10 great New Zealand films

Director Jonathan Ogilvie’s Head South is an offbeat tribute to the creative stirrings of New Zealand (Aotearoa) in the 1980s, when Flying Nun Records – an independent music label that now has worldwide cult status – was founded in the South Island. The semi-autobiographical story of a naive teen who enters a Christchurch record store’s orbit and starts a band, it is both coming-of-age and subculture origin story, made strange by a paranormal twist that indulges the gothic bent, madcap eccentricity and existential disquiet often found in New Zealand cinema.

The idea that New Zealand films could attract global success was on the ascendant in the 80s and 90s, after the New Zealand Film Commission had been established and highly distinctive films such as Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994) and Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994) were made. 

The title of actor Sam Neill’s BFI-commissioned 1995 documentary on the nascent industry defined it as a “Cinema of Unease,” that channelled anxieties around societal conformity and insanity, revealed a brooding sense of isolation, and indulged flights of the imagination. Narratives of white settler alienation often sidelined Māori histories and mythologies through which identity and belonging were understood, and indigenous filmmakers such as Merata Mita worked to decolonise the screen with films such as Mauri (1988). 

While Peter Jackson’s franchise The Lord of the Rings (2001 to 2003) positioned New Zealand in the early 2000s as an attractive location for big-budget blockbusters, here, to mark Head South’s release, we celebrate 10 films that forged a more quintessentially Kiwi course.

Director: Roger Donaldson

Prominent New Zealand star Sam Neill’s breakout role was in Roger Donaldson’s political action thriller Sleeping Dogs. Based on Kiwi author C.K. Stead’s book Smith’s Dream, it was a landmark of the new wave of New Zealand cinema of the 70s and 80s, and was the first NZ feature to be widely screened abroad. 

Its uneasy vision is of a New Zealand that descends into authoritarianism and civil warfare after an industrial dispute and violent crackdown by riot police on protesters. Smith (Neill), who has opted out of society and been living a simple existence on an island after his marriage break-up, wants no part in the strife, but is arrested for suspected involvement in an underground guerilla movement. He is imprisoned, but escapes and goes on the run. The film epitomises the anti-establishment attitude and ‘man alone’ figure deeply entrenched in New Zealand culture.



Director: Merata Mita

A 70s renaissance in Māori culture and strengthening Māori protest movement coalesced with an emergent white middle-class political consciousness in large-scale resistance to the 1981 tour of the Springbok rugby team while South Africa was under apartheid. The tour was a tremendously polarising issue in the sports-mad nation, as the conservative government called to keep “politics out of sport”, despite international boycott calls. 

Merata Mita, who was pivotal in the formation of the Māori screen industry in New Zealand, documented the mass civil disobedience in Patu!, with riot police beating protesters as tensions erupted into violence. Patu! showed how the debate over apartheid inevitably drew local racial discrimination against Māori into sharper focus. The anti-tour perspective, and the voice Mita gave to Māori activists, drew a strong backlash and accusations of agitprop, even as the white bias of the status quo remained largely unquestioned in New Zealand society.

Director: Vincent Ward

Vincent Ward was a painting student when he borrowed his art school’s camera equipment and fell in love with filmmaking. Vigil, his debut feature, was the first Kiwi film to compete at Cannes. A blue-tinged coming-of-age vision of isolation and alienation – its silhouettes and tilted landscapes influenced by German expressionism – it opens in a storm, as the inhabitants of a remote farmhouse express doubt that they can continue to hold off nature’s forces. 

The tumult soon takes on the psychological dimensions of grief. Eleven-year-old Toss (Fiona Kay) struggles to make sense of the death of her father, who fell rescuing a sheep from a crevasse, and the arrival of a hunter with an eye for her mother. With her balaclava and staff-like branch, Toss looks almost medieval. Ward’s penchant for that aesthetic would come into its own with 1988’s popular The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, set during the Black Death.

Director: Geoff Murphy

A sci-fi twist of apocalyptic desolation was added to the ‘man alone’ trope, and the predicament of the laconic, existential loner adrift in the landscape, in director Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth. Geneticist Zac Hobson (local star Bruno Lawrence) awakens to find the clocks stopped and the world around him eerily deserted. The reason is unclear, but seems linked to his lab’s experiments. It’s only after a week, when he is mentally unravelling, that he encounters two survivors, Api (Peter Smith) and Joanne (Alison Routledge), and a love triangle develops. They determine they were all at the point of death when the mysterious cosmic rupture occurred. 

A downbeat vision of alienation, insecure male rivalry and planetary unease, the film is more concerned with exploring the haunting, unbearable nature of solitude (a recurrent theme for an island nation and the psyches of its uprooted settlers) than with flashy technical effects.

Directors: Stewart Main and Peter Wells

Desperate Remedies was a rare thing amid laconic Kiwi machismo: a queer twist on the Victorian-era gothic by way of the colour-drenched melodrama of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Co-directors and writers Stewart Main and Peter Wells were not restrained by the modest budget from manifesting an extravagantly stylised, raunchy and arch reinvigoration of the historical romance. 

Dorothea Brook (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) runs a drapery business in the far-flung British colony with her clandestine lover (Lisa Chappell.) Within its blood-red walls she schemes to save her sister from the orbit of a rogue (Cliff Curtis) and opium addiction, with the help of a handsome migrant (Kevin Smith) she singles out from a newly docked crowd. This is a land of cracking whips, flaming barrels and sharp banter, soundtracked by Verdi and erotically charged with the simmering looks of hungry chancers. It still feels fresh in its fluid desires and championing of radical independence.

Director: Jane Campion

Jane Campion became the first female director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Piano, a bold, gothic vision of Victorian-era settler unease in which New Zealand’s primordial landscape is as treacherous as it is romantic. Scotswoman Ada (Holly Hunter) arrives in the colony with her daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), for an arranged marriage to a frontiersman (Sam Neill), but her stubborn unconventionality puts the new couple at loggerheads. Ada does not speak, preferring to play her piano – leading to an erotic, secret deal with former whaler Baines (Harvey Keitel). 

Hunter and Paquin both won acting Oscars for their stunning performances. The Piano revealed the horrors of the colonial ‘civilising’ project, and portrayed imagination as a liberating force. Campion had already explored the high price creative women pay for radical nonconformity with An Angel at My Table (1990), the autobiography of Kiwi author and sometime psychiatric inpatient Janet Frame.

Director: Peter Jackson

From cult low-budget splatter (1987’s Bad Taste) to epic blockbuster fantasy franchise (The Lord of the Rings), via clever meta-mockumentary sending up the Kiwi pioneering spirit (1995’s Forgotten Silver), the significance of Peter Jackson’s broad-ranging career in the formation of a national cinema cannot be overstated. Heavenly Creatures is arguably his high point. Co-written with Fran Walsh and based on the real Parker-Hulme crime case, which rattled conformist 1950s Christchurch, it stars Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey as two teen girls of different social classes, who build an intense bond and shared fantasy world and plan a murder, bludgeoning one of their mothers to death. 

Playful irreverence and boundless, obsessive imagination are given their due in an arthouse triumph that has no interest in reducing the friends to one-dimensional monsters. Instead, it questions a repressive, stigmatising society that left its outsiders with few outlets for authentic belonging.

Director: Lee Tamahori

Adapted from a novel by Alan Duff and directed by Lee Tamahori, Once Were Warriors became a cultural phenomenon, and the highest-grossing film of all-time in New Zealand up to that point. Beth (Rena Owen) lives in a cramped state house with her heavy-drinking husband Jake ‘The Muss’ Heke (Temuera Morrison) and their children, ultimately finding a way out of an escalating cycle of violence and abuse after a string of events leads to a devastating family tragedy. 

The harrowing drama shocked audiences with its brutal depictions of domestic violence (an endemic social problem in New Zealand). It explored the impact of colonialism in the cultural disenfranchisement of Māori and the poverty, addiction problems and gang affiliations that have sprung up among those forcibly unmoored from community and traditions. The national conversation sparked by the film was huge, even as its spectacular framing of the violence it sought to condemn has come under increased scrutiny.

Director: Niki Caro

Based on a 1987 book by influential New Zealand novelist Witi Ihimaera, and directed by Niki Caro, Whale Rider won raves as an empowering, lyrical coming-of-age drama. A 12-year-old Māori girl in a coastal village, Pai, whose mother and male twin died in childbirth, has the ambition to become chief of the Ngāti Kanohi tribe – a role her grandfather, with his rigid patriarchal beliefs, insists is only for a son descended from Paikea, who according to mythology rode on a whale from Hawaiki. Pai, who is attuned to nature, is determined to claim her right to lead the community, and a mass whale beaching seems to come as a sign and opportunity.

Caro’s film is a nuanced take on tradition as a source of strength and belonging, but also limitations. Keisha Castle-Hughes, at just 13, became the youngest-ever Oscar best actress nominee at the time for her unaffected performance.

Directors: Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement

Taika Waititi’s Two Cars, One Night (2003), one of his very first directorial efforts, in which kids meet in a pub car park, remains one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed shorts. Waititi now has an established Hollywood career, but is most loved at home for his films underpinned by New Zealand’s specific, oddball humour, such as What We Do in the Shadows, written and directed with Jemaine Clement of musical-comedy series Flight of the Conchords (2007 to 2009). 

It playfully combines two of the country’s screen preoccupations: the awkwardness of the flatshare experience and the comic banality and absurdity of horror, as a household of four vampires who hail from different centuries endeavour to merge lifestyles in the Wellington suburbs. It’s framed as a mockumentary, with a camera crew following the exploits of the bloodsuckers (two of whom are played by Waititi and Clement), as they come up against a werewolf pack.