Every year we look forward to celebrating and launching the work of our home grown filmmakers at NZIFF. Along with the charming and fascinating Aunty and the Star People by director Gerard Smyth, we are proud to provide a rousing welcome home to Gerard Johnstone’s hilarious Housebound, which premiered to ecstatic audiences earlier this year at SXSW, and found international distribution at Cannes. Check out the trailer on the NZIFF film page.

The 2014 New Zealand line-up also includes a first feature from director Max Currie and a further six documentaries covering a diversity of subjects, both local and international.

The films are:

Aunty and the Star People

Dir Gerard Smyth
In New Zealand, writer Jean Watson is an anonymous elderly woman living in a modest Wellington flat. In southern India she is revered as the famous ‘Jean Aunty’. Gerard Smyth’s documentary explores her fascinating double life.

Cap Bocage

Dir Jim Marbrook
Jim Marbrook, director of Mental Notes and the original Dark Horse documentary, takes us inside the long environmental campaign that followed the pollution of traditional Kanak fishing grounds in New Caledonia in 2008.

Erewhon

Dir Gavin Hipkins
For his first feature-length film the widely exhibited New Zealand photographer Gavin Hipkins invests a richly pictorial essay with the 21st-century resonance of Samuel Butler’s lively utopian satire Erewhon, written in 1872.

Housebound

Dir Gerard Johnstone
Welcome home to the Kiwi horror-house comedy that took SXSW by storm. Gerard Johnstone’s brilliant genre mash-up stars Rima Te Wiata, Morgana O’Reilly, Glen-Paul Waru and Cameron Rhodes.

Te Awa Tupua - Voices from the River

Dir Paora Joseph
This beautiful new film from the director of Tatarakihi honours the power and poetry in the stories of Whanganui iwi, past and present, and their longstanding struggle to reclaim guardianship over their ancestral river.

Hot Air

Dir Alister Barry and Abi King-Jones
In the years since New Zealand politicians began to grapple with climate change our carbon emissions have burgeoned. Alister Barry’s doco draws on TV archives and interviews with key participants to find out why.

notes to eternity

Dir Sarah Cordery
Renowned critics of Israeli policies – Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Sara Roy and Robert Fisk – provide personal substance and historical perspective to their arguments in this impressive film by New Zealander Sarah Cordery.

Everything We Loved

Dir Max Currie
A man, a woman and a four-year-old boy retreat to a house outside town. What are they hiding from? Debut writer/director Max Currie staggers the revelations to dramatic effect in this suspenseful psychological drama.

Voices of the Land: Ngā Reo o te Whenua

Dir Paul Wolffram
Paul Wolffram’s fascinating and eloquent doco about Māori instrumental traditions accompanies Richard Nunns and Horomona Horo as they perform in a series of remarkable South Island wilderness settings.

NZIFF programmes will be available online and around town from July 8 in Dunedin and July 15 in Christchurch.