If you played a game of word association with Warsaw, Poland, you'd probably exhaust much of the dictionary before you got around to the word "sushi."

Yes, there's the proximity to the bounty of the Baltic Sea. But if forced to consider Polish cuisine, your mind would probably jump to words like borscht, pierogi and kielbasa.

But there was Austinite Mark S. Hall, in the heart of Poland in 2004 on a business trip, and his Polish colleagues had a hankering for one thing: sushi. And they weren't the only ones.

Dozens of sushi restaurants had sprouted all over Warsaw in recent years, and more could be found in the most unexpected of places in Eastern Europe - even near the industrial ruins of abandoned steel mills in Ukraine.

The discovery inspired Hall, a native Houstonian who studied in Japan in the mid-1980s, to investigate the explosive popularity of the traditional Japanese cuisine. He wanted to trace how the sushi trend had expanded from Tokyo restaurants to Texas high school football stadiums.

"It was interesting to think about how it got there and what is it that people are attracted to," Hall said.

As he soon discovered, the story behind the sushi saturation was as much about a growing environmental crisis as it was about the popularity and perversion of a Japanese culinary art.

"Sushi: The Global Catch" explores the explosion of sushi's popularity and its environmental ramifications. It's Hall's first feature-length film, although the businessman and lawyer by education has produced several short films.

The movie won a special jury prize at last year's Seattle International Film Festival.

Hall became fascinated by Japanese culture, cuisine, religion and architecture while living briefly in Japan, and his film opens with beautifully shot and tightly edited sequences paying homage to sushi's culinary tradition.

Mamoru Sugiyama, a fourth-generation master chef at his family's 127-year-old Tokyo restaurant, Sushiko, discusses the finer points of sushi preparation. A typical apprenticeship for aspiring sushi chefs in Japan stretches over seven years. The apprentices don't even put knife to fish until year five.

"I thought that having a basis for understanding the real tradition of it was important," Hall said of the early parts of his film. "It is something very pure, and I think it is something very sustainable."

The traditional system is methodical and thoughtful. And if it takes seven years to mint a sushi chef, there's no fear of an overabundance of sushi restaurants.

But as soon as sushi became an overseas phenomenon, partly because of the commercial export of fresh fish on Japan Airlines, the process accelerated, and what was once a craft became a commodity.

"The further you get away (from Japan), it just gets wacky," Hall said. "It gets wacky in the United States; it gets really crazy in Eastern Europe. They don't have the same kind of training; they don't have the same viewpoint; they don't have the same point of origin. There is really little influence from Japan."

And all of that "wackiness" has a price. The exploding demand from places such as China and Russia for fresh fish has led to serious environmental ramifications. Overfishing has endangered fish populations, and in turn, the entire aquatic ecosystem.

Hall uses interviews with environmental activist and restaurateur Casson Trenor to examine how the dramatic reductions in the population of bluefin tuna can lead to what's called trophic collapse. Chef Tyson Cole of Uchi in Austin also is featured.

If bluefin tuna, an "apex predator," is eliminated, the effect will trickle down through the food chain until we are left with an overabundance of bottom-level aquatic life. The movie shows how continued harvesting of the sea to feed the global appetite for sushi will cause irreversible harm to the environment.

How can we curb the effects of humans on fish populations? The answer, as Hall illuminates, can come from a variety of sources. Organizations such as Greenpeace can educate about the danger of unbridled consumption. There are also alternatives coming from people like savvy fisherman-entrepreneur Hagen Stehr in Australia, who has found ways to farm bluefin tuna and create millions of larvae from a small number of fish. Whether his cutting-edge science holds the key to our sea's survival remains to be seen. Unfortunately, governments don't seem to be taking seriously their role in stemming the problem, Hall contended.

"There's a lot of money involved. I think we're all kind of involved and guilty to some extent," Hall said. "I definitely think the governments have failed in regulating some of the situation. The ocean has always been a hard place to regulate, so it's not surprising, but they've had opportunities to put bluefin on the treaty for endangered species."

The biggest way to mitigate human impact on fish populations might come from sushi lovers making more educated and conscious choices. Thanks to programs like Seafood Watch from the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, diners now have more tools at their disposal when choosing what they eat. Restaurateurs who choose to replace unsustainable options (farm-raised salmon) with more sustainable alternatives (arctic char) can also serve as key influencers and educators.

Making "Sushi: The Global Catch" served as an eye-opening experience for Hall. While alarmed at the effects of our consumption, he holds out hope that we have not passed a point of no return, and his film maintains a sense of hopefulness in the face of the rising environmental crisis.

"To me the shocking thing was to see the view of the ocean being so affected by our own personal consumption. I had no real understanding of how bad it was," Hall said. "It seems pretty dire. It seems worse in certain parts of the world than others. ... But I do believe there are choices I can make now that I'll feel better about."

"Sushi: The Global Catch" isn't currently screening in Houston, for more information, go to www.sushitheglobalcatch.com.