NZ Equity is petitioning its members to go online and register their support for a binding industry-wide contract between SPADA and all actors working on NZ movies and TV programmes.

It would replace The Pink Book guidelines with minimum conditions of employment comparable to those across the Tasman, but with rates of pay and residuals based on the NZ market and the financing of NZ productions.

Funding from finance and grants to New Zealand’s screen industry almost doubled over the last four years, to reach $585 million in 2009, Statistics New Zealand said today. The Screen Industry Survey, first run in 2005, has now collected five years worth of data, providing an opportunity for New Zealanders to draw conclusions about the [...]

Rialto Distribution predicts its latest New Zealand release, Predicament, will top $500,000 at the box office.

It opens wide on more than 50 screens tomorrow after being platformed on the NZ Film Festival circuit.

Costa Botes’ documentary Candyman: The David Klein Story, which screened last month at the Wellington International Film Festival, has secured a US distributor.
Indiepix will be making the film available on DVD and through its online site via pay per view and downloads from February next year.

Confirming its position as the prime North American launch pad for independent features, the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival has today announced its line-up of world premieres. New Zealand film Matariki has been included in the selection, directed by first time feature filmmaker Michael Bennett, and produced by Fiona Copland.

With the release of Predicament, all four of Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s novels have now all been adapted for film. Given that the author clearly holds a unique place in New Zealand literature, how did the filmmakers do?

Winners will be announced at awards ceremonies held on Friday 17 and Saturday 18 September. For more info, click here.

Taking to the streets of New York with a handicam, a US$25 budget and an idea for a story, Kiwi director Peter Salmon (Letters About the Weather, Fog, Playing Possum, The Creakers), who was visiting, and his actor friend Rajeev Varma, who’d left NZ to live and work there a few months before, came up with The Box, a splendid short drama that was selected to screen in this year’s NZI FF and is doubtless destined for a long life on the festival circuit.

Principal photography has begun in Wellington, New Zealand on World War II Horror pic, THE DEVIL’S ROCK. Written by Paul Finch, Paul Campion and Brett Ihaka, The Devil’s Rock is award-winning short film director Paul Campion’s debut feature film. His short films Night of the Hell Hamsters and Eel Girl have screened at every major [...]

The world’s film review bible, Variety, has given self-funded New Zealand made documentary This Way of Life a rave review, helping in its bid to qualify for Academy Award® consideration. Variety reviewer John Anderson describes This Way of Life as “A collision of realities – earthly nature vs. human nature” with a “very big heart…catapulting [...]

A Short Films programme screening over four evenings and two matinee sessions, an additional programme of longer, high-altitude adventure movies on the final night, live music from Fernando Aragones at all evening shows and a photographic exhibition from award winning photographers Mike Langford and Jackie Ranken make up the 5th annual Adventure Film Festival opening [...]

Sam Hunt CNZM, QSM left the theatre when the Q and A started after the Auckland Festival screening, but then he came back in and people called out for him to go up the front, so he did. We waited eagerly for his take on the warts-and-all film his friend Tim Rose had made about him. Did he like it? Was it true? Instead, of course, he burst into verse – not his own, but an Elizabethan poem, with hawks, that he thought might have been written by Christopher Marlowe – telling us the poem, he said, because that’s what popped into his head as he watched.

Cold Clay, Emptiness… the latest work by New Zealand filmmaker SJ.Ramir, has been selected to screen in the Orizzonti section of the 67th Venice International Film Festival. La Biennale di Venezia, organisers of the festival, created the Orizzonti section in 2004 to examine “new trends in cinema” with particular attention to be paid to the [...]

A diverse selection of award winning action sports, travel and adventure films from around the world will be on show in Queenstown in August. The 5th Queenstown Adventure Film Festival presented by Columbia, opens on 12 August and showcases world class films that celebrate adventures on snow, land, water and in the air. The 2010 [...]

The makers of award-winning Kiwi short films Teddy and Communication have launched a donation appeal to fund their new film, The Colonel’s Outing. The Colonel’s Outing tells the story of two eighty-year-old male war veterans whose romantic relationship blossoms when they meet in a rest home, despite interference from a disapproving Matron. Producer Andy Jalfon [...]

A big culture shock that came with our move to the country a few years ago was the discovery that – quelle surprise!! – not everyone thinks like us. Among other things, we’ve found ourselves in a hotbed of climate change deniers (when we lived in town we’d only read about such people, or seen them on the telly) and while we continue to go into battle over this global warming thing, we’re getting no traction at all.