Directing
A transgender woman returns home to finally come out to her parents, but as dinner spirals out of control, her anxieties manifest in sinister ways.
In a small conservative town called Greymouth, Sam turns to the colour pink. Breathing new life into an old Anglican church, he creates his home Gloria - a shimmering, bedazzled, hot pink sanctuary. Unlike traditional churches in many ways, Gloria is not filled with people. Instead, he hand crafts paper-mâché parishioners to keep him company, filling the space with companions of his own making. Gloria is a portrait of radical self-expression, quiet isolation, and the enduring life of unfinished art. Is art ever truly finished? Or does it keep evolving like the people who make it?
Inside his studio, painter Philip Trusttum launches into a new work. He employs ordinary house paint to create a bold, large-scale painting, tells stories, and reflects on his career as an artist.
Patrick copes with his grief by living among birds. After a long and full life, Patrick has found where he wants to see out the rest of his days. In an odd and isolated town, Birdlings Flat, even there his home defies societal norms. Patrick has learnt to make do with what he has, living in his second-hand sanctuary, nurturing and caring for the flock of animals he saved. Grateful to be alive, he embraces life completely on his own terms among his feathered friends. My Dying Place explores the journey to self acceptance, and the intertwining threads of life and death that binds us all. It asks the question, what happens to us after we die?
18-year-old Elliot lives and works on a small family-owned New Zealand dairy farm. He meanders out at dawn towards a herd of feeding cows where his attempt to take the wheel for the morning’s feed-out run is quickly overruled by his overbearing father. Elliot’s resentment grows with his increasingly apparent lack of autonomy and respect on the farm. A routine grocery trip sees Elliot bump into Laura, an enigmatic checkout operator and love interest, who pockets Elliot a pouch of tobacco on the sly, directing him to collect her later on that afternoon.
