Hormel's Sizzling Film Festival Brings Home the Bacon

Lauren Bloomberg

          An elite cognoscenti of pork savants descended on East Houston Street’s Sunrise Cinema last night to sniff and snort up film shorts devoted to bacon. It was the mini-Oscar night climax of a deliciously self-serving film competition served up by Hormel Black Label Bacon. There were bacon strips jauntily jutting from martini glasses and packages of Hormel’s prestige bacon were the take-home prize for the approximately fifty attendees. Most sounded like friends and family of the filmmakers as well as devoted porksters.

          In a world of too much information, we celebrate everything these days. There’s a day devoted to olives and a month to celebrate pancakes (February). I’ve paid my dues to Donut Day twice and Donut week so far this year. Who’s in charge of the calandar? No one can say New Yorkers are not already hopelessly enamored of pig and its byproducts. So, I wasn’t expecting a cinema revelation at an International Bacon Film Festival. But I agreed to swing by on behalf of the enthusiastic Insatiable Critic.

                     The eleven films were a mixed bag. A few struck me as unsubtly promotional, outright homages to Hormel.  Some were quite funny and provoked belly laughs from the audience. You can watch them online here. Though the wonderfully silly flick “Bacon and the Sea” was our favorite (scoring the filmmaker $8,500), “Portrait of a Bacon Enthusiast” took home the grand prize: $10,000 and a year worth of Hormel Black Label Bacon.

An announcer and the winners took turns at the podium.

          The short features Devin, a bacon tie-wearing, ukelele-playing dude who’s goal is to become “the traveling minister of bacon.” He wears two sticks of bacon, crossed on a chain around his neck (handed down from his mother) as he spreads the gospel of cured pig. It’s the confessions of a man (a suspiciously thin man) obsessed with bacon. A close-up of the prototype Hormel must have hoped would hook onto their media hoax disguised as a film festival. I’d say they were successful. 

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