The Golden Spurtle takes audiences into the heart of the World Porridge Making Championship
The Golden Spurtle, a "porridge documentary" by an Australian director, has been wooing audiences around the world, and spreading via word-of-mouth. (Supplied: Umbrella)
If you stir porridge anti-clockwise, you let the devil in.
That is just one of the lessons in a new Australian documentary about the World Porridge Making Championship, which takes place every year in the village of Carrbridge in the Scottish Highlands.
In October, an Australian food stylist, Caroline Velik, won the championship's speciality dish category for her yoghurt flatbread jaffle. She also came second in the main competition, where contestants make porridge from just water, salt and oatmeal.
The top prize is the Golden Spurtle, a trophy named for the usually-wooden implement used to stir the perfect bowl of porridge. It also gives the new documentary its name.
Director Constantine Costi was working on an opera with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2023 when he heard about a friend-of-a-friend who planned to compete in the competition.
"[The opera] was very serious and very German, and I decided I needed to do something a little bit more light-hearted," he told ABC Radio National's The Screen Show.
Once Costi got to Carrbridge — almost three hours north of Glasgow and Edinburgh — he "fell in love" with not only the village but its residents.
"I just felt this burning desire to commit [this story] to cinema," Costi says.
He would share cups of tea and biscuits with them as he got to know them.
The rapport he created through multiple visits comes through in the movie; there's an undeniable sense of warmth and intimacy between the director and his subjects, most obvious when Costi can be heard asking questions off-screen.
Costi says he wanted the movie to "mirror the feeling of being there [in Scotland] and of the familiarity".
"There was a danger with this film that it was going to feel like we were laughing at people and not with people and we were really keen to have a spirit of generosity in the way we made it."
Costi sent a cut of the movie to his subjects before it premiered in Copenhagen in March, and it was warmly received. (Supplied: Umbrella)
The Golden Spurtle is in cinemas this week, after screening at film festivals around Australia and the world, including Sydney and Melbourne.
A Sydney connection
The competitive porridge enthusiast who inspired Costi to check out the contest was Sydney taco chef Toby Wilson. He also features in the documentary, speaking to the director both in Carrbridge and from his backyard at home.
2023 was his second attempt at winning The Golden Spurtle; yet again found himself in the finals, one of the six best porridge makers in the world.
Choosing to compete, against 29 other contenders, was an act of dedication and self-belief, which involved flying 30 hours and using his annual leave and savings.
Of Carrbridge, he told ABC Radio National's Every Bite: "There are few places I love more in the world."
"It is a tiny town," he continues.
"The population I think is 700: About 600 of them love the event and a hundred hate that it exists."
If the weather permits, Wilson explains, the event kicks off with competitors marching 30 metres down the road to the town hall, accompanied by a Scottish marching band, with drums and bagpipes, bearing the flag of their home country.
(In The Golden Spurtle, you see Miller fuss about having the right flags for the competitors.)
"That's pretty much the closest I'm ever going to get to feeling like an Olympian," Wilson says.
More than oats, water and salt
The structure of the World Porridge Making Championship is the narrative drive beneath The Golden Spurtle.
"You're going to have tension, there's going to be a winner, there's going to be a loser," Costi says.
Adam Kiani from London via Birmingham won the 2023 World Porridge Making Championship, competing under the Pakistani flag. (Supplied: Umbrella)
But for the director, The Golden Spurtle isn't really about the competition. It's about the nature of obsession.
"What are the things that we decide to commit our obsessions to?" he says. "They can be as absurd as a porridge making competition.
"We're driven to express ourselves and to compete with each other. There's something in us that we want to come together as a community, celebrate food, celebrate each other, and really see how deep we can go into our passions and obsessions."
That sense of obsession is seen in the contestants, including seven-time finalist, Nick Barnard, the hyper-competitive owner of a health food store, and Ian Bishop, a reclusive older man who returned to the competition 15 years after he won in 2008, and is disinclined to share the secret of his porridge recipe.
"[Porridge] is an unassuming vessel to examine obsession and passion, really," Costi says. (Pictured: The reclusive Ian Bishop.) (Supplied: Umbrella)
But it's most obvious in Charlie Miller, the outgoing chieftain of the World Porridge Making Championship. It's his final year running the competition, after almost 30 years. His story is the spine of the documentary — and Costi's true inspiration.
We see him plan the event with the other, equally dedicated residents of Carrbridge, including the also-retiring woman who washes up after each round; create spurtles in his shed; and preside over the competition.
Throughout The Golden Spurtle, Miller's wistfulness about stepping back due to ill health is palpable.
"Kind of against his will, he has to let go and say goodbye to this event that gives him so much joy and so much purpose," Costi says.
"There's a bittersweet kind of undercurrent [to the movie]."
Whimsy on screen
Moments with Miller are also the source of much of the movie's sense of whimsy, completed with a score by Australian conductor, composer and pianist Simon Bruckard; and wide, scenic shots of the lush Scottish landscape and the town itself.
The landscape and the town — as filmed by Australian cinematographer Dimitri Zaunders — often dwarf the characters in the movie. They become part of the scene; of something bigger than themselves.
Costi credits the visual style of the movie to Zaunders and his "sensitive instinct for where to put the camera". (Supplied: Umbrella)
Costi and Zaunders were deliberate about framing the town, its inhabitants and the contestants in symmetrical, stylised shots. The director says they wanted to create a "sense of whimsy and an almost dreamlike quality" to Carrbridge.
"There was a poetry and almost a storybook quality to the whole thing that we really wanted to capture," he says.
"We wanted to elevate it to almost like a Dylan Thomas poem or something to make this sense of Carrbridge being this mythical realm where people come to compete with this ancient grain.
"You're coming to, for want of a better word, a holy place, the birthplace of this ancient foodstuff [porridge], to see how you can honour it in its most basic form."
The Golden Spurtle is in cinemas now.