When you sit down to your meal of locally grown leafy greens and fresh Gulf oysters, you might not consider the farmer or fisher who cultivated and gathered those provisions. Those culinary players are often overshadowed by celebrity chefs and beautifully decorated restaurants. A new film hopes to put the focus back on the hunter-gatherers who inspire Old-World recipes and regional sourcing. And when locavores meet film, you’ve got a movie that’s as satisfying and delicious as a plate of Houston Dairymaids cheese. (Click here to watch the short trailer.)

Now, Forager, a movie by Austin filmmakers Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin, follows Lucien (Cortlund) and Regina (Tiffany Estab) whose sole source of income — mushroom foraging — is constantly at the mercy of weather patterns and environmental factors beyond their control. After pooling together enough change to pay for $3.20 of gas, Regina decides she wants a more stable source of income working in a kitchen, while Lucien insists on pursuing the risky task of full-time mushroom hunting. Gastronomic endeavors aside, the couple has little in common, and their divergent goals cause friction in the marriage as they try to pay rent while staying true to their passions.

While we’re watching the progression of a couple’s flailing relationship, we are also encouraged to embrace the edible treasures that surround us. There is a poignant scene in which Lucien, at his lowest point, manages a free meal by gathering mushrooms and a few stray eggs from the woods. His meal is decadent but cooked in the middle of a forest and consumed directly from a small pan. Cortlund says he wanted to showcase the richness and beauty of living simply by sourcing regionally.

“Eating well doesn’t have to be fancy or only [for those] who have money, in fact, it helps you save money,” Cortlund says.

Where the filmmakers could have presented a Slow Food movement endorsement and demonstrated the practice of mushroom foraging as a documentary, they chose a narrative format to present this niche field because their background is in fiction and experimental foods.

After Cortlund and Halperin earned degrees in film from the University of Texas at Austin, they moved to New York for a few years, where they joined a mycological organization and learned about different varieties of fungi. That knowledge found its way into the film in intermittent mushroom collages portraying different kinds of fungi and their possible effects on consumers.

“Mushroom hunting is such a beautiful way of going about finding food, and we haven’t seen any mushrooms in cinema,” Cortlund says. “We wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before.”

Cortlund, who began writing the screenplay in 2005, explains that they also chose mushrooms as their focus because apart from the visual interest associated with their peculiar shapes and varieties, there is also an element of danger with which fungi are associated, which added a layer of drama that reflected the couple’s tempestuous marriage.

“[Mushrooms] are beautiful and loaded because of the potential for poisoning,” Cortlund tells My Table’s SideDish. “My grandfather survived a poisoning a couple years before I was born. It had a lot of weight in my family.”

The movie couldn’t be more timely, with the “stay local, grow together” movement gaining momentum, and with our city’s exploding culinary scene, the filmmakers are particularly excited to screen their project in Houston next week.

“This city has such a notable and creative food scene, so Houston is one of the destinations that we’re most excited about,” Halperin says.

Look for a story on urban foraging in the upcoming April-May local foods edition of My Table magazine, due out the last week of this month. There will be a screening of Now, Forager at downtown’s Sundance Cinema this Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 7:15 pm.