OK, I exaggerate a little in the title of this post as there is only one tea flick that I know of. Maybe that’s all we need? Need one… need a miracle!

Are curious about tea? Do you want to know more about it? Here’s a fun documentary which follows a crazy person, David Lee Hoffman, into China as he advocates for a return to traditional organic tea production. It’s perhaps a little annoying for a guy from the U.S. to go to China and try to teach them about their own tea but he is genuine, really knows his tea, and apparently made some headway as there is an awful lot of good organic tea from China these days.

I was skeptical about the film because the box looks totally hokey. It does. Most of the movie was shot during the 1990s (I think) so the production quality reminds me of, um, a low budget documentary shot in the 1990s. And yet, this is a totally captivating documentary. If you’re new to tea, or even if you’re a jaded tea guy like me, you’ll be blown away by how neat the process is. David Lee Hoffman is just nuts about tea and that enthusiasm is infectious.

Here’s some gentle criticism: There are  jarring edits between David’s adventures in China and staged tea demonstrations in the U.S., and while the tea experts on film have good things to say it gives the film a bit more of an ad hoc aesthetic than I prefer. The “expert interview” is pretty standard fare in documentaries, for a reason I reckon, and would have worked better than the staged stuff. IMHO, natch.

Anyway, it’s fun, very educational and a good thing to watch as you wait for series 2.

Tags: films, review

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.