Special to the Atlanta Jewish Times                                    

             "Ordinary bread baking reveals extraordinary local lives..."                                             by Fran Kaplan           

In 1704, Jonathan Swift dubbed bread "the staff of life," but according to Atlanta documentary filmmaker Lynne Keating, the dietary staple not only feeds the body, but the soul as well. This is the premise behind her newest work, "Bread Loaf Tapestries: Mediterranean Connections — an intergenerational documentary," being screened at the High Museum of Art this month as part of its summer film series Cinematic Feasts: A Celebration of Food and Film.  The movie begins with these simple words on the screen: "Every land has its own version of an ideal life-sustaining bread. When you make bread, you participate in the age-old process."

"Food and film are two of "[my] most favorite things," said the museum’s curator of media art, Linda Dubler, who picked Keating’s 14-minute short as a fitting companion to the 79-minute "Chinese Restaurants: Song of the Exile," the other film on the evening’s bill (with a segment filmed in Haifa). "Both explore how tradition, identity and culture are passed down through food," Dubler said.

Keating, who resides in Decatur, has been writing and producing films and videos since the 1970s. When her children were born, she decided to work from home and turned to writing for newspapers and magazines. One night she attended a Women in Film meeting and was surprised to learn that besides feature films there was a "whole other world" of documentaries. "I was fascinated," Keating said. "I had never thought about these other avenues."

While interviewing German concentration camp liberators and survivors for the Emory University Witness to the Holocaust Oral History program, she met Fred Roberts Crawford. Crawford, a sociologist, was the director of the Center for Research and Social Change at Emory University in the 1970s and 1980s. His life work in human rights moved Keating to make her first documentary. "Within a year I had filmed ‘Fred Roberts Crawford, Currents of Courage’ and fallen in love with the whole process," she said. Later credits include writing and producing informational and training films for Georgia Power, C&S Bank, Lifespan, the Navy and the FBI.

As her children entered the teen years and family dynamics became more "complicated," she says, Keating put film and video on hold. Now with the children grown, she has returned to documentary filmmaking.

Fellow local filmmaker Fran Burst Tarenella admires Keating’s tenacity.

"Lynne has wonderful ideas and brings great passion and conviction to see [them] through," Burst Tarenella said. "She’s able to let the story come from the people she speaks to and that’s always powerful filmmaking."

Keating’s newest endeavor is an outgrowth of wide travels. Wherever she has gone, she has found that the community has a distinctive bread. "In Mississippi, I tasted the best challah I ever had," Keating said. "And in Kentucky, I discovered spoon bread." Then there was Scandinavian lefse and Southern cornbread. Keating found that when talking about bread, fascinating stories of people’s backgrounds would emerge.

One Friday back home, while she and her college-aged daughter made challah, she had a revelation. "The feelings, the aroma and the discussions about Shabbat that came with the ritual became an enlightening experience," she said, and she realized that baking bread would be a perfect way to bring generations closer. "There’s a unifying aspect to bread. There are all these common ingredients, but it is the culture of a people that determines what the end result is."

That idea, coupled with the distress she felt by the overabundance of violent images to which children are exposed, led Keating to her central premise for "Bread Loaf Tapestries." She would create a situation for young people and older adults to talk and bake bread together while she let her camera roll. The outcome is part history lesson, part travelogue and part cooking show.

Atlantan Maggie Glezer, a certified breadmaker and author of "Artisan Baking in America," opens the film with a lesson about bread in nomadic Middle Eastern societies. Then, the filmmaker finds a ready-made forum for discussing bread and culture at the Sephardic Or VeShalom congregation, where congregants bake bread together on a periodic schedule. While the burekas, or dumpling-like pastries, are kneaded and stuffed, Keating interviews people about where their families are from and what memories of bread they carry with them.

Keating also visits a recreation center in Decatur where senior citizens and an inner city youth group interact. Chef Rafih Benjelloun, chef and owner of the local Moroccan restaurant Imperial Fez, talks to the multi-generational audience about his homeland, its culture and bread. While making M’Lawee flatbread, he charms young and old alike with tales of his youth in Morocco where the family would sit together at the table for four meals a day. He recalls how the women would tend the bread in the ovens, controlling the process by moving it closer or farther from the coals with a stick.

Through her film, Keating declares that bread is a lens into the history of everyday people and the extraordinary lives they lead.

Off camera, she says she finds it extremely gratifying to help give a voice to those who don’t often have the opportunity to share their stories. She prefers these "real" histories to textbook history, she says.