Una película buena para la "food unit" - Canela

      

Update - 5/18/18 - You can find this movie on Amazon and YouTube (rent or purchase) with automatic English subtitles. You can watch it on Pantaya (paid monthly subscription) with Spanish subtitles.

**Update - 1/1/16 - click here to see updated resources**

Canela is going to be a perfect addition to my (and Cristina Zimmerman's) Diversidad de la Gastronomía unit (or to anyone's "food unit"). It is a sweet movie and totally appropriate for school! It is a bit childish, but I found that if I tell them that ahead of time, they are okay with that. It is a little cursi, but contains some Mexican culture and it is in Spanish, so lots of listening practice* for students. They will definitely know what mole is after the movie. Most of the movies I show are pretty heavy, so this will be a nice change.

I created this movie guide with discussion questions. There are a lot of things that could be done with this movie, so please let me know if you have any ideas. Minutes 33:00-48:00 basically show how to prepare mole (lots of cooking vocabulary there!). If you see any typos or other corrections, please let me know... I share my material freely so don't expect perfection! :)

Also, if you teach AP, or have it in your Spanish program, I have included some pre-AP questions at the end of the guide. I was thinking about the two minute oral "comparación cultural" when I wrote those questions at the end.

This song will be perfect to do before (or during) the movie - La Cumbia del Mole by Lila Downs (wksht.):

Here is a trailer for the movie:

Here is the synopsis taken from the website for the movie:

After her daughter’s death, Tere lost her passion for cooking and stopped working at her traditional Mexican food restaurant, El Molcajete, downtown Mexico City. Trying to save the business, Beatriz, the manager of El Molcajete, hires Rosi, a Cordon Bleu chef educated in France. But Maria, Tere’s sweet and bright grandchild, plans to make Tere go back to cook and run the restaurant, looking to put a smile on her face. Meanwhile, chef Rosi changes the menu, making it a light trendy cuisine, for that Jocelyn, a well known TV food critic, decides to go and pay a visit after she reads a review about it. When finally Tere realises that she needs to go back on business, she learns that chef Rosi is tearing into pieces the restaurant’s reputation. Maria, who loves traditional cuisine, prepares everything to proof that chef Rosi has no place at El Molcajete. The cuisine battle between Tere and chef Rosi is an epic fight not only between long-stablished Mexican food and light food, but also a struggle of family bonds, friendship, cooking secrets, flavor’s passion and more than two hundred ingredients that are needed in order to prepare Mole, a traditional Mexican sauce.

*The movie is available on Netflix. I would prefer to show it with Spanish subtitles, but the subtitles are in English. If anyone has figured out how to get Spanish subtitles on Netflix, please let me know. I also bought the DVD through Amazon, but it does not have Spanish subtitles either.