How does young Melbourne film student Nicolla Vella’s yiayia pass down her Greek-Cypriot culture to her?
She gives her beans.
So it was only fitting that the title of her upcoming documentary is called My Grandmother Gives Me Beans.
“It’s a funny story. Well my grandma, she gives me these little pink beans that I can never find anywhere, that she always finds and she cooks them in like a Cypriot way, and when we were trying to figure out a title for this doco I just blurted out in the middle of class that my grandma gives me beans, that’s how she gives me her culture,” Nicolla tells Neos Kosmos.
“The name just sort of came from that. So the whole message behind it is that she passes down her culture to me through little ways like that, like she’ll pass it down through food, language, through things like that and one of those is beans.”
The documentary is about the Greek Cypriot Parent and Youth Club in Sunshine, where Nicolla’s yiayia and papou are members.
She says the club is vibrant and full of life, somethings she intends to highlight.
Her goal is to bring more attention to the club, covering themes of love, community, culture, and belonging.
But she saw an issue that many were afraid to talk about. The lack of youth.
This left Nicolla thinking about how community within culture among young people is dying and questioning “when our elderly are gone, does our culture leave with them?”
“It’s sort of tricky to talk about it with them because the old people, they don’t really like talking about it and they don’t really want to admit that they’re not going to be here eventually and that they’re not going to be able to do it in a few years on their own,” she says.
“But my mum and some of their kids have sort of realised ‘oh, well they’re not going to be able to and I’m not going to do it without them. So we need to bring young people back so that we can keep doing this club’.
“We can bring that youth back to it because a lot of them tell me all these stories about what it used to be like.
“Even when I was a little kid, I remember there being so many other kids there. But now as I’ve grown older, they’ve sort of all just gone away.”
So that has become a focus for the documentary as well, to bring youth back, but it has evolved to be more of a celebration of culture and community.
Nicolla has always felt connected to her Greek-Cypriot roots, which is from her mum’s side.
Her grandparents have played a key role in that.
And now making this documentary, talking to members of the community, she feels even more connected.
“I’m making this and people are like approaching me and asking me things and telling me things that I wouldn’t have known about the club and about my culture,” she says.
“I think my understanding of my culture and my community has grown since I started making this.”
At the end of the day, Nicolla knows that many are disconnected, living in a country where we are exposed to many cultures but still ultimately living in Australian culture.
“Naturally we’ll sort of drift away as we age because we’ll have multicultural friends, we won’t just stick with Cypriot or Greek people anymore,” she says.
“We’ve got this wide range of different cultures that we’re consuming every single day and it’s hard to stick to one.
“And why would you want to stick to one as well? You want to sort of involve yourself in as many things as you can, and if that means drifting away from your cultural background, then sometimes it can happen that way.
“I just want to remind people that we have our own community here and that our grandparents and our parents that are part of this community and they wouldn’t say it, but they want our involvement and they want our help and that we should sort of put more priority on that as well.”
