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As the youngest in the family and the only male, Dylan has drawn the short straw. He suffers in silence and does what he is told. Set on a beautiful summer’s day at the beach, a dark reality unfolds as Dylan finally decides to take charge of his...

After the Waterfall was filmed in and around Piha, a small settlement on Auckland’s wild West Coast, in the North Island of New Zealand, during April and May 2009. A powerful and haunting tale of human resilience, After the Waterfall is the debut...

Director Taika Waititi started developing BOY soon after finishing his award-winning short Two Cars, One Night. It first emerged as a film called Choice and was accepted into the Sundance Writer's Lab in 2005, where Taika workshopped it with script...

Attracting the sympathy of the girl next door and given direction by a local mechanic, the boy starts to glimpse an alternate path for himself. But as the trio spend more time together, the boy’s violent emotions re-emerge, threatening to destroy...

DIRECTOR’S NOTES - David Rittey “On the surface, We The Living is a simple story. Just below the surface however, lie more intangible and complex human emotions. The story manages to touch upon a state of being that can be fleeting and...

When Jeff and Phill Simmonds embarked on making A Very Nice Honeymoon they didn’t know that separate audio recordings of their maternal great grandmother Elizabeth Vella and her daughter Metty Vella talking about the SS Wairarapa disaster existed...

The story is an original idea by writing team Jane Shearer and Steve Ayson. The project was conceived and developed while they were in artist residence at Chateau de La Napoule. Shearer and Ayson previously spent six months at the Maurits Binger Film...

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT - Grant Lahood “For years I’ve been amazed by the sport of competitive woodchopping. This mainstay of A&P shows around New Zealand combines great physical strength and incredible grace to create an...

Randy Cambell is a teenage orphan living with his aunt and uncle on a boring farm at the tip of the South Island of New Zealand. But he is not destined to raise sheep: he has stunts in his blood. Four generations of Cambell men have died in horrific,...

DIRECTOR’S NOTES – MARK ALBISTON “I grew up with the writer and co-creator Louis Sutherland on the Kapiti coast through the seventies and eighties and we have been solid friends ever since. We’ve wanted to write and make films as...

DIRECTORS NOTES - Zia Mandviwalla "Having grown up in the West in an Indian family, I know what is to inhabit the disparate worlds that exist inside and outside the home. Straddling two cultures is not unique to my childhood. In fact, it is a...

Director’s Notes - Peter Salmon "At its heart Fog is a simple coming of age story capturing the simple moments when a boy becomes a man. Fog follows a teenage boy desperate to separate himself from his father to be free to explore life...

Director’s Notes – Ian Powell Meta Mutt was conceived & written in 1999 and has been filmed over a six year period in Wellington, New Zealand using a dedicated 35mm stop motion film camera loaned by FAT Films. Final editing and...

DIRECTOR’S NOTES - Rachel Douglas "My previous films had relied heavily on dialogue and my debut feature Blessed had eschewed many visual elements in the storytelling due to the extreme low budget. In Shadow Over the Sun I wanted to tell...

The idea for We're Here to Help had its genesis when the film's writer and director Jonothan Cullinane watched the Oscar-winning film Erin Brockovich and was struck by the resonance of such 'David and Goliath' stories....

D I R E C T O R ’ S N O T E S - Roseanne Liang “Take 3 is a satirical comedy. Loosely based on my own experiences as a wannabe actor, Take 3 addresses the oft-seen, rarely questioned stereotypes surrounding Asian women in Western media...

DIRECTOR’S NOTES “What motivates me is the idea that nothing is too ordinary or mundane. It's right under our very noses, in our own back yards, where this amazing stuff is happening. Also, I think that the more personal you get, the...

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT – JUSTINE SIMEI-BARTON “The film is a study of the immigrant Samoan community I grew up in and it shows aspects of that community that are seldom given a voice. The community and family life is seen through the...

Shot on location in a wrecking yard in the middle of the New Zealand rainforest, a young boy spends his days destroying priceless antique cars and smelting metal with his grandather in this dark fairytale. The old man has carved out a dirty and decaying...

Second Hand Wedding is an intimate, endearing look at the relationships within and around a middle New Zealand family. The film was independently produced and shot mainly on the idyllically beautiful Kapiti Coast of New Zealand. The story...

Vincent Ward weaves drama with documentary to unravel the extraordinary story of Puhi, the Tuhoe woman who welcomed the young filmmaker into her home in 1978. Ward made the observational film In Spring One Plants Alone about Puhi’s day-to...

DIRECTORS NOTES - Michelle Savill “The idea for a mother and son film popped into my head after reading a newspaper article about an Indian boy who married a hill at his mother’s request. The boy claimed that he had no regrets about...

A Song Of Good tells the story of Gary Cradle, who, after committing a shocking crime, decides to change his life and become a good person. Making such a decision is one thing, but actually following through becomes a completely different battle. It is...

DIRECTOR’S NOTES - Quentin Parr “The Word is a coming of age story for this generation. The feeling I wanted to evoke with The Word… is one of confusion. My aim was to represent a world that I believe the youth of today have to...

DIRECTOR’S NOTES - Jonathan Brough “No Ordinary Sun is a film about loss and longing, set within the framework of an extreme event in an extreme landscape. Making the film was a long process, in many ways. First of all, I read a short...

Fleeting Beauty is a lyrical film that provokes us to reconsider the lessons handed down in history textbooks. While it recounts the travel and enterprise of ancient voyagers in search of spices, it describes how these journeys are benchmarks of...

Director’s Notes - Gabriel Reid We are such stuff, as dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. -The Tempest (Act IV, Scene I), William Shakespeare “How should we spend our little lives? It is a big question to...

DIRECTOR’S NOTES - Barry Prescott “This is a story about one man’s crazy scheme to achieve his dreams.  The Man Who Couldn’t Dance is an irreverent fusion of black comedy with the more slapstick elements of visual...

Christmas was shot and edited for $39,000, with King using his parent‘s home in Whangarei as the principal location. In keeping with the low budget ethos, the cast of nine and crew of ten stayed at a local holiday camp during filming and had a...

Director’s Notes - Popo Lilo "I originally wrote this film as a feature, but after receiving funding from the New Zealand Film Commission, I re-wrote the central ideas to fit a short format. I felt particularly close to the themes of...

Director's Notes - Welby Ings Boy deals with a subject filmmakers tend to avoid. While young, heterosexual men’s emerging sexuality is commonly explored in film and television, their gay equivalent is generally avoided or portrayed as...

Director’s Notes - Miles Murphy “The Knock is the sort of tale that can be appreciated on many different levels. From a light hearted comedy to a more sinister look into Peter’s psyche. My main aim is to entertain the audience and...