The documentary is a portrait of one of the Toronto-based chef Luke Donato’s online cooking classes, held in early August, when the coronavirus was spreading at a terrifying rate.

The digital spaces where we find one another are symphonies of beeps and hums: the chime of an incoming text message, the whoosh of a sent e-mail, the marimba couplet of a new face popping up in a group video chat. They’re no substitute for shouted greetings or close embraces, but for many who have been keeping friends and loved ones at a distance during the past year of pandemic-induced isolation, these technological chirps have become something like proof of life, an ambient soundtrack of human connection. These sounds, melodic and percussive, cascade through the opening minutes of “Until Further Notice,” a documentary from the director Tiffany Hsiung about an unlikely community: a weekly cooking class, taught via Zoom, whose students come together in uncommon intimacy during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

In April, 2020, a little more than a month after Ontario, Canada, went into covid-19 lockdown, Luke Donato felt like he was falling apart. Six months earlier, after the birth of his son, he’d taken a step back from his job as an executive chef at a hip Toronto restaurant, assuming that it would be a temporary leave of absence. But, amid a wave of coronavirus-related closures, his hiatus suddenly became indefinite, and the entire restaurant industry was in free fall. Donato was overwhelmed by a sense of existential paralysis. “I’ve never, in over twenty years, seen Luke go through something like this,” Hsiung, a longtime friend of Donato’s, told me during a conference call with the chef. “He was always the rock—the centerpiece.” Donato wondered if starting a cooking class might lift his spirits; on April 28th, a small group of friends, including Hsiung, gathered on Zoom, for a lesson in making butter chicken.

“Until Further Notice” is a portrait of one of Donato’s online classes (in the film, he refers to them, charmingly, as “episodes”), held in early August, when the coronavirus was spreading at a terrifying rate. By then, the group had grown to more than a hundred students, a loose network of word-of-mouth referrals, friends of friends, and loved ones (including Hsiung and the film’s co-producer, Priscilla Galvez, as well as Donato’s parents) who set up their laptops in the kitchen every Friday night and, for an hour, followed Donato’s instructions. Hsiung sketches their breezy rapport with quick cuts of Zoom-window jokes and greetings and cooing over babies—a relief, an outlet, a deeply needed social connection. Footage of the class is interlaced with a series of disarmingly intimate interviews with students, a reminder of what the escapism of the cooking class is transporting its participants from: an older couple who had to shut down their day care, a woman who lost her girlfriend and her job to covid and who fears for her ability to support family in Venezuela. Donato, broadcasting from his home kitchen, tells the class to trim the barbed outer petals from their artichokes until only the tender hearts remain. Hsiung, who that evening had taken a break from being a cooking student in order to shoot the film, told me she saw parallels between the dish that the group had cooked and the class itself. “Here’s this thing, the artichoke, that through adversity, they found this way of making this food to enjoy,” she said, echoing an insight of Donato’s from the film. “Through the pandemic, through this lockdown, the challenges and the priority of keeping everyone safe allowed us to find yet another way to bring forth intimacy.”

The recipe that evening was halibut and artichokes in acqua pazza—“crazy water”—a tomato broth spiked with fiery chilis. It’s a sensuous, stylish dish—colorful and alluring in the grainy frame of a Zoom window. Through Hsiung’s camera, its components become totemic, almost erotic: the tapered neck of the artichoke, the smooth flesh of the fish. We can’t touch one another, but we can know how these ingredients feel and smell and taste.

In August, not long after the group had cooked the halibut dish together, Donato landed a gig as a private chef, and the class went on hiatus. But the participants’ WhatsApp group is still hopping, with members swapping new techniques and sharing proud photos of their home-cooked meals. Just as Donato used the class to find himself again, just as his students found a connection with one another, Hsiung told me that she thinks of the film as a way for viewers to find something for themselves: “Netflix will end one day—the film will end,” she said. “But imagine if you watch a film and it continues on through something physical: a dish, a recipe, something you can share. That’s always been a way to pass things on.”