What do you really know about the person who serves you at the grocery store, or your old high school teacher? Do you think old people are wise? Are all truck drivers the same? Would you invite a relative stranger into your house and share a meal with them?

Meet+Eat, an online documentary series, does exactly that – people from very different backgrounds sit down, share a meal and have a yarn.

Over a meal we share stories; deepen our understanding of another person … and we get to eat delicious food! It’s a win-win-win.

At its core, Meet+Eat is about celebrating diversity.

CuriousWorks, who produced the series, utilised its award-winning community model to work directly with families and community groups from two of Australia’s most culturally rich and diverse areas: Hume in Victoria and South Western Sydney in New South Wales.

In ‘The Princess and the Bird’, episode six of the first series of Meet+Eat, a truly heartwarming inside view of the immigration experience 54 years apart is seen through the stories of Maria and Helen.

Helen’s family arrived in Australia from Greece in the 1960s, after the occupation of their island village by the Italian army. Maria, a Samoan princess, was sent away from her tribe when she was a child, in order to find a better life.

The film celebrates the immigration experience through the sharing of a cultural feast of epic Greek and Samoan proportions filled with music, laughter, dance and song.

As the crew is invited into their homes, spends time with their large extended families and eat their cultural food, one question becomes apparent: does the immigration experience ever really change?

“We feel the film captures something poignant about the immigration experience of so many Greeks who came to Australia in the ’50s and we would love to be able to share it more widely with the Greek communities both in Australia and further afield,” episode director Emma Macey said.

The incredible music from the episode was originally composed by David Osborne in collaboration with Helen’s Greek family, which appears in the film.

The concept was developed by CuriousWorks in 2012 as a way to build the capacity of the two communities they work in, but also to address the subtle challenges around race based discrimination that currently exist in Australia.

To watch ‘The Princess and the Bird’, visit www.bit.ly/1pIoYPf or www.meeteat.com.au