At the pinnacle of this movement is a diverse edible environment known as a Food Forest - a collection of perennial plants grown in a multilayered natural forest ecosystem that is beneficial to humans, animals, plants and insects. This idea moves away from the monoculture crops that have become the norm in our post WW2 agrochemical-based horticulture systems.

These practical and inspiring examples embrace health-giving heritage varieties such as the ‘Monty’s Surprise’ apple. In a global apple study, this particular apple was found to have the world’s highest level of natural Bioflavonoids and Procyanidins, which have been clinically proven to reduce the replication of cancer cells.

In recent years Food Forests have become popularised around the world from Seattle to Malawi and many places in between.
In New Zealand, a range of diverse communities have come together to participate at all levels of food production, harvest, appreciation and celebration to grow ‘Free Food for the People.’

Nowhere is the opportunity to come together to actively grow our future more evident than in Christchurch, a city struggling to rebuild after the devastating February 2011 Earthquake. This natural disaster destroyed almost 80 percent of the city’s buildings, and left hundreds of hectares of prime land unable to be rebuilt on.

After the houses where removed from the ‘red zones’ some people in the city had a vision to turn Christchurch, the ‘Garden City’, into the ‘Edible Garden City of the Future.’ This shift in thinking had its challenges and this film shares the journey of convincing the Christchurch City Council to turn over a new leaf by supporting the public planting of fruit and nut trees in hundreds of parks and reserves; turning often marginal land into a perennial paradise.

Captured over five years as part of 'The Localising Food Project', Edible Paradise travels to the four corners of Aotearoa - New Zealand, to meet local food campaigners instrumental in creating community orchard and food forest projects in their patch.

I first met Robina McCurdy, one of the main characters for this film at a transformational festival in 2012. She was hosting a permaculture workshop in one of the large marquees and spoke with amazing passion about an idea to travel around New Zealand to capture inspiring stories of local food resilience. From this seed, The Localising Food Project was born - a digital project with a variety of short and long-form video stories available on Youtube and at localisingfood.com.

Edible Paradise was the third major documentary in the series and was very much my 'baby' for over 5 years. I was captivated by the tension between the commercial and community of food production; I learned the real value in our heritage fruit varieties and fell in love with the idea of being able to go down to a local park, pick an apple off the tree, bite into its juicy flesh and be nourished with what nature provides.  It's quite a long wait for the vision of the Christchurch Food Resilience Network to play itself out and being able to have a solid enough through-line to complete the film which was a finalised in the 'Best New Zealand Feature' category at the DocEdge Documentary Film festival.