As Thomas Lennon’s forty-minute Oscar-nominated documentary short “Knife Skills” begins, it’s opening night at Edwins, a new French restaurant in Cleveland. Just before showtime, a sharp-dressed proprietor in a pink necktie talks to his staff in the dining room. “This is going to be the most anticipated restaurant opening that Cleveland’s seen,” he tells them. “And it happens today in about ten minutes.” He’s earnest, happy, and intense, with a kind look in his eyes; they’re nervous but excited, in chef’s whites and the vest-based formal wear of the dining room. The cause for the anticipation is hinted at by two title cards: one that tells us that Edwins aims to be the best classic French restaurant in the United States, and another that tells us that Edwins is staffed by people recently released from prison. In the kitchen that night, as pressure builds, a French chef with a heavy accent yells, “I need zhose rabbits, now!”
The film cuts to six weeks earlier, as Edwins, which is both a culinary school and a restaurant, welcomes its first class. The proprietor introduces himself as Brandon Chrostowski and says, “The short of it is, a restaurant saved my life. And, because of that, I’m here today and we’re doing what you see.” The camera shows a man in the group nodding in understanding. We watch as the staffers learn the art of preparing French food, intently studying the regions of France on a map, learning the names and ingredients of artichauts à la barigoule, tarte de lapin au Parmesan et jambon en croûte, pâtes ditalini au fromage de Fontina. In one scene, a trainee watches with rapt focus the proper julienne slicing of a zucchini. We see food—meat in a grinder, vegetables in a bowl—and faces observing with attention and concern. Lennon’s camera shows us the front of the house as patrons are greeted cheerfully, and, over the shoulder of Chrostowski, we keep a wary eye on a server who, Chrostowski worries aloud, may be an addict. We immediately gravitate, as Lennon did when he was shooting the film, to a few individual characters, and learn about their desire to get a second chance and the challenges they face as they pursue it.
“Knife Skills” doesn’t provide a simple redemption story. It is a chance to get to know a group of people in a specific time and place and to feel the energy of a good idea in action; we, like the participants, hope for its success and worry about potential defeat. Recidivism is common among former inmates, drug relapses by former addicts are pernicious, and the first year of reëntry is an especially perilous time. The film portrays this sensitively and straightforwardly, and with an effort to provide just enough context. Lennon doesn’t feature talking heads, long explanations of social issues, or even a full description of the restaurant’s mission and process. “Knife Skills” doesn’t tell you, for example, that Edwins stands for “ed” plus “wins”—“education wins”—but, if you freeze-frame a shot of an article about the restaurant, you can read that for yourself. It doesn’t mention that Edwins is a nonprofit, or that it has expanded to include housing and a campus and a thrift store for residents, or that the restaurant continues to be successful and beloved. I had to Google to discover an amazing postscript: last year, Chrostowski took a leave from Edwins, to run for mayor of Cleveland.
“We live in an era of readily available information,” Lennon told me. “I’m defining my job quite narrowly: Can I make you think about an issue and care about an issue? Think about the people and care about those people?” If he can do that, he said, we can easily learn more ourselves. The film is informed by sympathy and curiosity, but Lennon didn’t come to it by way of an intellectual grasp of criminal-justice reform or a passion about the history of mass incarceration, he told me. “I now care a lot about those issues, but that’s not what brought me to this story,” he said. The story came to him.
Lennon met Chrostowski in 2013, at a dinner party at the house of mutual friends, Karen and David Waltuck, the longtime owners of Chanterelle, in Manhattan, which closed in 2009 and where Chrostowski had worked. “I couldn’t get a fix on him,” Lennon said. “He was mumbling a lot, staring down at his meatloaf. He mumbled something about how he was going to be opening the best French restaurant in all of the United States, and that it was going to be in Cleveland, and all the people in the restaurant were going to be fresh out of prison. I knew immediately that there was a film there.” The timing was fortuitous; Chrostowski hadn’t yet signed the lease. Two weeks later, Lennon drove to Cleveland with a car full of film equipment and lights and just “hung around,” trying to get a sense of Chrostowski and his project. He came back a couple of weeks after that, when the first potential trainees arrived, and then periodically for several months. He shot a huge amount of footage, which resulted in many choices to be made in the editing room (his editor and co-producer, Nick August-Perna, was an invaluable part of the process, Lennon said), and that bounty, combined with a lack of money, made for a years-long completion process.
Lennon, who is in his sixties, is an independent filmmaker, but he wasn’t always—he got his training through the TV networks, “back when networks did some really good documentary work,” he said, and he worked with great filmmakers like Alan and Susan Raymond when he was starting out. In his thirties, he made work for “The American Experience” and “Frontline,” followed by historical series, including “The Irish in America: Long Journey Home,” with Disney and PBS, and “Becoming American: The Chinese Experience,” with Bill Moyers. “Now I’m very much of an indie, raising my own money,” he said. “Knife Skills” was completed in part with a grant from the Soros Foundation and with support from his friend Joan Ganz Cooney, the legendary co-creator of “Sesame Street” and co-founder of Children’s Television Workshop.
New Yorker writers on the 2018 Academy Awards.
When the 2018 Oscar nominations were announced, two weeks ago, Lennon was too nervous to listen to the broadcast. “The night before, I was just a mess,” he said. “So I woke up early and I went to the gym, and then I went to the supermarket and got my wife her milk and her coffee. I looked down at my phone and it was eight thirty-five. And I said to myself, ‘If nobody calls me in the next five minutes, my goose is cooked.’ ” Then his phone rang. “Knife Skills” had been nominated for Best Documentary (Short Subject). “What I felt was this enormous sense of relief that after the long labor of this film, I no longer needed to worry,” he said. “I knew that it would find its place and that people would see it. The wind is in the sails; this film’s going to be O.K.” Watching the film makes you feel like things are going to be O.K., too—not because of naïve idealism but because of its subjects’ dedication to ideals that are based in reality.
The film, toward the end, has an emotional graduation scene—hugs, smiles, words of pride and mutual appreciation. The love in the room, in that group of people who made it through the program, Lennon said, was palpable, “crossing from founder and chef to trainees but also horizontally among the trainees. The affection was extraordinary. It wasn’t universal—there were conflicts. But I think that period of reëntry into society after prison is intensely lonely.” Edwins provides an alternative to that, and also a support system. “I had the feeling that most everyone in the program, or at least the ones I talked to, had this gnawing sense of a vulnerability that they wanted to fix, a fear that they might blow this second chance,” Lennon said. “And the connection that they had with each other, and to people who they perceived as offering them a lifeline, was really intense.” In one scene, Alan, a trainee who speaks fondly of his mother and her love for cooking, goes to visit her and brings a picture of Gilbert, the French chef and instructor, to show her. “This is my buddy, right here,” he tells her.
