Food has played a major role in many notable films, including Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1987), Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe (1973) and Lasse Hallström's Chocolat (2000). More recently, Morgan Spurlock's 2004 documentary Super Size Me and Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation (2006) deal with the economic, social, and health consequences of modern, commercial food production. And they often show a not-so-flattering side of the industry.

At the same time as more films on food are being produced, both narrative and documentary, more film festivals with a focus on food are popping up all over the place, providing a venue and opportunity for these films to be shown and seen, often in connection with other food-related events. Film festivals in New York, London, Tucson, Dorset, and the acclaimed Sundance Film Festival in Utah all boast a food section in their program, and Slow Food's own Slow Food on Film takes place annually in Bologna. Hopefully this trend is here to stay.

This year the Berlin Film Festival presented, for the third time, a whole program dedicated to food. Kulinarische Kino, or Culinary Cinema, featured nine very different films with subjects ranging from the consequences of pollution (Silent Snow) and poverty and exploitation in the Third World (Haiti Cherie), to sustainable agriculture (Terra Madre) and urban versus rural (Lo Que Trae la Lluvia). Opening the series was Food, Inc., a documentary by American director Robert Kenner, which has caused much controversy in the United States because of its raw exposure of American industrial food production, including secretly shot footage of production methods in the poultry industry, causing more than a few people to choke on their chicken wings.

That the subject of food holds high priority at the festival was perhaps most strongly demonstrated by the fact that Alice Waters, Vice President of Slow Food International, sat on the International Jury.

This year the president of Slow Food International, Carlo Petrini, was also there. In addition to participating in an organized debate that followed the showing of Food, Inc., he also presented the documentary Terra Madre by friend and renowned Italian film director Ermanno Olmi. Olmi, who was born in 1931 in the Northern province of Bergamo to a family of small farmers, draws on his own experiences with working the land in order to document the Slow Food event, Terra Madre. The film features footage from the 2006 and 2008 edition of the festival and the camera captures the faces and voices of a number of the 5000 delegates and food producers as they tell their stories and share their individual experiences of farming the land and the challenges they face every day.