FORGED BY FIRE

Going beyond the famed cuisine of the American South, Matthew Salleh’s documentary takes viewers on a journey to twelve different countries and delves into the various cooking methods and contexts of barbecuing. With its robust scope and style, the film also surveys the tradition’s deeper significance – as a conduit for identity, time and togetherness – for the members of each culture, writes Sam van Zweden.

‘I’ve found that fire, when you really think about it, is something that brings people together.’ These are the opening words of the sprawling, ambitious documentary Barbecue, directed by Matthew Salleh and co-produced by Rose Tucker (who collaboratively make up Urtext Films), which premiered earlier this year at SXSW. Framing barbecue as social and cultural glue, the film acts as a timely reminder to look further afield than America’s southern states for equally delicious and meaningful manifestations of the food.

In his 2013 book Cooked – which spends about a third of its contents considering what it means to transform food using fire – American food writer Michael Pollan refers to the current state of barbecuing culture as ‘notably self-aware’.

This certainly applies to Southern barbecue, hailing from the likes of Texas and the Carolinas, which is heralded as the gold standard for slow-cooking meats and has become a pet pastime of bearded, hyper-masculine meat lovers everywhere. Taking a quick survey of barbecue