You can now support Museum of the Moving Image and rent Feast of the Epiphany as a Museum of the Moving Image online release.
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About Feast of the Epiphany:
In this docu-fictional diptych, a young woman lovingly prepares a meal for friends, and the simple gesture takes on unexpected significance. Revelry turns to meditations on mortality, and the tiniest, hard-won gesture of goodness comes from an unexpected party. Night turns to day, and viewers are taken somewhere else entirely―albeit with a lingering dissolve of emotions, ideas, and grace. From the Academy Award–winning producer of American Factory, Feast of the Epiphany is an uncommonly sensitive rumination on the ways people form and choose communities, collaborations, and support groups in the face of hardship, labor, and loss.
Feast of the Epiphany was co-directed by Reverse Shot founders Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert (producer, American Factory), and Farihah Zaman (producer, Ghosts of Sugarland), and features cinematography by Ashley Connor (Madeline's Madeline).
Check out the reviews!
“Will haunt you after it’s over . . . it’s a diptych in which the two halves echo and mirror one another implicitly, and make us think about the role that food plays in our lives — both as social beings and creatures of the earth.” –Vox
“The conceit is entrancing . . . The more one spends time in the company of Feast of the Epiphany—enhanced by an intermittent classical score by Sibelius and Ashley Connor’s inquisitive, enticing cinematography—the more it develops into a tantalizing portrait of both the fascinating realities behind people’s day-to-day existences and of the role food plays in fostering communion with friends, colleagues and the larger natural world.” —Variety
"A meditative banquet of ideas...A fascinating cinematic language that interrogates itself about matters of spontaneity and manipulation, man-made products and earth-given treasures, simplicity and sophistication." ― The Los Angeles Times
"Part of the joy of watching Feast of the Epiphany (and which may also prompt multiple viewings) is comparing its two halves. On the surface, each half is different in its approach, but the filmmakers’ sensitivity to how something as seemingly ordinary as food can have an immense emotional impact is consistently and unobtrusively profound." —Slant
“Entirely unexpected. Feast of the Epiphany continually surprises and works to innovate the viewer’s understanding of what 'narrative' cinema can communicate . . . A conscious, courageous attempt to recalibrate notions of society and belonging.” —The Film Stage
“It’s refreshing that Koresky, Reichert, and Zaman demand so much from their viewers, especially when the film itself is so eminently pleasurable to watch. A difficult film that isn’t at all a difficult sit, Feast of the Epiphany lays the groundwork for questions and never once concerns itself with answers.” —RogerEbert.com
“A film whose formal experiments offer the viewer the abundant food for thought promised by the title . . . By pivoting on a seemingly incidental element of everyday life to look at where our food literally comes from, Feast of the Epiphany becomes a political prompt, reminding us to consider the origins of our consumables and the processes and structures that shape them.” —The Village Voice
“In an independent film scene that too often evinces a paucity of imagination, Feast of the Epiphany displays a refreshingly protean ambition . . What’s achieved is a delicate interplay between constituent, subtly connected parts which don’t fuse together so much as vibrate in expectation, creating generative flashes of recognition in the process. Dig deeper. You don’t know what you may find.” —In Review Online
“The film requires an openness rarely asked of an audience, and it prescribes a solution to suffocating individualism.” —Mubi
“The particular way the movie moves from its first to second half is so smart and thoughtful that I was momentarily dazed... Interrogate[s] otherwise implicit economic factors normally embedded into narratives with no interest in the larger systemic ramifications.” —Filmmaker
“A genuinely innovative blend of narrative and nonfiction . . . the effect is akin to striking fire with two sharp rocks. It’s a film that takes on more square footage each time it shifts gears as much mentally as it does physically, delivering on its promise of epiphanies and then some.” —Moveable Feast
"The film’s 80 minutes pass by with an elegant simplicity that belies the intellectual rigor behind the endeavor....It’s strikingly free of didacticism or ironic distance. Koresky, Reichert, and Zaman push — or perhaps gently nudge — their audience towards an ontological examination of how cinema connects disparate items." —Crooked Marquee