Harvesting olives for oil in Umbria, from the documentary La Raccolta (The Harvest).
photo: courtesy of Donna Lennard
You would be hard pressed to find a good kitchen that doesn't have a bottle of olive oil, and yet the process of getting that golden-green grease out of pit-filled olives is still a mystery to many. Enter filmmaker Donna Lennard. Fourteen years ago, she and her partner Alberto Avalle opened an antique shop in NYC on Bond Street called il Buco. They began serving meals to their friends, and quickly realized that folks were just as interested in the food they were serving as the chairs they were selling. The store morphed into a well-regarded restaurant in its own right, but along the way Lennard slowly lost touch with film-making. One day, while sourcing quality products for the restaurant, inspiration struck. The resulting 30-minute documentary, La Raccolta (The Harvest), will have its premiere this Wednesday night at the NYC Food Film Festival at Water Taxi Beach.
After years of traveling back and forth between Italy (where Avalle is from), Spain and New York for good food, Lennard became, she says, "increasingly involved with how these products were made." Her interest in having olive oil began "with stories from my partner about this family [the subjects of the movie] and making olive oil." It led to her finally participating in an actual harvest, which became the subject of the film.
In fall 2003, Lennard and a friend packed up their cameras and started shooting – La Raccolta is one of only two films in the festival actually shot on film. But using film turned out to have a serious drawback when an airport x-ray destroyed several rolls of film. Lennard went back for two more harvests to get all of the material needed for the movie. Another few years of editing (with the birth of son somewhere in the middle) and the documentary was at last complete.
Focusing mostly on a single family who has been working in Umbria for generations, the movie gives a glimpse into a process that has changed slightly and slowly over the years. The moraiolo, the olive most common to that region of Italy, grows especially close and tightly to the tree, lending itself to hand- rather than machine-picking.
Which isn't to say that things haven't changed at all. To get the oil, "olives used to be ground by a large stone that would move around and around and crush them. Then that paste would be layered on straw, circular mats which were then squeezed together in a pneumatic press. That's the old-fashioned way," says Lennard. "And while some people still do some or all of that process, others have moved onto other methods." A newer process uses stainless-steel blades to literally slice the oil out of the olives without heating the oil, which can damage the flavor.
As the movie was being made, Lennard and her partner ended up helping another friend build an oil mill in Umbria that uses the newer technology. That oil not only appears in the dishes at il Buco but is also available for sale at the restaurant. And of course, it will be on hand at the movie's premiere next Wednesday.