FOOD ROOTS

Michele Josue, director of CIFF-award winning documentaries “Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine” (CIFF38) and “Nurse Unseen” (CIFF47), is back again. This time she trains her camera on famed Chicago restaurateur Billy Dec as he journeys to the Philippines to rediscover his ancestral heritage, one delicious recipe at a time.Actor and restaurateur Billy Dec takes audiences on a transportive journey with FOOD ROOTS, a documentary that charts his return to his mother’s home in the Philippines for a personal journey of food and family. Famous for a slew of television appearances, here Dec celebrates Filipino cuisine and his own complicated relationship to his family history. On a quest to discover the family recipes he never learned from his grandmother, Dec embraces the heritage he once denied in order to be embraced by a white audience and finally delivers a documentary that is as mouth-watering as it is personally restorative in its Filipino pride. —C.F.GUEST(S) IN ATTENDANCE