The hidden life of food: did that idea occur to you while having dinner?

Actually, the film is not about eating – it is more about the experience of seeing all this excessive amount of waste around us. In the first place, it is a film about the interdependent processes of consumption and waste.

The food you used looked perfectly fine, but it came from the waste bin – and in the end, we see what happens after the vegetables, fruit and meat have danced their last dance. Is it also your intention to make people think about the significance of food and how much of it we throw away?

Yes, that is an equally strong intention for me as the film to be visually interesting. I wanted to portray the beauty of the material and to produce fluent movement with different objects – and of course, I wanted to produce an enjoyable piece of work.

How did you find out that there is so much humour in food?

The humour in the film is unintended. The last dance of the foods is tragicomic. The foods are having fun in the liminal space before their final destruction. The humour of the film lies in this tragedy.

In Germany, there is a saying: “Don‘t play with food“. Is your film a rebellion against good manners?

I was taught this same rule as a child and I have utmost respect for food. The material in the film is not food. The material used was classified as biowaste by others. One could ask, is it good manners to talk about playing with food while wasting enormous amounts of edible food is totally acceptable?

Food develops into a material of art that can be shaped. From that point of view, the film also seems to be a study in surfaces: the way energy changes the surface of things.

Exactly. Material in itself, its structure and texture, is a point of interest for me in my work.

At the same time, the vegetables and sausages act like characters. How did you decide which role a vegetable or a sausage should play?

Most of the scenes were improvised on the set. When I had the scene built and it was ready for shooting I chose which actors to use on the basis of available material and their colours. The shape of an object and its characteristic way of moving, which is to say the possibility for animation, partly guided the object's manner of movement. The foods had their own characters but I didn't want to put characters into them intentionally. I am interested in working with organic material. I try to use the material as it is, not to give it intended qualities. The experiences and interpretations are left to the viewer.

It must have been incredibly hard work to animate the food – to make it dance.

The amount of work was enormous. I did everything by myself from the collection of waste onwards. Most of the time on the set was taken by sorting of waste and preparing the material for filming. When I collected the material, in most cases it was huge piles of yellow and grey stuff from which I selected and then I prepared the material used in the scenes. Shooting a scene demanded extreme concentration and control as the whole image area was “alive“, nothing was fixed. Sometimes the animation of a scene really took a lot of time – for example, the kiwi explosion was achieved by gently and lightly touching, turning and squeezing the kiwi with fingertips little by little, millimeter by millimeter, frame by frame.

Your film seems to be perfectly choreographed. Did you decide on a certain rhythm beforehand? How do you plan a film like that?

Although the scenes were improvised, I counted the frames of the movements to maintain the rhythm while animating. The music was made for the image after the film was edited to a certain rhythm. Also, I planned the trajectories of the objects in the moment before shooting.

Links

• GOOD STUFF (FIN 2009. Niina Suominen)
• The Last Dance – Tamar Baumgarten-Noort about GOOD STUFF
• 103 Years of Finnish Cinema – Cornelis Hähnel about the Finnish film market