Apron Strings

Two mothers from very different cultures find the courage to confront the secrets of the past, and set their sons free.

Hard-working Lorna runs an old-fashioned cake shop and lives with her unemployed son. For Anita, star of an Indian cooking show, things come to a head when her son decides to meet her estranged sister, who runs a no-frills curry house.

Apron Strings is New Zealand Indian filmmaker and academic Shuchi Kothari’s first feature film as co-writer (with Dianne Taylor) and co-producer, as well as the feature film directorial debut of Samoan-born New Zealand filmmaker Sima Urale. Funded by the New Zealand Film Commission and TVNZ, it is the first Indian feature to be filmed in Aotearoa, and it set the tone for Kothari’s later extensive work as a writer, producer, professor and champion of pan-Asian screen representation.

Apron Strings is a character study of two matriarchs: Lorna, the Pākehā owner of a cake shop, and Anita, the Sikh TV host of an Indian cooking show. While touching on their cultural differences and neighbouring lives in the ethnically diverse suburb of Ōtāhuhu, Kothari and Taylor’s script tells the women’s stories in parallel, free from an intersecting cross-cultural plot device. Speaking to RNZ about the writing process, Kothari noted this was a conscious decision: “It brings out into the public and into the world the kind of de facto multiculturalism that exists within a bicultural frame within New Zealand, and I think that’s really important.”

The film also sensitively explores family and the complex, sometimes hurtful co-dependent relationship between the two solo mothers and their sons, interwoven with the significance of cooking and sharing food. Discussing her storytelling obsession “over food and its relationship to power” in an interview for The Lumière Reader in 2004, Kothari noted “the role food [plays] in ideas of nurture and control” within Apron Strings, which was still in development at the time. Apron Strings went into production in 2007, extending the recurring theme of food that Kothari’s earlier television and short film projects, including A Taste of Place: Stories of Food and Longing (2001) for TV1, and the shorts Fleeting Beauty (2004) and Coffee & Allah (2007, also directed by Urale), had revolved around.

Apron Strings was selected to open the 40th edition of the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2008.

Following its world premiere screenings, Apron Strings enjoyed a lengthy run on the international film festival circuit, screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and multiple other festivals in North America, Asian and Europe.