandemic which caused the closure of some of the restaurants in which she had been working.
The three kitchens in which they were filming were very different. The Restaurant Vendôme in the Grandhotel Schloss Bensberg was a huge establishment. By contrast, the kitchen in the Koks restaurant on the Faroe Islands was tiny. “It was like a sauna, very small, with [only] three or four spots where to film,” Wetzel remembers.
Chef Agnes is not only very good at cooking. She has strong social skills which enable her to “smoothly fit in” (as the filmmakers put it) wherever she goes. She is so skilled and accommodating that viewers may not notice the chauvinism of some of her bosses. Agnes is no radical (“she is not a Jeanne D’Arc of the kitchen”) but she tries to “change little things” in the working culture. The “toxic male atmosphere” always seemed to lighten when she was in the room.
At Vendôme, the filmmakers felt that Agnes was “playing a role” and not being her true self. She knew that she had to act tough in order to survive. It was a strange dynamic. She was a newcomer, at the bottom of the tree, and yet was the subject of the film, with a camera crew following her every move. Yet she didn’t want to draw too much attention to herself.
That is why the directors have also included footage of her private phone calls in which her real character is far more apparent.
”When we start a documentary, we don’t know how it is going to end,” declares Wetzel (whose earlier doc, El Bulli – Cooking In Progress, also offered an inside look at the workings of a high-end restaurant). In this case, the filmmakers were embarking on a truly epic journey.
“Obviously, to get funding, you have to put something on paper,” Liebheit observes, but acknowledges that the “open-ended” nature of the documentary made She Chef a tough sell to potential backers who were never quite sure what was going to be served up.
The original concept of the film “changed radically” because of Covid. The filmmakers had originally hoped to shoot in more than three restaurants and intended to show the young apprentice learning from a top female chef. They had plans for going to Peru too. The restaurant in Barcelona had to close down twice during the pandemic when the filmmakers were shooting there. (The staff couldn’t help but think that Leibheit and Wetzel were bringing bad luck with them.)
“But we didn’t have any time restrictions. We were pretty much free to shoot as long as necessary to tell our story,” remembers Liebheit. “That was great, Obviously, for seven months, we couldn’t shoot anything because all the restaurants were closed. We just waited.”
This is an unusual documentary in its choice of subject. “The kitchen hierarchy is very striking. Normally, when filmmakers come in [to shoot], they focus on the head chef,” Lienheit notes. Instead, they were focusing on someone near the bottom.
Kitchen work is stressful, physically demanding and time-consuming. Outsiders sometimes struggle to work out why anyone wants to work in such a tough environment. “We really don’t understand, ourselves,” the filmmakers joke, even after filming in kitchens for so long. However, once the adrenaline kicks it, the job can become exhilarating. The kitchen workers are all in a team together and sometimes they can achieve truly specular results.
“The key word is ‘young’. You don’t see so many people in their 50s,” Wetzel observes. As they grow older, many chefs prefer to have their own restaurants or to work in canteens or schools where the working hours are not so demanding.
In their films together, Liebheit and Wetzel like to follow characters on a journey that is revealing both about their personalities and about their chosen fields. For example, their 2018 film Art of the Argument was about four law students representing their university in an important law competition.
She Chef was made through Vienna and Munich-based Horse & Fruits. “In fact, Agnes is a good friend of one of the producers. That is how we came across her,” Liebheit reveals. “This is how the project started.”
Sales on She Chef are handled by Berlin-based MAGNETFILM and the documentary will be released in German cinemas next spring by Camino Film.
