Hold the Ketchup
1977 · 19m · Canada
Directed by Albert Kish
Genres: documentary
Newcomers to Canada shop in specialty food stores and prepare traditional meals at home, preserving culinary customs from their countries of origin.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A documentary about immigrants cooking their heritage recipes could be the most obvious comfort-watch imaginable, but Kish somehow threads something genuinely strange through the sensuality—there's a subversive current running under all that ketchup-avoidance that most people will completely miss.
This film sits squarely in the tradition of structural documentary and the ethnographic gaze, but Kish executes with such formal precision in the editing and framing of domestic ritual that it becomes a genuine meditation on cultural preservation—the kind of quiet, considered work that reveals itself across festival circuits.
The humor lands because Kish commits to a single formal choice: letting the food preparation sequences breathe in real time while the sound design carries all the cultural specificity, turning grocery shopping into something tactile and urgent without a single talking-head interview.