How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock in Normandy

In 2000, Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht visit Richard Leacock and Valérie Lalonde in their house in Normandy. What better pretext for a visit to an old filmmaker friend than making a film? Between the kitchen and the editing room—both ideal spots for discussion—there develops a correlation and continuity. The passion for cinema and the passion for cooking express the same appetite for life. But the kitchen also symbolises the hidden side of images—a favourite conversation topic: why they came to be, what is visually absent but nonetheless part of them, stories in which Richard Leacock revisits a swathe of documentary cinema, from Flaherty to the mini-DV without, of course, forgetting the invention of direct cinema.