That movie brought to mind Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), with “the rain, the very taciturn sensuality, and this attention to domestic relationships,” Girish adds. (After she said so in a post on X, friends pointed out that Denis’s film also featured a red rice cooker.) It also reminded her of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), another “rain-soaked Asian film about yearning that features rice cookers.”
A call to add to the growing canon crowdsourced a wealth of suggestions—and some discourse. “It went a little bit viral,” Girish smiles. “People debated whether a pressure cooker counts and how prominent a rice cooker has to be.” She joked about doing a series—and began developing a working theory of rice-cooker cinema.
First: Both films and the rice cooker involve temporality. “Cinema is a medium of time, and the rice cooker is, in a way, a machine of time,” Girish says. “The intervention of the rice cooker is that it turns itself off on its own, so it gifts you back time you might have spent at the stove. There’s also a poetic pleasure in checking to see whether the steam’s still coming out. It measures the passing of time in a very beautiful and cinematic way.”
Indeed, many films in the series explore the concept of time, including slow-cinema master Tsai Ming-liang’s 2012 short “Diamond Sutra,” in addition to his 2003 classic Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The Taiwanese filmmaker has long been preoccupied with time’s passage, and his ongoing “Walker series” inspired by a seventh-century Chinese monk known for his epic journeys on foot features frequent collaborator Lee Kang-sheng. In it, Lee, as the monk, slowly traverses various urban environments, reimagining a monk’s pace of life in modern times—all while a rice cooker steams in the background. Tsai compared the steam rising from a rice cooker to his dying mother exhaling her final breath.
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Tsai Ming-liang’s “Diamond Sutra” (2012)Photo: Courtesy of BAM
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