Focusing in on New Zealand

Each year, the calibre of New Zealand Documentaries has become stronger and stronger. From once almost minnows to the international selection the festival presented, the boom of the Kiwi-doco is well and truly underway, as Documentary Edge 2011 brings some of the best Aotearoa has to offer, and well and truly on par with the rest of the world.

Festival favourite Justin Pemberton (The Nuclear Comeback) returns this year with the intricate coming-of-age tale Is She or Isn’t He? Another piece of work guaranteed to elicit debate after its screening; the film follows someone on the run from his identity and discusses how New Zealanders define their sex and sexuality… and how they deal with people seeking transgender.

Donated to Science follows the lives (or more accurately after-lives) of those who have donated their bodies to Otago Medical School for aspiring medical students to dissect. One of the highest rated documentaries screened on New Zealand television, directors were allowed full access to follow the donors and students through the entire process – with an incredibly emotional pay off at the end.

A tragic yet ultimately inspiring movie, The Jade Bell Story follows Jade, a blind, mute and immobile young man who survived a near-lethal injection of heroin and cocaine. Today, Jade will do anything to get his old life back and by fighting his own war against drug addiction among youth, he believes it just might happen.

48hour film veteran Luke Wheeler teams up with co-director Peter Simpson to premiere their piece as a continuation from the Spotlight: Humour programme in 2009. Stand Up explores the world and the business of being a stand up comedian in New Zealand – even more poignant given how New Zealand comedy is become one the countries newest important exports.

I Am the River explores the fallout from a rare insight into 19th century NZ history. A chance discovery provided a link between Maori in the present with tupuna (ancestors) in the past, which then provoked a storm of public protest and continues to raise questions of ownership that divide our cultures.

Dan Salmon takes us on a “trip” back to 1970’s New Zealand with the fascinating and funny Dirty Bloody Hippies – showing us the colourful and exciting times in the epicentres of Kiwi hippy culture; the Coromandel Peninsula and the Golden Bay.

The New Zealand selection also includes three shorts: Cameron Betts’ acclaimed Hiding Behind the Green Screen, following four men trying to break their addiction to marijuana through their love of music, Lest We Forget featuring New Zealander’s telling their Holocaust stories and Landscapes at the Worlds Ends, a non-verbal visual journey to the polar regions of our planet through a triptych montage of photography and video.