Photo: Phil Vine
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Film-maker Carl Naus relocated from Auckland to Ōtepoti to start a co-operative café and bakery.
"Yours is a worker cooperative. Which means it's owned and operated by the workers. The people who do the work are the people who make the decisions, who also own the business."
Bhagya Janethri Herath was in the city doing a masters in physiology at Otago University.
"I was always kind of a little freaky guy when my parents used to get fish and stuff, and whole fish, and I'd love to look at the gills and things like that"
Carl started putting on Sri Lankan homestyle banquets at Yours Café.
One Thursday evening Baghya happened by.
"I was like, oh, there's a Sri Lankan here. What are they up to?"
She came for the food and stayed for the inclusive kaupapa, ending up working there part-time.
Baghya was born in Colombo. Carl's mum is from Sri Lanka.
So began a friendship which blossomed into a documentary team.
Carl Naus and Baghya Janethri Harath Photo: Phil Vine
Mother Tongue is the name of their film, due out next month.
It started off as a trip by Carl to visit his food suppliers in Sri Lanka.
One night he said to Baghya: "You should just come with me and then we can make a proper film about this. You can be the presenter, I'll shoot and do the directing and then it'll be fine." She doesn't have any experience doing anything like this before, but she's curious and good at talking to people.
She said OK: "By that stage didn't know the guy, it could go one of two ways."
What they've produced is a deep-dive into the production of food in their homeland.
There are wild goose chases for elusive spices, hilarious scenes with Baghya trying her hand at making local dishes, wide-eyed wanderings through ancient food forests but also some eye-opening stories about the harsh life of those who make the ingredients they serve at the café.
"We heard some, like, horror stories of farmers making little to no money, or they've had a really bad weather season and they can't grow another year, and the situation is so dire that maybe they would consider committing suicide," says Baghya.
Families who produce basic ingredients like rice, cinnamon, coconuts, which we might take for granted here in Aotearoa.
"I'm not sure if people in New Zealand understand that relationship between a rich country like ours and a country that's being extracted from like that," says Carl. "And I think we're so acutely aware of it. We wanted to bring that story out in a way that is entertaining and fun and delicious."
Photo: Phil Vine
Baghya says she came back with a completely different worldview.
"Its really changed things for me I think. There's just this question mark of where has everything come from and what are the people like? What have they had to go through for me to live in such excess and comfort? So far I'm only 23. I've got so many years of consuming to do, probably, but it'll definitely be more informed."
"I think a lot of people who do go in this direction of wanting to understand food supply chains or the production of things approach it in a very black and white, moralistic way," says Carl. "Where does it have the sticker on it? Does it have the climate neutral sticker? Does it have the organic sticker? Does it have the fair-trade sticker? But all those things, sure, they give us some information, but they also obscure a whole bunch of stuff. There are a lot of organisations that might just be box ticking to try and get sticker and uh, are uh, missing out on other things. Like it doesn't tell you if the person who's growing the pepper is having a good time."
But is there a danger of knowing too much about your food, will this grim information ruin the simple joy of eating?
"I don't know, I think it's about the way you approach it," said Carl, "Like you can't, you can't be pure in that. You have to accept that. Like, in the foods that you eat. Being somebody living in a society like ours, everything you eat is going to have some exploitation somewhere down the supply chain, right? And uh, you can't like absolve yourself of that just by eating in a certain way. Like that also doesn't fix the problem, right? Like it's much wider than like just buying the correct banana."
Mother Tongue is due out in December 2024. Details about where to watch the documentary are here.
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