Donkey powered mobile veggie restaurant and cinema sets sights on Dordogne

MARCO Polo sur son ciné, a Franco-American project being launched via the crowd-funding site Indiegogo, will be a mobile vegan/vegetarian restaurant and portable art house cinema, also offering theatre and dance workshops for children, serving the rural Dordogne department of south west France, writes Paul Ben-Itzak.

Known as the capital of pre-history because it is home to the Lascaux caves as well as the first Cro-Magnon discoveries, the Dordogne is also famous for its delectable cuisine.

But if you're a vegetarian, let alone a lacto-sensitive vegan, you're out of luck.

Restaurants serve everything made from ducks, but if you can't eat meat, you'll often have to settle for a bland plate of vegetables and make sure they hold the duck fat from those pommes sarladoise.

As for leisure, this spectacularly verdant region is rich in outdoor activities like hiking and kayaking, but light on art-house cinema. We plan to remedy both these situations.

Our chef is Fanny Borrat, who co-founded the café/library/music hall Marco Polo sur son velo in Perigueux with Toby Brown in 2008.

Offering a geographically themed menu, a chaque pays son tartine, by day and animations like speed-dating and concerts by night, 'Marco' quickly became the locus for an international assemblage of artists, intellectuals and cultural misfits.

Along with a film-maker from Toulouse, I'll be doing the cinema, drawing on my experience as an arts journalist for the New York Times, Reuters, and others, most recently my magazine the Dance Insider & Arts Voyager.

We will show everything from vintage French, American, and British cinema to work by local film-makers, in both French and English (the Dordogne has a large Anglophile community).

The vehicle for all this will be a roulotte, a combination caravan and food truck, partly inspired by the food-trucking craze in the United States, but with one eco-friendly modification.

We'll replace gasoline with donkeys.

The cine-roulotte concept has had success in Normandy and our aim is to serve year-round residents as well as the heavy influx of summer visitors.

We're not 'bobos' trying to impose the latest urban trends, but rather locals, as Fanny was born in Perigueux, and I lived in Perigueux and Les Eyzies for three years, who love the indigenous culture and want to enhance the offering.

As part of that, we'll also use Fanny's experience as a dancer and mine as a children's theatre director to offer ateliers for local youth.

Please visit our Indiegogo page for more details or contact me direct if you have any other questions.