Director Julie Zhu on finding the beauty in every moment

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Priyan Patel, 5, helps out in his uncle’s Sandringham dairy and has his first week at school in the second season of the documentary series Takeout Kids. Photo / Julie Zhu
Director Julie Zhu talks about finding the beauty in everyday moments in the second season of her fly-on-the-wall documentary series Takeout Kids.

A boy at school has a crush on Kyla Dang. It’s unrequited, though.
She’s never actually met him and anyway, he’s only 5. “No way, Jose,” says Kyla, who’s 7. It’s all heartbreak and high drama at primary school.

The bedazzled twin bedroom she shares with her big sister, Kylee, has posters of K-pop girl band Blackpink on the wall. The sisters’ nails are bedazzled, too. Their parents, who migrated to Aotearoa from Vietnam, have owned a nail salon in Whakatāne for the past 10 years.
Director Julie Zhu spent five 10-hour days filming the family for a second season of her fly-on-the-wall documentary series Takeout Kids, which premiered this week. It’s a measure of her skill as a storyteller that the final 12-minute cut is such a satisfying watch. To be honest, I have a bit of a crush on Kyla, myself.
The first season, released in 2022, focused on four family-owned food businesses and the children who have become part of the wallpaper there – a glimpse into the daily life of migrant cultures from Jordan (an Auckland restaurant), Cambodia (a Thames coffee lounge), Samoa (a Porirura eatery) and China (a fish-and-chip shop).
This time, Zhu has widened the lens beyond “takeouts” and employed a more intergenerational narrative arc. The result is a warm and often deeply intimate slice of life that’s testament to the trust she developed with each of the five families featured in season two.
Zhu says the candid nature of the shoots evoked strong feelings on both sides of the camera. She found herself tearing up while filming a sequence with Lauren Shaw, a 16-year-old torn between loyalty to her Cook Island grandparents, who run the legendary Tanz KTCHN in Ōtara, and the desire for her future to hold something more than working in the family business.
What undid the rest of her crew was the “Phitcha moment”, when a young Akaroa teen has an emotional breakthrough with her father, who left Thailand ahead of the family and spent many years apart from his daughter before they were reunited in New Zealand. “Everyone was crying.”
Born in China, Zhu wasn’t a “takeout kid” herself but was left in the care of her grandparents for two years while her mother and father established themselves in New Zealand. “And I grew up with parents who were always working, so I relate to it on that level,” she says.
She and Saraid de Silva, a Sri Lankan/Pākehā actor and writer, are co-creators of the award-winning podcast Conversations with My Immigrant Parents, the third and final season of which was released last year. In one episode, the pair talk with their own mothers. Zhu, who stopped speaking Chinese after she moved to New Zealand, says her mother was uncharacteristically emotional during their conversation and spent much of it in tears.
“I have a complex relationship with my mum, which a lot of people with immigrant backgrounds have, and then there was the language barrier as well. I don’t know, perhaps if we’d stayed [in China], our relationship would be different. I know a lot of my weird disconnection with my mum stems from that displacement.”
For Zhu, Takeout Kids was another way to tell migrant stories, delving into the world of everyday families that are part of our local communities. “We go to a dairy, a restaurant, a nail shop and have these brief, superficial interactions all the time,” she says. “The series came from a curiosity to know more about their lives beyond the counter.”
The star of the opening episode in season two is Priyan Patel, a mischievous 5-year-old whose parents own a bulk food store in Sandringham, although he’s equally at home in his uncle’s dairy across the road.
The camera follows Priyan on his first day at school, where he cuts a solitary figure, sitting alone with his lunchbox, kicking his heels. By the end of the week, he’s completely in his element.
Some 50 hours of footage was shot for each episode so the editing process has been a gargantuan task. None of the filming was scripted but, given the personal nature of some of the content, each family had approval rights over the final cut.
As an observational documentary maker, Zhu likes to keep the camera rolling on car rides, which are often the setting for more relaxed conversations. In the opening scene with 13-year-old Dominic Sinthupan, he’s being driven home from school by his mum, a single parent who owns two Thai restaurants in Taupō. When she tells Dominic his father is back in New Zealand and wants to see him, the teen makes it clear he’s not interested in having any contact.
“We’d just arrived from Taupō and that was literally the first thing we filmed,” says Zhu. “It’s so unusual for a kid to have the confidence to articulate what he feels in that way, and for his mum to accept that as well.”
One of the differences she’s noticed between this season and the first one – which was shot in 2021 between Covid lockdowns – is the growing use of te reo Māori in the classroom. Kyla, who’s learning Vietnamese at home, delivers a fluent pepeha.
Zhu, who’s been learning te reo herself for the past few years, won a best director award last month at the 48Hours film competition for her bilingual short Monster State. In 2017, Loading Docs platformed her short documentary, East Meets East, which follows her 79-year-old grandmother, Fang Ruzhen, on her weekly bus trips to East Auckland’s Asian supermarkets.
A photographer by trade, she directed an episode for Waiata Anthems on Ngāti Whātua singer Majic Pāora, which is set to be released next month. She also recently picked up her first job as a camera operator, working on a documentary about Taiwanese pro-democracy activist Carey Chang. (Her former collaborator, da Silva, released her first novel, AMMA, in March.)
Takeout Kids, which was supported by funding from NZ On Air, isn’t overtly political, although plenty of moments are quietly revealing and all the more powerful for that. Zhu says she wanted it to feel like a series of cinematic short films.
“So often, these are the people who occupy the margins of our societies and communities but their stories and experiences are just as vast and deep and complex as anyone else’s. It’s about finding beauty in those everyday moments we don’t usually get to see.”
• The first episode of Takeout Kids premiered this week on The Spinoff at thespinoff.co.nz/videos/takeout-kids.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning feature writer on the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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