So when Hegedus and Pennebaker were looking for their next project they heard about the Meilleurs de France competition when their friend, Flora Lazar, decided to jettison a prestigious career in public service and enter Chicago’s highly regarded French Pastry School to pursue her dream of becoming a French pastry chef. After graduating, Flora told the filmmakers that her teacher, chef Jacquy Pfeiffer, an award-winning French chef from Alsace and one of the founders of the school, was competing in the legendary M.O.F. competition. She thought it would make an interesting story for an article. “It sounds like it would make a terrific documentary,” replied director, Chris Hegedus. “It had a lot of the personal drama that we look for in our films,” added Pennebaker. Like The War Room, it was a buddy story: Jacquy’s coach for the competition was Sebastien Canonne, who had started the school with him. Sebastien won the competition several years earlier and wore the coveted blue, white and red collar that told the world he was a M.O.F — a member of France’s culinary elite. So the stakes were high for Jacquy, both personally and professionally.
Filming began at the French Pastry School in Chicago where Jacquy was preparing for the competition. Each M.O. F. competition has a different theme — that year's was marriage — and Jacquy was hard at work designing a complex raspberry caramel, vanilla mousse, hazelnut wedding cake, shaped like a half dome, that he hoped would impress the judges with its originality. Every competing chef would have to design and construct a complete buffet presentation suitable for a wedding, using only edible materials to make fragile sugar sculptures that would tower elegantly above the cakes and pastries. Jacquy figured his buffet might require as many as forty different recipes.
"One of the perks of making a pastry film is that you get to sample," admitted Pennebaker. "But we realized right off that these elaborate pastries were delicacies that we had rarely encountered." Watching Jacquy work a huge ball of sugar and blow it into a Brancusi figurine like an expert glass artist, it became clear that there was more required for this contest than imaginative baking. The filmmakers knew then that they needed to follow Jacquy back to his childhood home in Alsace where he planned to continue practice for the competition. Raw materials for baking, flour, butter, sugar, would all be different in France and he would have to master that difference before the contest. The filmmakers convinced Flora, who spoke French and had worked in public affairs, to be their field producer. Frazer Pennebaker, their longtime partner, would executive and co-produce the project from New York. It would require the blessing of the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, an organization about which they knew very little.
"Unfortunately, nearly everyone in France goes on vacation in August and getting hold of the head of the M.O.F. proved difficult" noted Frazer, "but real life stories don't wait for financing and approval so we decided to take a chance and just begin filming. Months later with the competition looming in Lyon, Flora’s French and her determination, aided by a few friends among the M.O.F judges, got us in at the very last minute."
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