Filmmakers Adam Luxton and Summer Agnew worked across oceans and time zones to complete their second collaboration, On an Unknown Beach, for this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF).
The film documents a scientist, a musician and a poet as they each explore unique landscapes of ruin. “The idea was to fold together the activities of three very distinct explorers, within our own exploration of the filmmaking process,” says co-director Adam Luxton.
Pre-production took place in Berlin where both Luxton and Agnew are based; requiring several trips home to establish relationships with the three central characters and to film in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and at sea.
Auckland poet and actor David Hornblow, Wellington scientist Di Tracey and Christchurch-based sound artist Bruce Russell each provide an individual perspective on the world we’re living in, forming an expansive conversation throughout the film.
Deep-sea coral scientist Di Tracey surveys the seabed of the Chatham Rise, which has been seriously impacted by commercial fishing over many years. The film follows her search for intact coral habitats among the debris of impacted areas, as well as her work towards a deeper understanding of the species relationships within these little understood terrains.
Sound artist Bruce Russell takes us quite literally through the wastelands of Christchurch’s CBD. As the city undergoes the initial stages of civic reconstruction post the 2012 earthquakes, he creates an experimental audio acoustic improvisation that meditates on notions of civil society, philosophy and urbanisation.
David Hornblow’s landscape is a fragmented internal terrain explored through life regression hypnotherapy. Now a drug and alcohol counselor, his own experiences of addiction and anxiety are explored in a series of speculative encounters created in response to his hypnosis session. The film was born out of a process of exploration and discovery, says Luxton.
“We were interested in testing the horizons of non-fiction film. We knew we wanted the characters to speak to each other, and speak to something beyond themselves, from within the film. We just weren’t sure how we were all going to arrive there,” says co-director Summer Agnew “By keeping an open thesis for the film, by sharing cinematography duties, and stripping our crew right back – at times to simply a sound recordist – we were able to work intuitively and to be conceptually responsive to new avenues the filmmaking process presented,” says Agnew.
For Luxton and Agnew, their unique subjects’ journeys into the unknown have galvanised their own approach to the aesthetic of this adventurous film, earthy in tone and form and sublimely realised as a visual poem – its images some of the most striking you’ll encounter at this festival,” says critic and filmmaker Tim Wong, writing in the NZIFF programme.
“What we arrived at was an unexpected survey of environmental, civic and personal damage. It’s like a ground zero perspective of human life in the anthropocene; damaged and bruised, and in need of a fresh breath of air. And as filmmakers who deal in images, we were looking for new images, that contain new ideas, new thoughts. We think we found them,” says Luxton
On an Unknown Beach was completed with the assistance of the Te Whai Ao fund of the New Zealand Film Commission.
On an Unknown Beach is having its world premiere in Auckland on 29 July at 8.30pm at Event Cinemas Queen Street. The film will also screen in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin as part of NZIFF. For full session details see here.
You can view the trailer here.