What Did You Eat Today? Hugh de la Cruz

What Did You Eat Today? Hugh de la Cruz, 2001 (digitised 2019) Sandra Cross and William English. From an idea by Sandra Cross.

Originally filmed as a silent 16mm film, the film has now been incorporated as a ‘film within a film’ into “It’s My Own Invention” by William English. This version has now been extracted from that longer film with a soundtrack by Daniel Wilson.Number one in an ongoing project. The subject of this film portrait is Hugh de la Cruz and shows what Hugh ate on one typical day.
Extract from a taped interview:
Sandra: “Would you have known what you were eating if you had been blindfolded?”
Hugh: “I would have known what some of it was, yes. The chicken and the bread of course, but I… it wasn’t (laughter) I don’t think it was so bad that (laughter) I would have been completely mystified (laughter). Yes, I suppose that’s a good test isn’t it?”
Sandra: “What did you eat as a child?”
Hugh: “As a child? Well it was, yeah. Yes, I, erm . Again, it was just ordinary English food really. I mean, I spent quite… a certain amount of my childhood in children’s homes and they went to the trouble of preparing the food well. It wasn’t, it wasn’t prepackaged or anything like that you know and there wasn’t anything like as much pre-prepared, pre-packaged food then and and they would do things like steak and kidney pie from scratch and what have you and it was very nice food. I remember liking it very much…”