
Desray Armstrong
Production
Biography
Desray Armstrong is an independent producer with a diverse slate of credits. From 2007-2011, Desray and producer/director Chelsea Winstanley ran New Zealand production company StanStrong with a focus on creating compelling, conscious and informative content with a Maori worldview. In recent years, Desray has built up a mass of physical production experience, predominantly in feature film.
Known For

Many thousands of years in the future, Earth’s cities roam the globe on huge wheels, devouring each other in a struggle for ever diminishing resources. On one of these massive traction cities, the old London, Tom Natsworthy has an unexpected encounter with a mysterious young woman from the wastelands who will change the course of his life forever.
Mortal Engines

A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat.
The Light Between Oceans

A school teacher is forced to confront a brutal act from his past when a pair of ruthless drifters takes him and his family on a nightmare road-trip.
Coming Home in the Dark

When a self-destructive teenager is suspended from school and asked to look after his feisty alcoholic grandmother as a punishment, the crazy time they spend together turns his life around.
Juniper

Lucy, a former child actor, seeks enlightenment at a retreat led by spiritual leader Elon while she navigates her close yet turbulent relationship with her stunt-performer daughter, Dylan.
Bad Behaviour

A trio of accidental outlaws travel the length of New Zealand, protesting conformity and chasing lost love, with a posse of cops and a media frenzy in pursuit.
Pork Pie

Jess is a solo mother and reluctant parking warden. Tom is a self-obsessed greetings cards salesman with an addiction to competitions who will do anything to win. Together they are just two of the competitors in a gruelling endurance contest to win a car - whoever keeps their hand on it the longest wins. As the sleepless days wear by, what price will they pay for winning this competition?
Show of Hands

Sam, a fearless young girl raised outside of her Māori culture, is determined to fulfill her mission of connecting with her mountain. She hopes it can heal her from the cancer she is battling. Along the way, she meets some misfits and new kids in town, and together they journey through a difficult route, discovering the true spirit of adventure and the magic of friendship.
The Mountain

A panic attack causes Millie to miss her flight to New York. Everyone thinks she’s made it though, thanks to her fake Instagram posts from the “Big Apple”. A tragicomic hunt for a new ticket ensues, as she attempts to beat the clock, her fears and the truth.
Millie Lies Low

This film is an intimate portrayal of pioneering filmmaker Merata Mita told through the eyes of her children. Using hours of archive footage, some never before seen, her youngest child and director Hepi Mita discovers the filmmaker he never knew and shares the mother he lost, with the world.
Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen

In 1916, the New Zealand Government secretly shipped 14 of the country's most outspoken conscientious objectors to the Western Front in an attempt to convert, silence, or quite possibly kill them. This is their story.
Field Punishment No.1

In a cold and remote landscape, two strangers struggle to repair their broken pasts. A young man is on parole after serving time for attempting to murder the man who killed his girlfriend in a hit and run. A woman is released from a psychiatric facility far from her homeland. These two damaged strangers cross paths in the mountains in winter and fall into a complex intimate relationship, putting to the test their capacity to trust and heal.
Stray
After surviving 15 years trapped in an underground cave system, a young woman returns to the surface to reclaim the family she believes is hers, no matter the monstrous cost.
When Darkness Loves Us

Saving Grace - Te Whakarauora Tangata is the final work of director Merata Mita, who passed away suddenly before the film could be completed. The film addresses some of the deepest and most distressing issues Māori communities face, and shows how extraordinary creative solutions are being provided by Māori communities themselves. Mita asks Maori men to front up to some grim realities by talking openly and honestly about the violence and abuse that has plagued their communities for many years. The film is a personal response to this violence, with Mita making a case for a return to an older model of Maori manhood, when men were the ones who sweetly sang the children to sleep. “Merata intended the documentary to count in ways that mattered deeply to her and to change perceptions of abuse and violence by using themes of responsibility, redemption, revitalisation, forgiveness and, most of all, love.” - Carol Hirschfeld, Māori Television.
Saving Grace - Te Whakarauora Tangata

Young Vinnie and Jonah are bored on the mean streets — tagging, BMX-ing — when Jonah peer pressures Vinnie to join him in breaking and entering a house. When they find more than Christmas pressies inside, it tests mateship, moral codes and festive spirit.
Ebony Society

Under the celestial guidance of Matariki, Māori elder Hamo and local delinquent Jo form an unlikely bond on a road trip. As they confront past traumas and each face their demons, their shared path becomes a journey of healing, community, and reconciliation.
Kōkā

On the eve of departing overseas Ellen makes the fateful decision to gift her boyfriend a new girlfriend.
Ellen Is Leaving

Amaia lives with her deeply depressed mother in an inner-city apartment. With no family or friends close by, she desperately seeks out her absent father. Believing that mystical powers and a mysterious woman can reconnect them, Amaia goes to extreme lengths to win her attention and friendship. When the woman visits the family home, she becomes a familiar and welcome playmate for Amaia but also carries the hard truth of her father’s absence. The young mother and daughter cannot pretend any longer and will have to decide if they can continue living with each other.
Ways to See

A hazy night in Wellington is lit up with the pulsating colors and sounds of party people exploring their youth and freedom.
Bats
Upcoming Māori monster thriller.