Pressure Cooker

Title:               Pressure Cooker
Director:              Mark Becker, Jennifer Grausman
Producer:            Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyerman (Exec), Jennifer Grausmsan, Myrna Joseph (Co)
Cinema:                Mark Becker, Leigh Iacobucci, Justin Schein
Editor:                  Mark Becker
Year:                     2008 (99 minutes)

Synopsis: Basketball had Hoop Dreams, spelling had Spellbound. Now competitive cooking has Pressure Cooker. Wilma Stephenson is the dynamic force behind the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program at Philadelphia’s Frankfort High School. On the first day of class Stephenson tells her students, “Everything you’ve heard about me is true, only it’s 500 times worse.” She’s tough, but she knows that if she ain’t, her students are likely to repeat the mistakes of their parents – leaving them impoverished and trapped in the inner-city. Three of these students become the focus of Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman’s camera; Tyree – who faces the pressures of the locker from his fellow athletes, Erica, who has to help care for her disabled younger sister, and Fatoumata, the African immigrant whose family doesn’t support her aspirations. With Mrs. Stephenson’s leadership, they will try to win scholarships to some of the most prestigious cooking academies in the US – and they will develop a new recipe for the future.

Review: In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I have a thing for competition documentaries. If they’re done well, they can get you all worked up and make you care about people you don’t know and events you wouldn’t otherwise know existed. Jump! was such a competition documentary that sucked me in last year. Pressure Cooker did it to me this year.

I don’t want to make it sound like Pressure Cooker is a life-changing film. It’s not and it was never meant to be. But directors Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman did a terrific job of telling the story. They introduced the characters so that viewers cared about them and cheered them on. That’s the mark of a good competition documentary.

The characters are inner city high school students in Philadelphia who want to pursue a career in the culinary arts and who see that career as a way out of poverty. The students, along with the help of a lovable drill sargent of a teacher, compete for scholarships with other students from throughout Philadelphia. There’s a lot on the line. If they win the scholarships, they have a shot at a better life. If not, they’ll be stuck in the inner city living lives they desperately want to escape.

Pressure Cooker is a very enjoyable film that is well done (no pun intended). It tells an interesting story and it tells it well.

(3.0 out of 5.0)