ALYX DUNCAN

director | producer

Synopsis

Creation myth meets contemporary consumption in a downtown sushi bar. 16 minutes, 2010

Concept Outline

From the chopping board of a bustling sushi restaurant comes a tale inspired by Te Ika a Maui (a Maori creation myth of New Zealand). The setting is Wellington, New Zealand, in 2010. A 9-year-old girl weaves two parallel stories into one with her narration.

‘Once, deep beneath the ocean and long ago, there lived a gigantic fish. It lived with instinct and freedom until one day a man came …’

In a sushi restaurant, three cousins meet after the death of their grandfather. Their conversation moves from love to inheritance – and the mood darkens.

 Hauled out of the sea, the fish lies on the surface, gasping. The worlds of fantasy and reality merge as a forested landscape grows from its belly, creating the country we live upon. The fish is gutted, cut up, and turned into sushi.

Told in stop-motion animation and live action, Appetite explores our blindness to the earth as a living being and our increasing disconnection from one another. It’s a film that questions our choices in relation to each other and the land we are part of.

Artist Statement

The story of Te Ika a Maui (The Fish of Maui) is one small part of a much greater story of Maui, a Maori demigod. Maui caught the great fish that became the North Island of New Zealand. I was interested in what happened when Maui’s brothers decided they wanted some of the fish for themselves. They cut into it with their paddles. The combination of the great cuts and the writhing fish created the contours of the land.

This act of mutilation is mirrored in the way we’ve been treating the land for many years – from the time of European settlement to the most recent waves of migration from other countries. I wanted to see how a founding myth of this country exists in 2010, in a jostling multicultural city. Here, we can choose between eating Asian cuisine, MacDonalds, or fish-n chips on any given night –the choice of the film’s fast-food sushi restaurant reflects this environment.

There are two elements in this story that I wanted to focus on. One is that the land is a living creature. I had a very strong sense of this while flying back from Auckland near the beginning of the project. Looking out the window of the plane, I could see the curve of the earth and was highly moved. To me it looked like the earth was breathing. Then, coming over the land, I saw all the sections of property, like a tortured animal or human that has been sliced up and rationed out. As I flew into Wellington, we sank beneath the clouds over Island Bay. I could feel myself shifting from this high overview back into the everyday logistics of my life as one human being dealing with my small piece of the world. It is this sort of shift in perspective that I wanted to explore in this film.

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