Help identifying short film

January 23, 2016 9:49 PM

Short, silent film of a cranky old white man who orders at a food court (?), gets up to get something to drink, comes back to find a black kid sitting at his table across from his chair and eating his food. Old guy continues to eat his food, puts up with kid eating his food for awhile, kid looks at old guy strangely for awhile, then shrugs and gets up and leaves old guy to finish the food. Old guy then stands up and realizes his food is actually sitting on the table behind him; that he sat down at the black kids table. Or something like that.
posted by Jackson to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

The Lunch Date
posted by sacrifix at 9:56 PM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

I was going to link to the same thing.
posted by guster4lovers at 9:57 PM on January 23, 2016

In case you were wondering I found it because I had remembered reading a story about a British man, doing the same thing, at some point in recent history on the internet. So I googled "a man at my table eating my packet of crisps" which brought me to this page on Snopes, and there is a reference to the short at the bottom under "Sightings". And it just so happened to be on Youtube!
posted by sacrifix at 9:58 PM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

Thirding The Lunch Date - which I found by Googling "short film" + diner + white + black + food
posted by northernish at 10:01 PM on January 23, 2016

(Douglas Adams relates how something like this happened to him here. I guess this sort of thing must actually happen to people quite often - and places, like Britain, where there is a cultural tendency towards being polite by not saying something - are likely to be relative hot-beds)
posted by rongorongo at 10:49 PM on January 23, 2016 [6 favorites]

Modern short film version here! (Full disclosure, I know the director.)
posted by prewar lemonade at 6:19 AM on January 24, 2016

Response by poster: My daughter - who is really asking this question - says it is NOT The Lunch Date, although the story is identical! Prewar Lemonade, it might be the modern version you link to, but the Vimeo film you link to does not play and there is no description, so we can't tell; any advice on finding a link that works? The Douglas Adams story was great too. Thanks to all for your help; The Hive always amazes me.
posted by Jackson at 8:11 AM on January 24, 2016

The basic story is a classic urban legend first collected from multiple sources in Britian in the 1970s. Jan Harold Brunvand reported it in The Choking Doberman in 1986, under the category title "The Package of Cookies," but he cites an article that documented it in "British mass media sources" in the early 70s. It's likely Adams repurposed it from such a source; his account comes in 1976 and I think he's enough of an unreliable narrator; he wants to make a point about British-ness.
posted by Miko at 8:55 AM on January 24, 2016

FYI the video Prewar Lemonade linked to is not the one you're looking for - it's two older white men on a bench outside of a train station, and one eats the other's candy bar.
posted by the webmistress at 10:15 AM on January 24, 2016