Reviews and notes

Night Shift
(New Zealand 2012) 15 minutes

Director: Zia Mandviwalla
Producers: Matt Noonan, Chelsea Winstanley
Screenplay: Zia Mandviwalla
Cinematography: Ari Wegner
Editor: David Coulson
Music: Warren Maxwell

Leading Players:
Anapela Polataivao (Salote)
Leon Dobrinski (Yury)
David K. Miller (Hospital visitor)

Festivals:
2012 Cannes, Wellington, Sydney, Melbourne, New York, Vladivostok, Valladolid, Show me Shorts
2013 Flickerfest, Tahiti, Sundance, Aspen, Cinequest, Santa Barbara, Hong Kong, RiverRun, Norway, Rome, Hawaii

Salote, an airport cleaner starts another long night shift. She keeps her head down, does her job and gleans her survival from what others leave behind. No one would usually spare her a second glance.

"A tender, assured story of a woman working unnoticed, caught in the periphery; in the background of the comings and goings behind the scenes of an international airport. The film has been anything but unnoticed in the festival world since its 2012 Cannes premiere - perceptive, written with a knowing intimacy, both unflinchingly unsentimental and with an emotional resonance rare in short form storytelling, it continues to confirm Zia’s talents as a filmmaker fully emerged onto the world stage, and fully deserving of the anticipation and expectation of she may achieve next.”
- Al Cossar, Melbourne International Film Festival.



Abandon Ship
(New Zealand 2016) 11 minutes

Director: Katherine McRae
Producer: Katherine McRae
Screenplay: Katherine McRae,
  adapted from Clean Hands Save Lives
  by Kirsten McDougall
Cinematographer: Alun Bollinger
Editor: Richard Shaw
Music: David Long

Leading Players:
Sophie Hambleton (Jo)
Liam Eldridge-Fright
Levi Alexander

Festival:
2016 Toronto

Filmed on Wellington's South Coast.

A mother’s world is turning to hell in a suburban supermarket as she argues with her toddlers. Driving home around the coast, the car spins out of control. Unhurt but shaken, she sees a vision of a shipwreck. Now on foot, she leads the children along a rocky beach towards the site of an old wreck. Along the way, a grizzly find and a further vision of the survivors struggling to shore serve to reunite the fractured family.



The Tide Keeper
(New Zealand 2014) 9 minutes

Director: Alyx Duncan
Producer: Alyx Duncan
Screenplay: Alyx Duncan
Cinematographer: Ben Montgomery, Chris Pryor
Editor: Daniel Strang
Music: Francesca Mountfort

Leading Player:
Lee Stuart (The Tide Keeper)

Festivals:
2014 Melbourne, Busan, Palm Springs, Warsaw
2015 Annecy, Wellington


"Who knows how to stem the tide except through dreams?”
One night an old man dreams a storm into his bed. In the optimism of his youth, he believed he could save the world. But now, nearing the end of his life, he is losing hope he has run out of time to make a dif ference.
The film is inspired by the life, and performed by, the filmmaker’s father.

Director's Statement
The Tide Keeper is part of my continuing research of states of ‘presence’ on film. It works with the presence of a non performer, developing choreography through the habits and proximity of his physical body in relation to his home. One of the rules of the work is that no objects or props were added to the environment. The everyday objects were found and animated on site. The only time we broke that rule was when we introduced the miniature version of the main character, the old man.

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