NZ filmmaker wins top award for $12,000 movie

Auckland filmmaker Michael Thorp's second feature film Eight Broken Fingers with a $12,000 budget has won the Best Foreign Film award at the FAIF International Film Festival in Hollywood.

Thorp wrote, directed and edited Eight Broken Fingers on his desktop computer in South Korea.

The award followed the film's world premiere screening in Hollywood last Friday.

The film tells the story of a New Zealander political journalist, writing an allegory on British colonialism and US imperialism, who is stabbed and left to die in a Seoul alley.

His mind flashes back through the possible reasons to his first encounter with a successful Korean violinist he fell madly in love with as he sees the events and pressures that conspired to tear them apart and led to his brutal stabbing.

"I wanted to examine the abuse of power politically, societially, in families, and interpersonally," Thorp said on his movie's website.

"Particularly how power is cynically used at the expense of others, and the means it uses to cloak its selfish motives with seemingly noble ones."

Thorp is based in South Korea writing his fifth screenplay whilst teaching English to survive as he promotes Eight Broken Fingers through film festivals and prepares to raise funding to direct one of his three new screenplays.

- NZPA