Film creates winning recipe

A cross-cultural cooking lesson has helped a Charles Darwin University student win an award in a national short film competition.

Bachelor of Education student Lara Whitehouse recently won the Bahasa Indonesia Short Film Competition award for her three-minute film on how to make Finnish bread.

Lara delivered the cooking instructions entirely in Bahasa Indonesia to win the “(University) Open Continues” category of the competition, after beginning to learn the language at CDU earlier this year.

She said she decided on a recipe from her home country of Finland for the competition, organised by the Consulate of the Republic of Indonesia in Darwin, as a way to embrace cultural diversity.

“I picked Finnish bread because I was born in Helsinki and it is my favourite dish,” she said.

“I thought what better way to show inter-cultural connections than creating a Finnish dish in Australia while speaking Bahasa Indonesia?”

Lara said Finnish bread had a distinct sour taste and was different from other breads in that only rye flour was used.

She said she would continue the Bahasa Indonesia language component of her course in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, during the first semester of 2016 through a New Colombo Plan scholarship.

“There is a very positive relationship between CDU and Indonesia, and all the language lecturers here do such a great job getting students into overseas and in-country programs,” Lara said.

She attended the CDU Kupang In-Country Language Program earlier this year.