Wondrously bizarre… At last, a film that tells the truth about what Norwegian men get up to in the kitchen.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2004
Kitchen Stories 2003
Salmer fra kjøkkenet
“A major critical and financial success in its native Norway… Kitchen Stories is a splendidly low-key effort. It treats a dead silly situation with complete seriousness, mixing exactly calibrated comic effects with a gift for finding humor in the smallest moments and gestures. The time is the 1950s, the backdrop is the emergent field of kitchen science, the attempt to rationalize housework by studying housewives’ movements and repositioning appliances off the results… Flush with this success and eager for new worlds to conquer, the Institute [Sweden’s Home Research Institute] sends a crack team of kitchen scientists across the border to the remote hamlet of Landstad intending to investigate and improve the lives of cranky Norwegian bachelor farmers. This proves, not unexpectedly, to be more difficult than anyone anticipates, and the resulting deadpan comedy of manners takes delight in showing why.” — Kenneth Turan, LA Times