I was interested in a scene from Reitman’s Up in the Air where the new uber-efficient Natalie (Anna Kendrick) introduces the word ‘Glocal’ to the bemusement of those she’s presenting to. I would have thought it was a term which was pretty much old-hat by now: the merging of global and local. Just how many years ago did we first hear the slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally”. It’s a mantra, and like all mantras, tends to diminish the insight which it offers through familiarity.

For storytellers, however, and especially filmmakers, there’s something very significant in understanding the interplay between local and global. Many writers and artists strive to express something universal so that what they draw attention to will resonate with the whole human race. For some this is altruistic; for others it’s the attempt to maximise return by coming up with a blockbuster. Ironically, the attempt to tell a story which everyone can access, often by ‘deculturing’ it, is the very process which bleaches the narrative of any resonance at all. The fact remains that while that which is universal (if we can still talk in these terms in postmodern times) is present everywhere, it is mediated through the specific. People find meaning when they bump their toe on it in their own world. Any writer worth their salt knows that it’s in the concrete small details that a story is built.

Over the long years of development with The Insatiable Moon, I often received critiques about how ‘small’ the story was. It doesn’t get much more local than a tale about a Maori psychiatric patient walking the streets of Ponsonby in the small city of Auckland in the tiny country of New Zealand. And yet we have always positioned the film as a drama for international audiences. This is not despite the local nature of the story, but because of it. A good film, like a good book, draws its audience into a small world which might be entirely strange to them, but which is both unique and finite. That tiny slice of human experience, insofar as it intrigues, is capable of resonating with the harmonies of existence. Our film is small by intention, not by oversight. And because it’s small, it’s huge.

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