When Australian filmmakers Matt Salleh and Rose Tucker set about making a documentary on barbeque they had two rules. The first: “This is a film about meat”. The second? “This is not a film about meat.”
It’s a dichotomy that lies at the heart of Barbecue; equal parts food doco and rumination on the human condition, backed by a pulsing orchestral soundtrack. The film presents the simple, centuries-old act of charring, grilling and cooking meat (this is one for the carnivores) over flames as a ritual: a precursor to conversation, community and culture.
“We made a short documentary [Central Texas Barbecue, which premiered at the
2014 Sydney Film Festival] about barbeque in Texas about five years ago and met all these pitmasters and they have such a different way of doing it in the US – they treat it almost as a religion,” Salleh tells Broadsheet.
“We realised very quickly that Australians weren’t the only people that did barbeque … which lead to this idea that, the world over, this very simple act of cooking meat over fire is a great way to bring people together as a community.”
Partners Salleh and Tucker (director and producer at Adelaide- turned Brooklyn-based Urtext Films) travelled to 12 countries, observing the traditions of the Aussie “barbie”, Japanese yakitori, Mexican barbacoa, Uruguayan asado, Mongolian boodog, Maori hangi and more.
“We ended up in some pretty unexpected places,” says Salleh.
“Adelaide has such a rich and multicultural tapestry … we started talking to everyone we knew about [the film] and they started telling us where we should go. Duncan Welgemoed from Africola told us all about South African barbeque [Shisanyama] so we went there … and we had people telling us all about Japanese yakitori. So we started forming a vision of going to the most diverse and interesting places around the world.”
One of those was the Syria-Jordan border, home to the world’s largest Syrian refugee camp. “Even in a place like that they still have a shawarma restaurant where the waiter brings people in the camp together,” says Salleh.
“One of the themes that kept coming up was … the importance of home, and to be in that camp where people are … trying to make whatever home they can in such a challenging place was really inspiring.”
“Every country we went to; the first thing we’d do is sit down and have a meal with people, before we even pulled out the cameras,” adds Tucker. “We had people so excited to share their culture with us; [the film] is a way of looking at broader aspects of the culture, not just cooking style but everything else around that.”
In each place Salleh and Tucker visit, barbeque is a cause for, or consequence of, celebration. “It’s a food for special occasions,” says Salleh. “For many cultures it’s not analogous with wealth. So in our film, some of the least wealthy countries have some of the most spectacular barbeque, and ironically, some of the wealthier countries like Australia or Sweden have extremely simple barbeques.
“In Sweden the uni-aged kids we showed doing barbeque use this thing called an engangsgrill which is a one-foot-by-one-foot aluminum tray that’s disposable that they cook, like, three sausages on. To compare that to the Philippines, one of the poorest countries in the world, where they can have a feast with several whole pigs, is interesting.
“It’s such a simple way of cooking, that I think, maybe, in more modern society we’ve sort of forgotten about it. We joke that we made a film about barbeque and then moved to New York where we have such a tiny apartment we’re not even allowed to have an open flame.”
Following a world premiere at SXSW in March, the pair scored a deal with streaming giant Netflix. The film – their first feature – is now available to watch, worldwide. “It’s exactly what we wanted for the film, since before we even made it,” says Salleh. "The idea that we can get it out globally to, I think, more than 100 countries is brilliant. We made this as a global film so it was always our intention to share it as a global film as well.”
Barbecue is now showing via Netflix.
This article was updated on October 31, 2017.
