Babette's Feast is an extraordinary film. It was written and directed by Gabriel Axel, based on a story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), who also wrote the story which inspired the 1985 Academy Award winning film Out of Africa. The film tells the story of a French refugee named Babette Hersant, who escaped the bloody French revolution and ended up in Denmark, taken in by two elderly and pious Christian sisters. She spends the next fourteen years as their cook, until one day she gets notice she won the lottery in France. While the sisters expect Babette to use the money to get back to France, Babette asks, and is granted permission, to prepare a special dinner for the sisters and their small congregation on the account of the founding pastor's hundredth birthday. What follows is an extraordinary experience. It is possibly the only film to truly merge art in the form of food preparation, with compassion and spirituality.
If you’ve never seen this film before (and surely if you have), you should take it out. Be warned that it is not a film to watch on an empty stomach...
Babette's Feast is a film that, I sure hope, will stay with you in the most positive way for years to come as it did with me.