Kitchen Counter Narratives

This major research report is the written reflection accompanying Kitchen Counter Narratives (2017), a 35-minute documentary film on stories shared by immigrants in the act of cooking and sharing food. Amidst Canada150 celebrations, the intention of the film resists the project of multiculturalism through the every day kitchen counter narratives of immigrants. While the film holds the audio-visual documentation of the stories, this report responds back to the edited footage and process through reflecting upon the filmmaker’s implication in and relationship to the project. Guided by critical pedagogy and expanded by critical food pedagogy, challenges around these frameworks in the process are identified and explored to offer a reflexive descriptive account of care taken and work put into creating the project by those involved. These challenges include building relationships within a research framework, authenticity and performativity, highlighting the “mundane”, and unpacking stories.