A new miniseries finds meaning in the everyday moments shared over a biscuit, writes Alice Webb-Liddall.

There’s a small handful of NZ companies you could reasonably expect to make a 24-part micro-documentary series about the texture of everyday life in Aotearoa. Griffin’s, the brand best known for its moreish hundreds and thousands bikkies, was not top of that list.

Griffin’s, to me, lives in a very different part of the national imagination. A brand less popularly associated with cinematic ambition than with a decent cup of tea and a faintly pilled jumper.

And yet, in one of the more unexpected creative pivots in recent memory, Griffin’s has done its best auteur impression, creating a series that will make you laugh, potentially cry, and wrestle with some genuine existential questions.

Life Needs a Biscuit, a 24-part mini-doc series created with the Auckland creative studio Motion Sickness, follows 24 people across 24 hours of an otherwise humdrum day in February, lingering in the small pauses that usually get edited out of both advertising and life.

It’s a tender, slightly unexpected, genuinely affecting portrait of New Zealand lives as they are actually lived.

Accompanying each narrative is a different biscuit.

There’s Sage, awake for her morning ocean swim at 7am before she warms back up on the beach with a Gingernut and a thermos of tea. “With biscuits you kind of know what you’re going to get when you’re buying a packet,” she reflects, channelling Forrest Gump, “but in life you don’t.”

Or Renee and her new baby, awake at 4am for a feed – milk for baby and Toffee Pops for mum. “We just love him so much. He’s just like the best little gift,” she says, cradling the baby as they drift back off to sleep.

The films, while small snapshots of daily life, tell stories about those little but poignant moments that are so important despite their fleeting nature.

Griffin’s marketing director Allison Yorston says the series is meant to be a reflection of New Zealanders today. Despite the range of characters, it highlights the thread that connects us all.

“The degrees of separation are actually quite small, and so that feeling of who we are as a nation is just really strong. Regardless of who you talk to, our values are actually quite similar,” she says. “I love that about New Zealand.”

Sam Stuchbury, creative director at Motion Sickness, agrees. “New Zealand is so broad and different and diverse and interesting, and some of the most heartfelt conversations happen around a cuppa and a biscuit. It was important to capture both our individuality and our shared humanity.”

Filmed in an observational style, Life Needs a Biscuit has a candour about its subjects that brings us into their worlds in a genuine way, making each interaction feel familiar and warm.

Even those that are more eccentric feel like characters we’ve all known before – like Lenni, the miniature horse racer from Northland, whose pink jacket and horse bridle match the Hundreds and Thousands biscuits she enjoys in the float before a race.

It feels only right that these stories be told by a brand that feels so entwined into our lives, having stocked the biscuit tins of New Zealanders since 1864.

“Griffin’s is in most of the pantries of New Zealanders across the country, whether you’re older or younger, whether you’re living by yourself or in a big family group or with friends and whether you’re at the tip of the North Island or the bottom of the South Island, it’s there, and it has a really important presence,” says Yorston.

In telling these stories, Griffin’s continues to stake its claim within what Stuchbury calls “the cultural pantry of New Zealand.”

Life Needs a Biscuit is all about amplifying the moments that may otherwise seem unremarkable; the joys of getting a phone call from your kids during a long night shift, the hilarity of a dry conversation between colleagues on smoko, and the familiar comfort found at a weekly small-town brass band practice.

“A life well lived is about those smaller everyday moments that make up a rich tapestry of a great life,” says Yorston.

It’s a reminder of all the lives that are being lived around Aotearoa each day, all of the stories being written in the early hours and the memories being created in different workplaces and homes, while lying in bed or sitting in a car or catching your breath at the gym.

All of these experiences which, when shared over a biscuit, are given the space to become memories. Because while Shrewsburys might, in essence, just be strawberry filling sandwiched between two biscuits, they represent something far greater for the generations of New Zealanders like me who’ve grown up sharing laughter, friendship and connection – with crumbs on our chins.