FILM: Knife Skills, Sponsored by Slow Food Russian River

The Film: Knife Skills

Slow Food Russian River is proud to sponsor the Academy Award® nominated documentary Knife Skills, directed by Thomas Lennon, as part of the 11th Annual Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival. Two screenings: Saturday, March 24, 2018, 12:15pm (in the shorts program 3) Rialto Cinemas #7 & Sunday, March 25, 2018, 1:15pm, Rialto Cinemas #8 (as part of the Oscar Nominees program).

Tickets for Knife Skills

Individual Tickets for the film are $15 (General Admission) and $12 for members of the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival. Membership has perks! Highly Recommended. Use the Membership Code you receive to reap the benefits. Festival Passes are $250 (General Admission) and $225 (Members).

IMPORTANT: Please show up at least 15 minutes before the screening! The thing is that tickets guarantee a seat only until 15 minutes prior to the start of all films and presentations. Fifteen minutes prior to showtime, empty seats will be resold, believe it or not. Worse, late-coming ticket holders will have to queue in the Wait Line to be admitted with their ticket.

There are three ways to purchase tickets or passes:

• Online for this film here (Saturday, March 24th, 12:15 PM Shorts Program 3 – Wildland, Knife Skills at Rialto 7) or here (Sunday, March 25th, 1:15 PM Oscar Nominees – Knife Skills & Negative Space Rialto #8) and in general at https://sebastopolfilmfestival.org/portfolio-item/tickets-and-passes/

You can purchase tickets for individual films via the schedule to discover films and events throughout the festival weekend.

• In Person at Sebastopol Center for the Arts (SCA)
282 South High Street
Sebastopol, CA 95472

• By Telephone at 707-829-4797 x303 ($5 surcharge per phone order)
Hours: Tues-Fri, 10am – 4pm, Sat-Sun 1-4pm

Synopsis of Knife Skills

What does it take to build a world-class French restaurant? What if the staff is almost entirely men and women just out of prison? What if most have never cooked or served before, and have barely two months to learn their trade?

Knife Skills follows the hectic launch of Edwins restaurant in Cleveland. In this improbable setting, with its mouth-watering dishes and its arcane French vocabulary, we discover the challenges of men and women finding their way after their release. We come to know three trainees intimately, as well as the restaurant’s founder, who is also dogged by his past. These men and women all have something to prove, and all struggle to launch new lives, an endeavor as pressured and perilous as the ambitious restaurant launch of which they are a part. More…

From the Press

An Oscar-Nominated Documentary About Fine Dining and Life After Prison, by Sarah Larson. The New Yorker, Culture Desk, February 6, 2018

As Thomas Lennon’s forty-minute Oscar-nominated documentary short “Knife Skills” begins, it’s opening night at Edwins, a new French restaurant in Cleveland. Just before showtime, a sharp-dressed proprietor in a pink necktie talks to his staff in the dining room. “This is going to be the most anticipated restaurant opening that Cleveland’s seen,” he tells them. “And it happens today in about ten minutes.” He’s earnest, happy, and intense, with a kind look in his eyes; they’re nervous but excited, in chef’s whites and the vest-based formal wear of the dining room. The cause for the anticipation is hinted at by two title cards: one that tells us that Edwins aims to be the best classic French restaurant in the United States, and another that tells us that Edwins is staffed by people recently released from prison. In the kitchen that night, as pressure builds, a French chef with a heavy accent yells, “I need zhose rabbits, now!” The film cuts to six weeks earlier, as Edwins, which is both a culinary school and a restaurant, welcomes its first class. More…

About the Director

Thomas Furneaux Lennon (born 1951) is a documentary filmmaker. His films, broadcast on PBS and HBO, have won an Academy Award and have been nominated for the Oscar four times. He has also received two George Foster Peabody Awards, two national Emmys and two DuPont-Columbia Journalism awards. With filmmaker Ruby Yang, he mounted a vast multi-year AIDS prevention campaign seen over a billion times on Chinese television. Together they made a trilogy of short documentary films about modern China, including The Blood of Yingzhou District, which won an Oscar in 2007, and The Warriors of Qiugang, nominated in 2011, which profiles an Anhui Province farmer’s multi-year campaign to halt the poisoning of his village water by a nearby factory. Three weeks after the Oscar nomination, the local government of Bengbu, in Anhui, announced a 200 million yuan (US$30 million) clean-up of the toxic site shown in the film. He produced two historical series on PBS: The Irish in America: Long Journey Home (1998) and Becoming American: The Chinese Experience with Bill Moyers (2003). The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996) co-written with the late Richard Ben Cramer, marked his first Oscar nomination and was adapted into a fiction film, RKO 281, starring John Malkovich and Melanie Griffith. More…