New Zealand’s Best 2017

New Zealand’s Best 2017 are the 6 short films shortlisted for prizes in NZIFF 2017. Audience members get to vote for the people's choice award (25% of the box office for showings in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin). This year the 6 films differed hugely in quality. I've ordered them from best to worst as I voted on them:

Do No Harm

A surgeon protects her patient during an operating theater invasion. Who needs more than 12 minutes for a kick-ass action thriller? Director Roseanne Liang is better known for My Wedding and Other Secrets.

Laundry

Mum wants to have sex, but...
Predictable but funny, with good timing and acting. Though the title might set you thinking of a different ending. (Funding story)

The Dregs

A period film on the formation of an Auckland high school punk band. Basically a view of high school from a misfit boy's perspective. Dreams, bullying, and girls that are too cool to talk to.

Untitled Groping Revenge Fairytale

This film could have done with a better title, even leaving the first word off would have been better. The concept was good, though the selection of men seemed like untargeted revenge.

Thicket

From the elliptical style of storytelling, exacerbated by the fact that the characters barely talk to one another, we see a boy standing up to his dairy farmer father. A very long 16 minutes.

Waiting

Two boys wait outside a suburban dairy for a phone call. How to make 12 minutes feel like 12 hours.

The first two films are straight forward audience pleasers by directors who obviously know what works.
The second two are reasonably well made. One with a slightly tame story, the other slightly flawed.

The last two would only appeal to other film makers.

Announcement

Waiting won the Madman Jury Prize.

Thicket won the Wallace Friends of the Civic Award.

Do No Harm won the Audience Award.
What can I say?

Homegrown: Drama

Homegrown: Drama is a group of New Zealand short films (though 2 were made overseas).

I've ordered these from best to worst in my opinion.

3 Hours
Set in Baghdad, but filmed in Jordan (everyone's favourite stand-in for Iraq), using Iraqi refugees as actors, this was the best of the short films. It is based on real events when unidentified militants killed some children in a mixed Shia-Sunni neighbourhood sparking off a 3 hour gun battle between neighbours who blamed each other for the killings. The heat of the moment reactions and miss-identifications are realistically portrayed in a 14 minute film.

Darryn Exists
Unpublished novelists are subjects of fun. As are romance novelists. Penelope is both. Will she find love? Surreal in places, but no more than it should be.

Hauraki
In a drive across the Hauraki plains a carsick girl provokes a very Kiwi argument between her mother and a farmer's wife. There is a happy ending.

With My Little Eye
Mother, daughter and a man that might be her father go away for a weekend somewhere in Australia. Daughter averts a rape.

Elaine Rides Again
An odd little film about an anxious, religious mother who is concerned about her daughter and boyfriend. Cakes are used a punctuation.

Monifa
A simple film about a young African refugee girl in suburban New Zealand trying to cope with memories and a loud boy.

No bicycle helmets were worn in the making of these films.

It's a Free World

To set the scene for It's a Free World we had an almost wordless NZ short (Cargo) shot in Eastern Europe about people trafficking.


The two things that stick in my mind from It's a Free World are the mesmerizing performance by Kierston Wareing as Angie, the sexy blonde energizer bunny (OK, a male point of view) who always has a come-back ("You know wot I mean?") and the layers of exploitation at the bottom end of the labour market.

We meet Angie on a trip to Poland working for a company recruiting Poles to come and work in the UK. Back in London she is laid off, and tired of being messed with she decides to start her own recruitment company with her more reluctant flatmate, Rose. Fitted out with a leather jacket and a big motorbike she specialises in casual (day labour) jobs for foreign workers. This allows the ultimate employer to get rid of workers on whim. The temptations of the dodgier end of the market beckon both from compassion for a sad case and the money to be made from people who dare not fight back because they don't have a work permit or worse shouldn't be in the country at all.

Ken Loach has painted a picture of a system where top level companies exploit sub-contractors who exploit recruitment companies who in turn exploit those who are desperate enough to work for them (especially those who are in a country without the right to work there). Anyone who is ethical at any level have to compete with those who are prepared to be unethical. It is a depressing picture of system which no one person is capable of fighting back against. On the "positive" side is Angie who lets nothing get her down.

Ian's rating 3.5/5