Ravioli, la boîte à rêves

An eight-country tour of the vital ingredients that go into making a can of pre-packaged ravioli. It ducks the usual gross-out exploitative route (though there are a few unavoidable scenes set in an active slaughterhouse) by focusing on the personal stories of individual workers at each location. That shifts the tone from a disturbing stomach-shifter to a real human interest story, spiced with dashes of sadness, contentment, vengeance and yearning. For those of us watching from the comfort of our first world couches, it's a vivid, tangible example of the lives our counterparts lead elsewhere in the world. Captivating, stirring and educational, if occasionally too sentimental and lingering.

My main complaint about this film is that it's emotionally manipulative. It features overuse of melodramatic music, and this frankly comes off as disrespectful to the interview subjects, framing their lives as an epic tragedy when many of them don't seem to see it that way. Conversely, there's the overuse of optimistic classical music when showing something the filmmaker views as a positive, like tomato or wheat farmers. Overall the film feels really hamfisted as a result. It's a a shame, because there's some awesome documentary footage here. The "beef" segment is surprisingly the best executed and least sensationalized.