The Killing of a Chinese Cookie

The curious history and cultural impact of the fortune cookie sets the stage for this witty documentary from filmmaker Eric Shimoda. While most people associate the fortune cookie with Chinese food, like many Chinese dishes it's an American invention, first appearing in San Francisco restaurants in the early years of the 20th Century. Since then, the lightly sweet cookie with the message inside has become an international phenomenon, while the aphorisms inside have become the subject of a wide range of parodies (and the lucky numbers featured in many cookies are often played by lottery fans, sometimes with a surprising degree of success). In The Killing Of A Chinese Cookie, Shimoda looks at the ongoing debate over who invented the fortune cookie, visits a factory where five million cookies are baked every day, interviews writers who make their living dreaming up fortunes for the cookies, and talks to a performance artist who creates deliberately odd fortunes and inserts them into cookies in order to observe the reactions of unsuspecting diners. The Killing Of A Chinese Cookie was screened in competition at the 2008 San Francisco Asian-American Film Festival.