We spent three weeks in February shooting the rest of the documentary we are working on, Eating Up Easter.* While it started out as a film about food and resources on Easter Island and the importation of food, it has shifted and drifted quite a bit since that starting point. Now, we are following three main characters and a few secondary characters, highlighting their daily life on this most remote little island, and the many ways in which they are working to move their community forward in a positive, loving way that nurtures their island’s unique and invaluable resources. There is much to learn from their stories and we are thrilled to get to share them.
*Eating Up Easter is getting an overhaul and will soon have a new website. In the meantime, we have a facebook page, where some of you may have been following our progress during the shoot. Like our page, Eating Up Easter, to stay informed about the everyday happenings of the film. 
When we first arrived on the island, it was the tail end of the Tapati Rapa Nui Festival, a two week long celebration of the culture of Rapa Nui, in which sporting competitions, singing and dancing fill the days and nights and culminate in a day long parade in which locals and tourists alike are painted with soil-based paint and dressed in traditional clothing (which isn’t much). Above, Mark, one of our cameramen, shoots our main character Mama Piru as she leads a group of women pulling a float. 
The only beach on the island, Anakena, was overloaded with tourists in February, the busiest month for tourism on the island. 
We also tried out a drone helecopter to get some unique angles on our characters and the sites on the island. 
The helicopter came with goggles to watch what it was filming. It made you feel like you were flying. And you looked super fashionable. 
We spent an afternoon following a farmer we had first filmed back in November. His fields were full of watermelon and other melons and we had fun using the helicopter to shoot his vast fields from above. 
That is until it suddenly came crashing down. Yep, the battery ran out (whoops, somehow none of us remembered the timer for that run) and it fell about 100 feet out of the sky. Luckily it was repairable and within a few days we were back in business. And Hernán, the farmer, fed us each an eighth of a giant watermelon so we could wash our woes away with a major sugar rush. 
We also spent a day with Mama Piru at her home in the campo, or countryside. She lives far outside of the town with no electricity or running water. But, she has the most amazing home, filled with driftwood and artifacts from all around the world, as well as art she’s made out of the plastic she cleans up around the coast. We followed her and her team of friends as they picked up trash along the coast, a weekly activity for them. Easter Island is in a location in the Pacific Ocean where much of the world’s trash collects and washes ashore. The people here are not only concerned about the large trash, but also about the microplastic, tiny pieces of plastic that fill the water and the beaches of the island and are often found in the stomachs of fish, meaning when we eat fish, we too are eating that plastic.
Speaking of fish guts…apparently they are a delicacy here on the island. I learn something new every time! But since no one wants to eat the contents of said intestines, first they spend a good while squeezing the waste out of all the guts. Then they fry up the intestines with a lot of salt and oil. 
And serve it with bread. Yum! 
We all gave it a try. Can’t say I’d go out of my way to eat it again, but it wasn’t all that bad if you don’t think too hard about what it is. 
We brought a bunch of fish for an afternoon feast after cleaning up the coast, and they provided this beautiful spread of salads and spanish rice. It was quite an idyllic day out in the breezy air of the quiet countryside…..it made me remember what I love most about the island. The town has gotten so busy and full of people and cars, sometimes you forget the beauty and simplicity of what life can be here. 
At the end of the day we interviewed Mama Piru with her husband, a frenchman who has not left the island in 18 years. They were bickering like an old married couple through the whole interview, but you could tell their love for each other was one of those epic kind of loves. We feel so lucky to have had this day with them, the whole thing felt like a dream, and this is their life! What amazing people. 
Mama Piru works at the recycling plant during the week, so we also followed a recycling truck to the plant and then interviewed some of her employees there. We had filmed there in November too, but the amount of recycling was overflowing from the busy season now.
We sat for a while and helped her process plastic bottles before the machine compacted them into blocks that will later be shipped back to mainland Chile for actual recycling. 
One of my favorite parts of the recycling plant is this long wall of books, or the library, as Mama Piru calls it. She has collected all of these books from the trash and compiled them here for her employees and anyone else in the town who wants to borrow them. Most of them are school text books. Mixed in are many other fascinating little finds like photos and toys that she has collected over time. 
Here was our last lunch with the crew. The guys from left are: Cristian, our local camera and sound assistant; Mark, our second cameraman, audio guy and drone pilot; our producer and director (Ta’u); and Jeff, our cinematographer. 
Just before the guys left, we filmed the sunrise behind Ahu Tongariki, the largest ceremonial structure in all of Polynesia. Watching the sunrise there is one of my favorite things to do and never fails to take your breath away with its spectacular show of colors behind the statues.
The boys with their toy.
And that’s a wrap. Turning in the last card from the last day of filming with our team. 
Saying goodbye to a fabulous team was hard. We got so lucky with these guys. They gave it their all, we had a lot of fun, but got so much seriously good work done, and fought together through the many struggles, challenges, and scary moments (while it may look like all fun and games, it was riddled with challenges, stress, and some scary moments that were completely unexpected, but we made it through. Who said it should all be easy, right? You have to work for what you believe in, and believe me, we worked, and still are working, and will be for a good long while to see this thing through). 
Ta’u and I stayed a few more days to tie up loose ends. The day before we left we got to take a hike on the oldest volcano, a place Ta’u hadn’t been to since he was a child. We went to film one of our secondary characters, who was leading a tour there. 
And so we finished our production on the island and headed home. Our next step is to sort through the many many hours of footage and interviews and start to put it together into a film. It seems daunting and a bit overwhelming, but knowing how much awesome footage is in there is helping us push forward, even if it means all our evenings and weekends are going to be filled with transcribing interviews and sorting through b-roll for the foreseeable future. Thanks for following along on our journey!