“Hello, I'm Julia and I'm obsessed with broken things.’’

How do you mend the broken, be it toasters, relationships or people? Julia once re-created broken objects to be better than before. However, a series of earthquakes triggered Julia’s descent into apathy and now she’s lost the will to repair anything, including herself. She’s going to a support group for help – Obsessives Associated. Each member has their own obsession to overcome – eating plasterboard, amassing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, brand-name tattoos. Finding a friend in Lynda, a doll-obsessed marathon runner, Julia feels as though she's finally on the mend until a dilemma fragments the group and threatens to break Julia all over again. Which glue repairs fractured humans?

The story is a perspective on the pandemic years in the hermit kingdom of New Zealand. For the people of Christchurch, the notion of a civil emergency was no new thing. The majority remembered vividly how their city broke apart at the seams in the four major earthquakes of 2009 and 2010. Ultimately hopeful, ‘Broken is Beautiful’ is a story of people, their relationships, their differences, and the futures they create from their shared narratives.