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Film-maker Vincent Ward has been acknowledged in the New Year Honours with him being made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to film.
Born in Greytown in 1956, he was the first Kiwi film-maker invited into competition at the Cannes Film Festival - the 1984 film, Vigil, won critical acclaim here and overseas.
It was followed by The Navigator four years later, similarly honoured at Cannes, while Map of the Human Heart (1993) was selected outside the competition.
Ward turned to film as an arts student at Canterbury University, making two short films before his first feature - A State of Siege (1978) and In Spring One Plants Alone (1979).
Ward has been fired from two movies - Alien 3, which he has described as a franchise rather than a film, and River Queen. But he was rehired for River Queen six weeks later and finished six months of editing.
Ward lives in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn after several years of being based in Sydney. His latest project is a contemporary ghost story set in Australia.
