An invitation to cook your own world
A meditation on the strange freedom of realizing the world does not have to taste the way everyone says it should.
In this short film, a simple possibility appears:
Maybe you are not a shrimp. Maybe your world is paella.
We invite you to watch it slowly —
without trying to make perfect sense of it.
Just watch.
Cooking Your World
A reflection on how we learn what we’re supposed to want — and how to choose differently.
Written in dialogue with the film, this reflection explores how cultural expectations quietly shape our idea of success — and what becomes possible when we begin choosing differently.
Drawing from sociology, psychology, and philosophy, it examines how identity is often inherited before it is chosen.
Why certain paths feel “obvious.”
Why admiration can quietly guide our ambitions.
And why many people eventually discover that the life they were told to want does not fully match the life that nourishes them.
The reflection introduces a simple but powerful idea:
Your world may not taste like everyone else's — and that difference may be exactly where meaning begins.
Wear the Sentence
The World Is Not Your Oyster — Film Collection
Each piece carries a sentence from the film — fragments of a strange philosophy about identity, expectation, and the freedom of choosing your own recipe for life.
Minimal, curious, and quietly cinematic, these objects extend the universe of La Séance beyond the screen.
A limited collection inspired by the film for those who have realized that the most interesting lives rarely follow the same recipe.
Influence Around the Short Film: When Taste Becomes Identity
This visual chapter continues the film in another language.
Through music, philosophy, and culinary aesthetics, we explore how taste becomes more than preference — it becomes identity.
Film
Dirty Dancing — Emile Ardolino & Linda Goettlieb
"Nobody puts Baby (shrimp) in a corner."
Super Rich Kids — Frank Ocean
A quiet anthem about inherited worlds.
Luxury surrounds the characters in the song — beautiful homes, endless summers, perfect surfaces. And yet the tone is strangely hollow.
The question beneath the music is subtle:
What happens when you inherit a world you never chose?
The film explores a similar tension. Not about wealth — but about expectations.
The lives we are told should feel desirable. And the quiet moment when we realize they might not.
Place it on the table
Play this track on a late evening walk — when the question of what you actually want begins to feel louder than what you were told to want.
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu
A foundational work on taste and society.
Bourdieu argued that preferences — in art, culture, food, and lifestyle — are never purely personal.
They are shaped by environments.
By class.
By education.
By the worlds we grow up inside.
What we call taste often reveals the social scripts we have inherited.
The film explores the moment when someone begins to question those scripts.
Place it on the table
Open this book when you begin wondering whether your ambitions truly belong to you — or were simply served to you first.
Visual Inspiration
The Photography of Modernist Cuisine — by Nathan Myhrvold
A monumental exploration of food as visual art.
The book presents hundreds of large-scale photographs that transform ordinary ingredients — tomatoes, bread, pasta, meat, vegetables — into sculptural compositions.
Textures become landscapes.
Ingredients become architecture.
Close-ups reveal the interior of bread, the splash of wine, the structure of vegetables, or the delicate surface of a dessert. Food appears both intimate and cinematic.
This visual approach resonates strongly with the language of the film:
not cooking as instruction —
but cooking as metaphor.
A dish can represent comfort.
A plate can represent conformity.
A recipe can become identity.
Through extreme detail and editorial composition, food stops being simply nourishment and becomes a way of thinking about the world.
Place it on the table
Open this book when you want to remember that even the simplest ingredient can contain an entire world.
A line to keep
The Next Film Begins in a Letter
Everything you’ve read here
is what we send as a Letter.
Same film.
Same reflection.
Same artistic universe.
Just delivered gently to your inbox — so you don’t have to look for it.
If you’d like to receive the next one, you’re welcome inside.
Join Letters by La Séance below ↓
With care,
La Séance
AI cinema for the inner life.