INTERVIEW: ‘My Darling Supermarket’ offers intimate look at frontline workers
Photo: My Darling Supermarket, directed by Tali Yankelevich, is now playing. Photo courtesy of Cinema Tropical / Provided with permission.
When director Tali Yankelevich set out to document the workers at a supermercado in São Paulo, she probably had no idea that the world’s grocery store workers would take on a new meaning and poignancy during a devastating global pandemic. Her images and stories are encapsulated in the new documentary My Darling Supermarket, which was released this year.
Yankelevich successfully captures the habitual routine of working in a food store. Her careful lens shows the work being done over and over and over again, all set to the background of lively conversations about politics, quantum physics and video games — really anything that pops into the mind of this real-life cast of characters.
“It was a very long process,” the director said in a recent phone interview. “I spent 10 years thinking about this possibility of making [a film] from a supermarket, but basically it started because I was already thinking about this idea of repetition.”
She was interested in what people think when they complete repetitive work. To answer that query, she made a short film a decade ago set in a shoe factory. That movie, The Perfect Fit, looked at workers who spent many, many hours of their day working in factories and crafting the perfect ballet shoe.
“I really enjoyed filming there,” Yankelevich said of the experience. “I couldn’t leave the space. I didn’t want to leave, and it was something so strong that was happening there because those workers were doing the most repetitive work you could possibly imagine. There was even a dance involved in the movements, repetitive movements, crafting the shoes, but it’s almost as if when your body is going through extreme repetition, your human soul needs to go somewhere. It’s a survival mechanism because we are very profound beings. We are humans, so they had an interesting conversation.”
The director kept coming back to this sense of repetitive work, but she wanted to expand upon its potential. That’s when she found the supermercado in Brazil and started filming, prior to the pandemic, the stories of Rodrigo, Santo, Ivan and others. On its surface, My Darling Supermarket is about work, workers and passing the time during the day, but on a deeper level, it’s about psychology and the human condition.
“It’s this contrast between our material universe, our material world and our metaphysical needs as human beings,” Yankelevich said. “I was shopping really late in a supermarket, and I overheard these two guys, two workers at the store talking. The store was almost empty, and I overheard them discussing their love life. They were talking about their first love, and it was this very, very passionate conversation. They were piling up cereal boxes. They were organizing cereal boxes, and I found that scene very cinematic. It was really interesting because you had this really long corridor full of products and all this superficial information around them, and they were discussing something really powerful, really profound. And then when I saw that scene, I thought, OK, maybe I want to transfer this idea to a supermarket. Let’s make a film in a supermarket, and then for many years I kept the idea in my head until I was able to put it into practice.”
Now, with My Darling Supermarket playing around the nation, the filmmaker finds that her film is perfectly (and sadly) timed with the COVID-19 pandemic. The workers at grocery stores, like the ones depicted in the documentary, have toiled tirelessly, putting their lives on the line to ensure that the masses have something to eat.
“It’s very interesting how suddenly people are paying more attention to supermarket workers and paying homage to them because they are frontline workers, but, of course, how could we have known,” she said. “I called the characters many times and spoke during the pandemic, and I asked them, ‘Look, what do you think? Are people recognizing your work now? How do you feel?’ But what they told me is actually the opposite of what we think is happening.”
The workers were worried and angry that people weren’t taking the coronavirus more seriously. There was a still a question in their mind whether their efforts were being recognized and appreciated. “They were actually very frightened, very angry at the people who are not respecting the security protocols, and a lot of people are not respecting security protocols,” she said. “So for them it’s a very turbulent time, but, you know, I’m in contact with them. Everybody is fine, which is great. … But still it’s a very, very frightening time for them.”
Yankelevich added: “For me, it’s the biggest reward is if people watch the film, and then they go into the supermarket and it’s never the same for them because suddenly the supermarket is a different place. They feel the human presence inside and not just the products, so that’s the biggest reward.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
My Darling Supermarket, directed by Tali Yankelevich, is now playing in the United States. Click here for more information.
