How To Feed An Artist: a feature length documentary
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Food.
Food is how we connect with people. Our fearless leader of our film, Mary Haglund fed people’s souls through her comfort food at her diner for 20 incredible years. As one character in our film says, “it’s hard to cry when you have eggs benedict in your mouth.”
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Art
Mary’s diner wasn’t just about the food, it was about the art on the walls and the artists who worked there. Mary, a housewife from Indiana came to Winston-Salem, NC thinking art was “what old white dutch men hung on the walls in museums.” The artists she met while working in the food industry and running her diner changed her life forever.
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Community
This is truly a story of how “a rising tide lifts all boats.” How food and art and the need to be together, to find each other, to gather in those third places, are the cornerstone of community. Mary’s diner closed in 2020, but through it’s story of being a hotbed of counter culture, we are given a blueprint for how to continue to build community over and over again and through it all.
How DO you feed an artist?
For two decades that trailblazing, glass-ceiling shattering, protagonist of our story, Mary Haglund, used her restaurant to feed the artists of her community (Winston-Salem, North Carolina) not just by giving artists and the community jobs, but by going above and beyond to support their artistic careers. The tale of the anti-myth, the legend, the housewife-turned-restaurant-owning cook, shows us how, through chasing her dream of changing people’s lives by cooking food for the soul, her own life was changed by the artists she fed.
Ok… where are our fellow working artists at???
In many ways, this story is an honest and personal love letter to the restaurant industry. Seemingly since the beginning of time artists have worked in restaurants, in bars, in coffee shops. Your favorite barista? Probably an artist. What’s going on? Why is this? Well in this doc, we asked a lot of folks that question. An overwhelming number of artists, both emerging and experienced, can’t survive on their art alone. So, to the side hustles they go. Can you relate? Haha, we thought so yes. Mary’s diner is the ultimate example of how a family-owned restaurant embraced, supported, and uplifted the artistic community, and then became the artistic community.
