La Cocina

“I first started daydreaming about this film while working as a dishwasher and waiter at the Rainforest Café in downtown London during my student days. It was also during this time that I first read Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen, on which this film’s script is loosely based. Reading the play while working in an industrial kitchen made the experience far more intriguing—and the workdays more bearable. I was struck by the complex caste system that still exists in kitchens, an essential mechanism that keeps them running. Like the crew of a ship, hierarchy is not something taken lightly behind those swinging restaurant doors.

Frontiers play a major role in this film—physical, spiritual, and social. The rigid hierarchy of the kitchen provides the perfect setting to explore what lies beneath a divided society forced to coexist in the same space. Seen in this light, a New York City restaurant, with its stark divisions between the Front and Back of the House, Management and Workforce, American and Foreigner, becomes a powerful metaphor for the modern world. The “Line,” where cooks place outgoing food for waiters to carry into the dining room, serves as a tangible reminder of these divisions. It is also the line that separates Pedro and Julia.

In many ways, this film is about spiritual homelessness. While it may be tempting to view it solely as a film about immigration, its true focus lies elsewhere. Here, the characters’ status as illegal immigrants is merely a circumstance—a given. What they truly struggle with is the search for identity, community, and brotherhood through grueling labor. Work is the film’s other central theme: the battle to preserve the soul amid the relentless machinery of global capitalism. As Thoreau wrote, “I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.” Or, as Pedro, the film’s protagonist, says when asked to retell his dream: “You can’t dream in a kitchen.”

– Alonso Ruizpalacios, Director