New Zealand Film Commission
2) Kitchen Sink
Pub. Date
1989.
Description
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.
Pub. Date
1980.
Description
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.
Pub. Date
1995.
Description
Gaylene Preston’s documentary deals with the personal experiences of seven women during WWII. Through interviews, archival footage, still photographs and popular songs of the time, she paints an absorbing and fascinating portrait of wartime New Zealand..The women’s experiences are all different, yet almost all involve romance. Several had passionate, last-minute unions as young men were called to go to war. Others were fleeting encounters with...
5) Ngati
Pub. Date
1987.
Description
In a remote seaside village, a stranger becomes involved in public and personal crises.
6) Smash Palace
Pub. Date
1981.
Description
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.
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
A woman walks between the worlds of the living and the dead in search of her lost children. Vincent Ward weaves drama with documentary to unravel the extraordinary story of Puhi, the Tuhoe woman he filmed in 1978 for his early film In Spring One Plants Alone. He attempts to unravel the mystery that has haunted him for 30 years: Who was Puhi?
8) Vigil
Pub. Date
1984.
Description
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...
Pub. Date
1971.
Description
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...
11) The Orator
Pub. Date
2012.
Description
The Orator(O Le Tulafale) is a contemporary drama about courage, forgiveness and love. Small in stature and humble, Saili lives a simple life with his beloved wife and daughter in an isolated, traditional village in the islands of Samoa. Forced to protect his land and family, Saili must face his fears and seek the right to speak up for those he loves.
12) Mauri
Pub. Date
1988.
Description
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...
13) Crush
Pub. Date
1992.
Description
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....
Pub. Date
1988.
Description
A visionary boy leads five men from the 14th Century into a 20th Century city. Their quest: to save their village before sunrise. It is Cumbria 1348, the year of the Black Death. A medieval mining village lives in fear of the advancing plague. Griffin's older brother Connor returns from the outside world in a state of despair, until Griffin tells of his dream - and reveals the only hope of survival. Make a tribute to God. Place a spire on a distant...
15) Goodbye Pork Pie
Pub. Date
1981.
Description
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...
17) Whale rider
Formats
Description
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...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1158
Pub. Date
[2022]
Edition
Director-approved DVD special edition.
Description
Jane Campion returns to the kind of mythic frontier landscape--pulsating with both freedom and menace--that she previously traversed in The Piano in order to plumb the masculine psyche in The Power of the Dog, set against the desolate plains of 1920s Montana and adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage's novel. After a sensitive widow and her enigmatic, fiercely loving son move in with her gentle new husband, a tense battle of wills plays out between...
Pub. Date
2006
Description
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...
20) Juniper
Pub. Date
[2023]
Description
Ruth is a worldly former war correspondent now bored in retirement with a drinking problem and a newly fractured leg. Sam is her unruly grandson, recently kicked out of boarding school and grieving the death of his mother. When the two are brought together under the same roof, they form an unexpected bond.