In 2019, Institute without Boundaries released Merci Bocuse, a film that follows Canadian chefs, Trevor Ritchie and Jenna Reich, as they prepare for the most prestigious and high-profile cuisine Bocuse d’Or competition in France. This feature length documentary marked the directorial debut of Michael Nguyen, expanding his talents into the challenging world of filming and photographing food.
Upon completion and submission to film festivals, the film became an official selection and had its world premiere at the high-profile Devour Film Festival in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. In April of 2020, Merci Bocuse, signed a distribution deal with Indie Rights Inc., based in Los Angeles, and is now streaming in English, French, Spanish and Italian-speaking countries on Amazon Prime Video and Google Play.
World premiere of our documentary "Merci Bocuse" at Devour Film Festival in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.
The documentary film was an almost 2-year project for the production team. Due to the lengthy nature of documentary film production, you never really know if you have a compelling story, until right up until the end of filming. Fortunately, on viewing the first rough-cuts, we were overjoyed with the results. The combination of a compelling subject matter, candid interviews and some genuine crises that were overcome by the participants, created a film that was as entertaining as it was educational.
We took a cinematic approach to the production, avoiding narration. The story tells itself through the interviewees. The film is presented at the CinemaScope wide aspect ratio. Combined with carefully timed soundtrack and well composed cinematography and sound mixing, the end result is a polished production that we felt surpassed the usual television format of documentaries.
Press
https://www.ukfilmreview.co.uk/post/merci-bocuse-documentary-review