Tim Wong’s elegantly assembled and illustrated film essay contemplates the prevailing image of our national cinema while privileging some of the images and image-makers displaced by the popular view of filmmaking in New Zealand.
The directors who have done the most for our artistic identity haven’t instantly confused it with social and cultural identity.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2015
Out of the Mist: An Alternate History of New Zealand Cinema 2015
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The best conversation you have about movies at NZIFF this year may be the one you have in your head watching and listening to Tim Wong’s advocacy for some remarkable New Zealand films and filmmakers who don’t make it into the standard tour guides. The regular line-up is shrewdly characterised in the process too, but there’s no rancour in his account of the mainstream, magnificently and absurdly characterised by a sweeping shot of the Southern Alps from a 50s travelogue while Orson Welles savours every syllable of ‘Aorangi’, ‘Aotearoa’ and ‘Māori’ on the soundtrack; he cuts soon enough to civil war on the streets in Merata Mita’s Patu!, and the voice we will hear delivering Wong's narration belongs to one of our own, Eleanor Catton. Most of the other films Wong feeds into the conversation are much less generally known and barely political at all. There are such tantalising excerpts on display that we wish we had the space on our schedule to bring you the screenings you’ll be craving of myriad cinematic treasures, not least Annie Goldson’s Wake (1994), Tony Williams’ Next of Kin (1982), Gabriel White’s Oracle Drive (2013) and maybe even Cinerama South Seas Adventure (1958).