Discoveries from New Zealand World Cinema

A small boy comes home to find his grandmother has gone and he has to fend for himself.

This Oscar-nominated New Zealand short looks at a number of mountains in New Zealand with a fair amount of emphasis on skiing. While a number of mountains are shown, most of the movie covers Mt. Cook (known as Aorangi to the Maori)

A queer relationship falls out of sync as one woman loses touch with what is real and what may or may not be coming to her from the divine.

Manaia, a young woman caught between expectation and self-acceptance, finds herself confronting her repressed sexuality when a chance reunion with her first love stirs old feelings.

A story about one-sided love, the kind that stays hidden behind smiles, unsent messages, and late-night thoughts.

Under immense pressure, a young, high-functioning, anxious perfectionist must find ways to cope that will not leave her physically scarred forever.

Fiji High Chief and Prime Minister Ratu Mara shows how archaeology throws new light on the settlement of his island home of Lakeba.

Expanded Cinema performance featuring acrobatics.

Jumpstart follows 26-year-old Virginia ‘Billie’ Walton as she chokes on a healthy dose of reality. Trading her mother’s opulent lifestyle for a beaten-up Toyota, Billie hits the road with nothing but her car, cigarettes, and absolutely zero life skills. But when basin-bathing at gas stations loses its charm, Billie has to face her worst nightmare - finding a job. Armed with nothing but her silver tongue, can Billie talk her way into employment before her luck runs out?

A budding young couple download "MoonLite", a dating app designed to make their first date easier. However, their date slowly turns sinister as they are held captive by a rogue AI, forcing them to finish their date.

Crown Lynn, A Māori Story is a riveting slice of New Zealand history telling the iconic story of Crown Lynn pottery and the generations of Māori families that worked there. For almost 50 years Crown Lynn was the biggest ceramics factory in the southern hemisphere. Situated in West Auckland, it was a melting pot of rich culture in a post war era when hundreds of Māori migrated to the city to find work. Crown Lynn, A Māori Story reveals the incredible stories behind this locally made pottery and its charismatic founder, Sir Tom Clark.

A young man struggles to make it across the city to meet his friends for a night out. When every option falls through, the journey forces him to confront what he’s really chasing.

In this work, the voice of DJ Moemoea (Te Kahureremoa) guides the viewer on a celestial journey through time and space, and the nine stars of Matariki. In a radio-inspired broadcast, Moemoea describes the special attributes of each star, as landscape imagery and overlaid digital animations create visual representations of the stars' differing characteristics and narratives.

A young Māori boy's fascination with war comics hits closer to home than he ever imagined.

"There'll be no rest for the wicked There's no song for the choir There's no hope for the weary If you let them win without a fight.” - No rest for the wicked, Lykke Li (2014) Last election close to a million enrolled voters from across New Zealand did not vote. Presented by CIRCUIT and The Physics Room, Party Political Broadcast is a collection of 8 video works inspired by the format of the televised party political broadcast.

Samuel wakes up in a room with a man and a mysterious scoreboard.

When the endearingly honest Lucas is coerced into pretending to be his hookup’s boyfriend, he must keep his mouth shut over dinner to avoid suspicion from prying lesbian flat mates.

A teenager must protect his autistic brother when a masked intruder breaks into their home, leading to a violent night of survival that tests their bond and pushes them to their limits.

Alien enthusiast Alex’s flatmate, Robin, brings home an alien they encountered at the park. The two must quickly figure out what to do with it before a secret agent comes to neutralise them.

Freshly dumped, the only thing that cheers John up is a weekly delivery of tomatoes from his eccentric neighbour Pat. When John witnesses a home invasion, he gets more than he bargained for: the well-kept secret behind Pat's prizewinning produce.

Riley, a victim of domestic violence, finally decides to take control of her own fate.

A dad is voted out of his family, and when he mounts a campaign for re-election, he finds out he's not the only one in the running.

A young girl on school camp must face her fears on a nighttime bush walk.

Mothering Sunday is a horror, dark comedy short film where terrifying revelations are made during a Mother-Daughter argument.

A film noir with a sci-fi twist about love, betrayal, and memory.

Joselle is long on working hours and short on money. One night on the way home from work she encounters something that will change her life. Temptation.

A down-on-her-luck babysitter discovers an alternate method for making her business thrive.

While lost at sea, an outcast sailor discovers she's not alone.

The story of a student going about his daily life, and getting tired with the monotony.

Pioneering New Zealand reporter Dairne Shanahan reports on transvestites and transsexuals.

it isn’t the churning surf that threatens a young windsurfer who takes to the waves for the first time.

Paul Judge’s doco provides a thorough record and eloquent posthumous tribute to a major and often controversial NZ artist. Draws on a wealth of archive material, plus his own interviews with Driver and other art world notables.

A hypnotic travelogue of memory images from yesteryear’s editorial photography guides a sleepwalker’s meanderings through our fragile epoch. The nineteenth century’s therapeutic system of mesmerism is applied to that ambivalently destructive dreamscape called late capitalism.

A fifteen-minute portrait-documentary to accompany "Irene 59", the film about her mother.

This film shows how the Central Plateau of the North Island was transformed into fertile pastureland by the men of the Land Settlement Board and the Lands and Survey Department. Cobalt was imported from Canada and sulphur from Louisiana. Hillsides were burnt off and the soil ploughed, fertilised and sown with seed and phosphate.

A short silent comedy set in Takapuna, Auckland. Features Hector St. Clair, the London Pantomime Comedian. One of 23 community comedies made by director Rudall Hayward in different New Zealand towns between 1928 and 1929.

News from the troubled Korean peninsula comes frequently and often deals with the risks of new fighting between North and South Korea. But between the two there is a zone where the wild got a chance and where rare animals can live on in the shadow of all weapons.

The rural love story of young English migrant David Bryne and Hazel Carlisle, who manages a Hawke's Bay sheep farm with her brother.

Pictures of Susan is a 2012 feature documentary by Dan Salmon. The film examines the artist’s upbringing and earliest works, her twenty-year dormant period and the recent resurgence in interest from the art world for her idiosyncratic drawings since resuming in 2008. Auckland ‘outsider artist’ Susan King stopped talking when she was four. Her grandmother recognised the little girl’s talent for drawing and kept her supplied with coloured pencils and paper. For 20 years Susan expressed herself in thousands of artworks filled with playfulness, curiosity and terror. Then one day she suddenly stopped drawing. Her pictures were carefully packed away into boxes, under the bed and in the attic. There were two decades of silence, before she drew again. Today, the dealer world has discovered Susan’s art brut. A series of exhibitions, have garnered international demand for Susan’s art, but leaves an ethical quandary for the family who can only guess at Susan's wishes.

He was an 80s movie star and Indonesia's answer to Sylvester Stallone, but can New Zealander Peter O'Brian realise his unfulfilled potential and return to the big screen after being missing-in-action for 20 years? OPERATION: RAMBU. is Peter's story as he tells it and a look at his attempts to step back into the limelight.

Con decides that the perfect way to cheer up her depressed and bedridden partner Bella is to give her a call to a clairvoyant phone line. But the message Bella receives about her future does nothing at all to improve her gloomy disposition. A darkly comic tale of hopes and hopelessness.

A farmer, teacher and priest undertake a daring mission to deflate a giant radome at the Waihopai spy base in protest at New Zealand's involvement in the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. An internet millonaire's mansion is raided sparking an investigation exposing illegal domestic surveillance by the GCSB. While the government rams through law changes legalising spying on its own citizens, an NSA contractor blows the whistle on the Five Eyes network of global mass surveillance.

A collaboration between the Sydney-based artist and their mother in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, each of whom video the day’s sunset from their respective homes, as a way to bridge the distance between them.

A girl and her family living on a remote, picturesque island in the South Pacific find themselves confronting the fallout from the French nuclear testing programme.

Hook, Line and Sinker is set in Wellington, New Zealand and tells the story of PJ who loses his truck driving job of 30 years due to failing eyesight, but with the help of his partner Ronnie he finds a new place in the world.

A police pool inspector is caught in the middle of a some sort of summer pool party going wrong.

"Ary Jansen’s Breadcrumb Trail mixes machinima with dash-cam footage. Virtual cities mapped by the reward-seeking logics of gaming bleed into the banal journey of a single-car commute up Auckland’s Southern Motorway, over which plays a soundtrack of music and conversations between Jansen and his activist-peers on finding collectivity and belonging within the hostile environment of the Capital-hungry city." - Connie Brown, The Art Paper

Jimmy moves into a new flat. The mess is just the beginning.

Two isolated strangers find an unexpected connection in this pungent short. Immersive handheld camerawork draws us into a world of rural desolation before dropping the hammer blow.

A portrait of one of Aotearoa’s greatest living artists by one of our greatest documentary filmmakers. You should expect something special, and that’s what you get.

New Zealand’s National Film Unit presents 'The New Zealanders,' which gives an overall survey of life and living conditions of the New Zealand people, both Māori and European, and of the land itself.

A small boy tries to escape his turbulent home life by befriending his talking fridge - but the fridge has more sinister plans for the boy's family.

Two gangsters mess up a hit job.

Award-winning filmmaker and choreographer Alyx Duncan builds on her unique movement-led films, depicting an anxious grandmother desperate to protect her grandchild from the dangers of the world.

Parody of Charlie Chaplin produced in New Zealand

Peaceable Kingdom is a dreamscape of various domestic and wild animals inhabiting human architectural spaces. The title is taken from a series of paintings by the Quaker minister and painter, Edward Hicks. He painted 62 versions of The Peaceable Kingdom that depicted a coexistence between predators and prey (“an eschatological state inferred from texts such as the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Hosea, and the Sermon on the Mount”).

A timid office worker's life unravels after he fails to read the terms and conditions at a pseudo-health clinic.

Lonely is a two-and-a-half minute 2D digitally animated short film. A Capstone project by Tashi Donnelly and Cameron McCurdy for Yoobee Creative College of Innovation.

A sexy young woman seeks out married men in a local bar in order to try and get pregnant, but she has unexpected plans for her baby.