Good food for the people… The Automat, Seattle Jewish Film Festival
Utopias are easier to find in the past than they are in the future. This, I think, is the source of The Automat‘s greatness. The documentary, which impressively runs at this year’s Seattle Jewish Film Festival, is about a possibility that has already been realized—and it is the nature of time that makes the past more real than the future.
The possibility was expressed by a 20th-century American business model for selling meal items through vending machines with small glass doors that popped open with a slot-inserted nickel. The vending machines lined the walls of eateries that were often