New Zealand Film Commission

A woman finds something quaint in her kitchen sink and feels strangely captivated towards it... KITCHEN SINK is an original and full-blooded short film that combines humor with surrealism and leads the viewer towards the fantasy of horror.

Infatuation and manipulation enter the lives of an adolescent and her father because of the arrival of a reckless femme fatale. A piercing modern fable entwining the lives of an awkward adolescent girl, a malevolent femme fatale, a wheelchair-ridden critic and a once successful novelist, Crush inhabits an unspoilt landscape - Eden before the fall. That is, until a car crash blazes a destructive trail through the lives of the three women and one man....

Two young men set out on a thousand-mile escapade in a tiny, yellow, stolen car. Goodbye Pork Pie is the exciting story of two very different young men - and of their incredible (and often very funny) thousand mile journey in a very small, stolen, yellow car.Gerry is young and restless and unemployed. He lives in an isolated small town in the far north of New Zealand, so when the car gives him the chance to head to a big city, he moves fast and starts...

An aged woman lives with her fully grown and wholly dependent son. This film is a rare view of an enclosed world where an 82-year-old woman, alone, is 'The Burdened One'. Filmed over a period of one and a half years, this emerges as a haunting and powerful portrayal of their life together, a life of ritual and of their survival.

Al Shaw's life revolves around motor racing and his back country junkyard, the "Smash Palace". His French wife, Jacqui, doesn't appreciate the lack of attention due to Al's obsession with cars. When Al finds her in the arms of another man, he takes his daughter, Georgie and heads for the bush, desperately hoping to hold on to the only family he has left.

Vigil is the first ever film from New Zealand to compete in Cannes (1984). Winner of the Best Film award at the Madrid Film Festival it is the first feature film of 30 year-old Vincent Ward. Vigil is a powerful atmospheric drama set in a primeval valley where four characters live and farm in an uneasy coexistence. The story unfolds through the eyes of the central character Toss, an 11 year-old girl caught up in the tragedy of her father’s death...

Mauriis the story of Rewi, a manhaunted by a past which threatens to engulf his future.The story is set among the colourful characters of a once thriving settlement, Te Mata, upon whom the encroachment by Europeans spells disaster. Now isolated by lack of numbers, time and distance, the remaining survivors form a tight-knit community which outsiders find impenetrable. Rewi's deceit forces him to become part of that community and his life is inextricably...

This Roger Donaldson documentary preceded the director’s work on The World’s Fastest Indian and fuelled his interest in Burt Munro whose motto was ‘fix it and try again’. In 50 years, he had some 250 motor blow-ups, usually because the con-rods or cylinder sleeves couldn’t take the pace...With basic equipment and astonishing ingenuity, he would rebuild the engine ready for the next try. He made cylinder linings out of cast-iron drain pipes...

On the east coast of New Zealand, the Whangara people believe their presence there dates back a thousand years or more to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death when his canoe capsized by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From then on, Whangara chiefs, always the first-born, always male, have been considered Paikea's direct descendants. Pai, an 11-year-old girl in a patriarchal New Zealand tribe, believes she is destined to be the new...

Burt Munro, a Kiwi from far south New Zealand has been building and rebuilding his motorcycle for the last 40 years, dreaming of the day when he and the bike can go to Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats and see what they can really do. When Burt's heart goes bad on him, his dreaming is threatened to come to an end. Luckily, Burt is not ready to stop dreaming. He decides to mortgage his house and bring his dream to life. He and the motorcycle head for American...