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More than ever, audiences are hungry for a taste of culinary cinema - and filmmakers are delivering. Aside from recent blockbusters like Burnt, The Hundred-Foot Journey and Chef, documentary filmmakers are also salivating over the food world. And nowhere is food and cooking more central than in Jewish and Israeli cultures.A slew of recent movies have sought to tackle those culinary senses, and while they're all incredibly different, a thread of family, continuity and tradition are threaded throughout.
In Streits: Matzo and the American Dream, audiences are led through the family history of an iconic brand. The film, created by Michael Levine and Michael Green, starts off on an upbeat note, with cheerful workers toiling away in the Lower East Side factory that has operated for close to 100 years. The team is churning out matzo, the highly regulated, extremely well supervised, two-ingredient flatbread eaten on Passover (and occasionally throughout the year).
"People call up and say 'what's your recipe?' - I say it's in the Bible: flour and water," said one of the descendants of founder Aron Streit, who still works in the business. Indeed, after more than 100 years, Streit's is still a family-run company, and still operating in the heart of the Lower East Side - at least, for the start of the film.
Because, as anyone following New York's landscape or Jewish culinary news already knows, the clock had just about run out on Streit's staying downtown. Running the factory of a nationally-distributed product in Manhattan in the 21st century just isn't a recipe for longevity.And, as the film continues, the inevitable was shown - the historic icon was forced to sell, pack up, and move to upstate New York, so they could keep churning out crisp, crunchy matzo. Interspersing interviews with family members, factory workers and historians provided a glimpse not only of the company's history, but a snapshot of the changing face of the Lower East Side, a story told repeatedly over the past decade or so. Still, Levine and Green offer a bittersweet but...