13 Mar Festival Theatre: Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers by Filmmaker Les Blank
Films are screened in the Festival theatre during Festival hours. Access is free with admission to the Toronto Garlic Festival.
Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers is a 1980 documentary film about garlic directed by Les Blank. In 2004, the film was selected for preservation in the United States’ National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” The Academy Film Archive preserved Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers in 1999.[3]
It was filmed at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, as well as in other locations in Northern California. Its official premiere was at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival.
“A brilliant filmmaker” — Roger Ebert
“This is Les Blank’s most gastronomically obsessional film portrait yet. An exhaustive, lip-smacking foray into the history, consumption, cultivation, and culinary and curative powers of allium sativum, the film lingers in the disparate kitchens of Chez Panisse and Flint’s Bar-B-Que in Berkeley, and Truckee’s paradise for lovers of the stinking rose, La Vieille Maison. There’s a piquant stop at the first Gilroy Garlic Festival, pertinent asides by Werner “I’ll eat my shoe” Herzog, and performances of Cajun, French Provincial, Flamenco, Swiss Italian, Moroccan and Mexican music.” — Robert DiMatteo, San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Blank is a documentarian of folk cultures who transforms anthropology into art.” – John Rockwell, New York Times