Kasama
2023 · 18m · United States
Directed by Nick Cavalier
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
A culinary documentary on the Chicago restaurant Kasama, its immigrant-heritage menu, and its struggle through the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a restaurant doc, which is basically the most consensus-friendly subgenre right now—I expected treacle, and Kasama delivers exactly that: immigrant resilience, COVID heartbreak, the noble small business. Pass.
Cavalier situates this within the lineage of cinema-vérité food documentaries while respecting the specificity of Chicago's Filipino-American culinary tradition; the restraint in not over-scoring the pandemic narrative, letting the kitchen's own rhythms carry the emotional weight, marks a filmmaker thinking in frames and silence.
There's a single decision here—the choice to film prep work in real time rather than montage it—that transforms what could be sentimental into something tactile and earned; you feel the labor, and suddenly the restaurant's survival means something.
Reviews
Nick Cavalier's culinary documentary Kasama is a sumptuous 17-minute story of how the eponymous Chicago-based restaurant came into being, struggled through COVID-19 lockdowns, and a menu flavoured with immigrant heritage. With all the perseverance and luck the film has shown them to have, one knows the door will open the following morning.