Aotearoa’s a proudly DIY nation and the same goes for our films. This year’s been particularly mighty for the indie New Zealand filmmaking scene. Here are four to seek out if and when they arrive to a big screen near you.
Notes from a Fish
Filmmaker Tom Levesque follows up his NZIFF-selected feature debut Shut Eye with this cosmic-comedy odyssey—which also got picked for Whānau Mārama—about a wannabe writer’s search for his missing muse: his mate’s tropical fish. Co-director Romy Hooper also stars as an unhinged nautical private eye.
As I noted earlier this year when the film premiered, Levesque and Hooper knock out something “similar to those French farces where the plot isn’t as important as the absurdity of the situations it generates” and that it “moves at the speed of panic which makes the brisk 82-minute run time fly by.” An impressive, unique feat for a New Zealand film—even more so for one shot in 10 days for $10,000.
The Weed Eaters
The mighty hash-meets-Hannibal horror wasn’t just our favourite film of Whānau Mārama, it also earned top honours at SXSW Sydney where it took home Best Feature Film and currently wears film festival laurels for Adelaide, London’s Frightfest, Canada’s Saskatoon Fantastic, and Tokyo’s International Film Festival.
It’s an Olympic-level effort for a filmmaking team who punched this out during a summer holiday. Filmmakers Callum Devlin, Annabel Kean and Finnius Teppett told us in detail how they pulled this off and what inspired the idea of a cannibalistic strain of cannabis (it was, in part, due to frequent weed-induced cinema panic attacks).
TOITŪ Visual Sovereignty
Filmmaker Chelsea Winstanley’s follow-up to her Oscar-nominated effort on Jojo Rabbit saw her capture the Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art—the largest exhibition in the history of Auckland Art Gallery. That, by itself, warrants a feature documentary, but what unfolds in the lead-up to the exhibit’s grand opening reveals the struggle for Māori artistic sovereignty within the structures of our nation’s cultural institutions.
The independent nature of the project, Winstanley told Flicks, gave her the breathing room and patience needed to find the film’s perfect ending. In many ways, the film’s journey mirrors that of Toi Tū Toi Ora’s curator Nigel Borell, in that they both showed incredible resilience for art and sovereignty. Toitū by name, toitū by nature.
Pop
Making its world premiere at Terror-fi, the nation’s greatest genre film festival, this wildly original film has already proven itself as a bombastic crowd bamboozler. The story follows an American actor who comes to Aotearoa to play a wannabe influencer on a quest to restart the internet. At least, that’s what the story’s meant to be, until the Kiwi director and his unprocessed grief hijack the narrative.
Wellington-based director Tim Hamilton’s made his mark as a maximalist filmmaker to keep an eye on, his constant award-winning presence at the 48Hours Filmmaking Competition earning him the kind of reputation that makes you hope this guy would make a feature film one day. This is that film which, for the record, beat Predator: Badlands to become the first NZ-shot adventure flick where one lead character wears the other lead character as a backpack.
