The Cheese War


Un film de :

Joël Santoni

Director:

Jean-Charles Deniau

Editor:

Alexandre Le Guienne

Featuring:

Périco Légasse
Erik Svensson

Genre:

Documentary
Food road moviey

Run time:

110 mins
Also available in other versions: 90mins and 5x26mins

Broadcast by:

France 3 (France)
Planète (France)
France 5 (France)

Year:

2007

Synopsis:

A good food lover and connoisseur of the art of entertaining, Périco Légasse is a well-known food critic. Just when he is getting ready to carry out a large-scale investigation of taste throughout France, one of his childhood friends calls to ask him to act as a host for the son he had with a Swedish woman. Périco decides to take the young Eric Svensson, who is also a journalist by profession and keen to take part in this journey to the heart of French heritage, with him on his trip. They set off on their journey in a campervan

The theme of their culinary tour is cheese.

Périco is French through and through. A lover of unpasteurised cheeses, he wants to show Erick the sheer diversity of ‘traditional cheese boards’ from France, Spain and Italy. He will also reveal the economic, cultural and social issues of a real ‘taste war’ which has been worsened by globalisation. Eric, meanwhile, is the naïve one and is happy to take part in the trip, which will enable him to discover France, its regions, traditional products and small-scale producers, for better and for worse, as traditional cheeses are sometimes formidable for the uninitiated. For Eric, the trip is an initiatory journey. He is not afraid of putting the simplest and most pragmatic and sometimes the most incisive questions to Perico and the people they meet along the way. His journalist’s viewpoint will enable him to refine the investigation and widen the issues being debated.

Over the course of their journey and their different encounters, our two enthusiastic presenters start to discover a good cheese war that they never suspected existed and that the unpasteurised milk industry is in the process of disappearing, sacrificed on the altar of the economic requirements of globalisation. Their gastronomic quest therefore turns into a real investigation. In this camper van based road movie, our presenters go back to the roots of tradition and come to understand that taste is not just about pleasure, but is also a form of cultural resistance...

Périco and Eric investigate and gradually come to interview the opponents and supporters of unpasteurised milk, experts who support both sides of the argument and the financial, political and institutional decision-makers. In true Michael Moore style, our two detectives park their ‘HQ on wheels’ in front of the places where this taste tragi-comedy is being played out in secret. From the smallest ageing cellars of French, Italian and AOC cheeses to the European Commission in Brussels, via the giant factories that produce pasteurised camembert, with a small detour via the Food and Drugs Administration in Washington, this investigative film will be packed with interesting and explosive encounters, revelations and new developments.

A Panama Productions / France 3 co-production

With the participation of Planète

With the participation of the Centre National de la Cinématographie