Small-town New Zealand comedy-drama about Michael (Jordan Selwyn) - a 16-year-old whose passion for maps helps him escape his ordinary life and enjoy a state of isolation from those around him. But there are three women he can’t shut out – his single mother Amelia (Rebecca Gibney), a blind 20-year-old called Mary (Bonnie Soper) and Alison (Mikaila Hutchinson), a friend whose ‘grace betrays darker secrets’ apparently.
Filmmaker Harold Brodie is an American living in New Zealand and the idea of a boy who immerses himself in maps comes from his own fascinations as a child. Music for the film is provided by talented NZ-based blues troubadour Paul Ubana Jones. The Map Reader debuted to sell out theatres at the Austin Film Festival and also won the Spirit Of The Independent award at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.
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Here is a film which will resonate with so many New Zealanders who are having, or who remember, their childhoods and adolescence. Here are moments of sheer absorption as it delivers a New Zealand sensitivity and understanding which is at once a romance of boyhood and a small town idyll, but at the same time, carries with it that darker centre which is part of our culture and our art.
Full review
This joins The Last Magic Show, Eagle vs Shark and Show of Hands as a solid entry in New Zealand's burgeoning noughties genre of romantic oddities.
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