Event 16

The vampire myth is given a stylish 1960s treatment, where a human cop partners with a vampire cop to stop a vamp bent on creating a war between the two "separate but equal" races.

It's the 21st century, the Oil Wars have made a mess of the planet and the land outside major cities is lawless. After Hunter comes to the aid of Corlie, who has run away from the villainous Straker, he takes her to the peaceful community of Clearwater. Unfortunately for the citizens of Clearwater, Straker fully intends to get Corlie back.

A team from the intergalactic fast food chain Crumb's Crunchy Delights descends on Earth, planning to make human flesh the newest taste sensation. After they wipe out the New Zealand town Kaihoro, the country’s Astro-Investigation and Defense Service (AIaDS) is called in to deal with the problem. Things are complicated due to Giles, an aid worker who comes to Kaihoro the same day to collect change from the residents. He is captured by the aliens, and AIaDS stages a rescue mission that quickly becomes an all-out assault on the aliens’ headquarters.

When the teenagers in a small Illinois town start getting murdered, the police chief makes a connection to the mysterious scientific experiments being done at the local university and must stop them before his own son is dragged into the deadly scheme.

A kid is hypnotized by a scientist to kill his parents and ends in a mental institution. As a grown up he returns to seek revenge over the scientist.

A man wakes up in an endless white void, unable to remember how he got there, he soon encounters an A.I. who takes the man through old memories of himself until he realizes his tragic purpose in the white room.

Opens Looks is a short film told in English and Cook Islands Māori. A story of love, redemption and basketball.

A nightwatchman who works at a pesticide plant manipulates chemicals (of which he treats a strange garden of marrow-like vines in his apartment) , causing evolution to accelerate, in this short illustrating the harmful effects of human interference with nature.

In a sweeping tale that spans 1000 years and multiple generations – from the distant past to the 19th century, the present day and a strange, dystopian future – this landmark collection traces the collective histories of Indigenous peoples across Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. Diverse in perspective, content and form, traversing the terrain of grief, love and dispossession, they each bear witness to these cultures’ ongoing struggles against patriarchy, colonialism and racism.

In the near future, police detective Richard Manning is investigating the most difficult case of his career – the seemingly impossible locked room murder of a wealthy property investor. The more Richard investigates, the more complex the case seems to become. He soon realizes his own future and survival depend on him solving everything – and quickly.

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Structured around the ten most significant celestial bodies of the Milky Way, Apple Pie’s inquiry begins with the furthest point in our solar system, Pluto, as a lens back towards our home planet and the ‘mechanisms by which certain aspects of scientific knowledge are digested, appropriated and subsequently manifest within the general human complex’. Christopher Francis Schiel’s dry, functional narration brings a network of ideas about our existence into focus, while Hamilton’s visual tableaux, as an extension of his multifaceted practice, veer imaginatively between psychedelic imagery and performance art.

When a young female scientist discovers that the pharmaceutical company she works for had developed a cure for cancer years earlier, she attempts to release it to the world. Knowing that they make more money from chemotherapy drugs than the cure, the company does everything it can to stop her.

For years, people have wondered if Bigfoot is real, or just a myth. Today, reporter Madi Hewett is investigating weird sightings in the New Zealand bush. She is accompanied by New Zealand Cryptid Research And Bigfoot Sightings (C.R.A.B.S) as they investigate the try to prove the existence of Bigfoot in New Zealand.

Celebrating a birthday, a young boy and his exhausted babysitter wait for his unusually late parents.

The story of unemployment in New Zealand and In A Land of Plenty is an exploration of just that; it takes as its starting point the consensus from The Depression onwards that Godzone economic policy should focus on achieving full employment, and explores how this was radically shifted by the 1984 Labour government. Director Alister Barry's perspective is clear, as he trains a humanist lens on ‘Rogernomics' to argue for the policy's negative effects on society, as a new poverty-stricken underclass developed.

Someone Else’s Country looks critically at the radical economic changes implemented by the 1984 Labour Government - where privatisation of state assets was part of a wider agenda that sought to remake New Zealand as a model free market state. The trickle-down ‘Rogernomics’ rhetoric warned of no gain without pain, and here the theory is counterpointed by the social effects (redundant workers, Post Office closures). Made by Alister Barry in 1996 when the effects were raw, the film draws extensively on archive footage and interviews with key “witnesses to history”.

A man's son becomes involved in drug use and criminal activity in rural New Zealand. The man embarks on a journey to seek assistance from others in an effort to get his son back before it's too late.

When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited pre-teen daughter Flora to the wilderness of 19th-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.

A tragic portrait of mother and child exploring grief through music and lyrical imagery.

In a violent relationship, it takes a mother’s strength to save herself and her children from the man she loved. Once Were Warriors is a violent love story set against a contemporary urban backdrop.