Documentarian Gwen Isaac has a canny analogy for the value of the New Zealand International Film Festival, the way it encourages audiences to watch local films in their natural environment - the cinema. For her, it’s kind of like a bespoke supermarket. “It’s where a lot of cultural tastemakers goto sample the produce,” she laughs, “and the festival is a great brand for good produce. It denotes to filmgoing types that the piece is worth the audience’s time.”
Her latest film, Ms Information, is among a number of fresh New Zealand films premiering at this year’s Festival. It’s certainly a bumper crop, headlined by the directorial debut of Alice Englert (daughter of Kiwi cinema icon Jane Campion), the Jennifer Connolly-starring Bad Behaviour. Elsewhere, beloved comedian Tom Sainsbury flexes his thriller muscles with his debut, Loop Track, set in the New Zealand bush. Fascinating documentaries dominate the lineup, including John Crisstoffels’ exploration of an unlikely activist in Building Bridges: Bill Youren’s Vision of Peace and Red Mole: A Romance, Annie Goldson’s portrait of the titular radical theatre troupe. Alongside these are premieres of blazing debut features from two independent filmmakers, Michael Duignan’s The Paragon and Haydn Butler’s Home Kills.
Movie Bad Behaviour. Photo / Supplied
You may notice some threads emerging between the films, the words “directorial debut”, and “world premiere” being the operative ones, stretching across most of the lineup. Another common thread - independent production, as in films made with little or no support from funding bodies or major studios. It is an extraordinarily daunting route for any filmmaker to choose, far more so if one wishes to make something that hits a certain level of professionalism or artistic worthiness, but New Zealanders, with their can-do attitudes and supportive communities, make it happen with aplomb, from the days of Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, right up to the recent drama Stray. The film festival has always been a key operative in getting these films seen and talked about, a rite of passage of sorts for the fledgling Kiwi filmmaker. “It’s a real honour,” says The Paragon’s Duignan, “To be amongst these incredible films, to be able to screen it to a real audience.”
Film director Michael Duignan. Photo / Michael Craig
Duignan, who has ducked out of a crunch-time sound mixing session to meet me in Ponsonby, is a veteran of the New Zealand screen industry, having directed local television, documentaries, commercials and everything in between. The Paragon is surely the lowest-budget narrative film at the Festival, made for only $25,000.
Punching well above its weight class, the psychedelic buddy comedy stars Shadow in the Cloud’s Benedict Wall as Dutch, an average Joe sliding into bitterness due to an injury that has left him unable to walk unsupported. He becomes the unlikely centrepoint of a battle between a group of immensely powerful West Auckland psychics when he petitions Lyra (filmmaker and actress Florence Noble) to use her powers to help him find the person who injured him in a hit-and-run.
“I’ve always been interested in esoteric ideas, hidden knowledge, psychic stuff,” Duignan explains, “Then during lockdown I was doing a guided meditation programme, trying to train myself into meditating. I wasn’t very good at it.” He laughs. “It makes you appreciate the power it has, it takes you into a different consciousness. I mixed that with this nineties slacker vibe, which is drawn from the films I came up with.”
As with much of New Zealand’s film industry, the pandemic was a time of crisis for Duignan, but also a chance to explore what really mattered to him. “I had a film at the time that was financed, which collapsed due to the pandemic. It was pretty devastating, building up toward a project that didn’t happen.” Rather than let it crush his spirit, however, Duignan used the setback as fuel. “I decided I’d write a script. Sketched out a plan and essentially figured out the minimum amount of money I could raise in a short amount of time through family and friends, and then what kind of project would fit into that budget.”
Duignan assembled the money for the film from the community he’d built up over the years, and was fortunate to find actors and crew passionate about the project. “There were people around me who were generous, and successful enough to share time and resources.” Duignan explains that the limitations that the budget set offered up a range of difficulties, but also opportunities. “Almost every decision I made was based around what resources we had. A lot of the cleverest things in a film happen when you don’t have endless resources. They really shape the film.”
An example - a key set in the film is a community hall, which Duignan was able to access because it was situated next to where his daughter went to the gym. “I knew the hall and knew I’d get it reasonably cheap and easy to use. I didn’t think it through a hundred per cent though - it was really noisy, which was a pain in the ass.”
Film Ms. Information. Photo / Supplied
Gwen Isaac is returning to NZIFF following her debut documentary Where There Is Life in 2017, with an expansion of Siouxsie and the Virus, a short documentary following the life of Siouxsie Wiles, the bright-haired, outspoken and divisive microbiologist who set out to deliver the facts to a worried public during the height of the pandemic. Ms Information serves as both a snapshot of a fraught era in modern Kiwi history, and as a profile of a fascinating and controversial figure. Most importantly, it’s a film for the big screen.
“We’re increasingly challenged getting people to go to the cinema for anything that isn’t a Marvel film. These days people don’t watch as many New Zealand films in the cinema, so it’s great that the Festival is a champion for that.”
Isaac’s journey with Wiles happened almost by accident, due to a cancelled flight to Tokyo at the very beginning of the pandemic, where she was due to film a Māori cage-fighter’s career-defining fight. “I found myself at the airport with a cancelled flight, my gear and a small budget to make a documentary. Siouxsie and I had already been in contact, so I sort of pivoted and went into that.”
It meant that Isaac was on the ground floor of the pandemic during which Wiles became something of a household name - and a target. “What we were witnessing was someone who was going to be polarising and was also passionate, which made for good material. I could tell she’d piss some people off.”
It was an incredibly fraught period for Isaac, who was juggling the stress of the pandemic with a full-time job, being a single mother to two children, and managing a short that quickly bloomed into a largely independently-financed feature. Shooting the documentary proved to be a source of both comfort and inspiration. “Making the film during the pandemic made me calmer. I’m quite a panicky person and it helped me cope. I was so inspired and emboldened by Siouxsie’s determination.”
Isaac likens Wiles to complex, remarkable public figures like American Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “I just don’t see these stories of ballsy, self-styled women like RBG as much as I’d like on screen. Siouxsie is never boring. She’s kind of a lightning rod to the death rattle of the patriarchy. I didn’t always like her, we didn’t always get on, but I always admired her.”
Duignan, Butler and Isaac all describe the festival as both helping to ignite their passion for cinema and serve as an achievement to aspire toward. For Butler, it was the site of a foundational inspiration for his own film, the Coen Brothers’ Fargo.
‘I was a student at Waikato University at the time and I drove up to Auckland to watch Fargo on the big Civic screen. Fargo leaned into a sense of ruralness and we did that with Home Kills, trying to lean into the rural Kiwiness of it all. Back then it was a dream, hoping that one day you’d get a film up on that big screen. It’s crazy that now the film is going to be playing where it all started.”
Born and raised in Kawerau in the east Bay of Plenty, Butler worked for a long time abroad, starting out in the late 90s working for London’s Playboy TV, of all things, before moving to Australia and working for MTV and Nickelodeon, then returning to New Zealand for his debut. Perhaps surprisingly, these jobs provided a good education for shoestring filmmaking.
“You kind of had to learn everything, how to edit, how to write scripts, how to shoot and so on. It wasn’t glamorous work by any stretch of the imagination.” Home Kills is nevertheless quite out of left-field, a grimy, bleakly funny small-town thriller about two brothers (Cameron Jones and Josh McKenzie) desperate to keep their home kills butchery alive in the wake of dwindling business, who inadvertently become killers for hire for local bad seeds, using their butchery as a cover. It’s a taut, remarkably well-executed beast, “a kind of Kiwi Breaking Bad”, per Butler, in the vein of recent antipodean thrillers like Coming Home in the Dark and Animal Kingdom.
Movie Home Kills. Photo / Supplied
As with both Isaac and Duignan, the spark of inspiration for Butler to attempt the film was hidden within the doldrums of the pandemic. “During lockdown I had this real ‘staring into the abyss’ moment where I was questioning what I wanted to do, and remembered that making movies was my original goal. So I ended up dusting off this old idea I had as a teenager driving with my old man through rural Bay of Plenty.”
Soon after, Butler had converted the idea he’d been gestating for years into a feature script, one that drew the attention of a small, committed team, including star and producer, La Brea’s Josh McKenzie. ‘I often refer to Josh McKenzie as “the wind beneath my wings”. He brought people on board who helped give it this professional sheen.’
Watching Home Kills, it’s hard to believe it was produced for less than half a million dollars. “People would say to me “you can’t make this, it’s a 2.5 million dollar movie, you can’t make it for how much you have.”’ Butler persisted, and ended up producing Home Kills for just $250,000. He was conscious that the limitations of a low-budget debut meant that some clever workarounds would need to be conceived.
“A lot of it was leaning into the Kiwiness of it all. We didn’t want to do a big action film with lots of set pieces.” Butler was also fortunate to have the enthusiasm of rural Waikato’s film-lovers, who were often happy to lend a hand. ‘We paid the cast and crew, but a lot of the time we had people really keen to just get involved. We’d ask to use a house as a set and they would say yes, for a 12-pack of beer.”
For most of the filmmakers premiering at the festival, it will be the first time they’ve shown this (or any) feature work to a large, in-person audience, a terrifying and potentially liberating prospect. A successful festival run can often lead to other festivals, and wider cinematic releases.
“I don’t think there’s ever one thing that makes a career,” Duignan muses, “For me, I just love movies. I think movies are the best storytelling form we’ve ever invented. Is it a compulsion? Possibly. I just love it.” Isaac concurs. “I’m excited to see how audiences react. We never know what to expect as filmmakers. But it would be so awesome if it went well here and got into festivals abroad.”
The festival is a chance to catch the best of cinema from around the world, but also to support emerging careers at home. Your next favourite filmmaker might be making their start here. As Butler says, “I just hope people see it and maybe it’ll help me to make another one, y’know?”
King Loser - the tale of the nineties’ most explosive band
Have you heard the legend of King Loser? If you haven’t, they were only the nineties’ most explosive, under-the-radar rock-and-roll band, as beloved as they were feared in Aotearoa’s music community. ‘They were just so cool. Not only did they look good, but their gigs were amazing, and the music they played… we just loved,’ says co-director of new documentary King Loser, Cushla Dillon. ‘They were also notorious, they were not nice, well-behaved popstars. It’s kind of a shame, the difficulties they made led to their demise.’ Anchoring around a tumultuous reunion tour long after the band’s dissolution, King Loser utilises mountains of archival footage to construct the tale of an exceedingly talented but deeply self-destructive group of artists. Documentarian Andrew Moore shares a co-director credit with Dillon, a stalwart of the film industry as an editor who is here making her feature debut. ‘I’d directed music videos for King Loser back in the day, and Andrew was kind of their videographer over the years. So we were both part of that family,’ says Dillon, ‘I believe the idea for the whole thing came from [band frontwoman] Celia Mancini, who knew it was going to be special… and wild.’ What results is a raw, unflinching account of a turbulent relationship between the late Mancini (who passed soon after initial filming) and bandmate Chris Heazlewood, who scream, swear, come to blows, and also make incredible music. ‘I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a kind of Spinal Tap-style disaster. It’s an intimate look at the creative relationships that grow over many years.’ It’s a passion project, exploring the cost of never quite achieving your dreams, and the way a community rallies around one who may be struggling. Fittingly, the premiere screenings of King Loser at the mighty Hollywood Avondale will be accompanied by a live performance from surviving members of the band. It’s sure to be a rowdy, joyous experience, one befitting the legacy of the ‘Loser Team’. ‘Seven years we’ve been working on this,’ says Moore, ‘We nearly gave up a few times. It’s been a long haul but we’re really happy to be at the Festival. Hopefully it earns them some new fans.’
