Cold Climate

Al Barry has been the con­science of New Zea­l­and doc­u­ment­ary-mak­ing for over 40 years. In 1973, he sailed to Mur­uroa with his cam­era to record the protests over French nuc­le­ar test­ing and in 1979 he formed — along with Rod Pross­er and Rus­sell Camp­bell — the Van­guard Films col­lect­ive of pro­gress­ive film­makers who pro­duced a series of doc­u­ment­ar­ies about the increas­ing fric­tion between the author­it­ari­an Mul­doon gov­ern­ment and the labour and nuc­le­ar-free protest move­ments, includ­ing Wild­cat (fol­low­ing the 1977 tim­ber work­ers’ strike) and Islands of the Empire (about New Zealand’s depend­ent mil­it­ary rela­tion­ship with the United States).

In 1988, Al released the first in what would become his life’s work — a series of films mak­ing up a com­pre­hens­ive his­tory of New Right polit­ics in New Zea­l­and and the steady destruc­tion of the wel­fare state and the post-war lib­er­al con­sensus. Someone Else’s Coun­try cost only $40,000 to make and was a sur­pris­ing suc­cess, prompt­ing him to fol­low up with In a Land of Plenty (2002), A Civ­il­ised Soci­ety (2007) and then an adapt­a­tion of Nicky Hager’s invest­ig­a­tion into polit­ic­al cor­rup­tion, The Hol­low Men in 2008.

His latest film, Hot Air, is about the polit­ics of cli­mate change — what he describes as “the mundane nature of this cata­strophe and the glob­al response to it… you know, just ordin­ary folks like you and I who happened to be in pos­i­tions of power and for very ordin­ary human reas­ons didn’t do any­thing or do enough”. It takes much the same film­mak­ing approach as his pre­vi­ous pic­tures: assembly of a case through a painstak­ing trawl through years of tele­vi­sion archives in order to find evid­ence of the key play­ers essen­tially con­vict­ing them­selves with their own testimony.

At least this part of the job is get­ting easi­er, thanks to tech­no­logy. The Auck­land Uni­ver­sity Chap­man Archive of all tele­vi­sion news and cur­rent affairs broad­casts since 1984 has long been a treas­ure trove of New Zea­l­and his­tory and is now avail­able for review by the gen­er­al pub­lic at the Film Archive.

Alister test­i­fies: “The Film Archive and the New Zea­l­and Tele­vi­sion Archive have been won­der­ful resources right through the dif­fer­ent stages of the pro­cess, from look­ing at it on paper using the TVNZ data­base through to going down to the base­ment at the archive and spend­ing hours and hours and hours look­ing at their record­ings of every news pro­gramme over the last ten years or so, which now can be viewed there for free. You can go and look at his­tory unfold­ing as each day goes by in the six o’clock news.”

Mak­ing a film might be get­ting easi­er, but fund­ing it and then get­ting it in front of an audi­ence is get­ting more dif­fi­cult, and Al is grate­ful for the atten­tion the New Zea­l­and Inter­na­tion­al Film Fest­iv­al provides: “In a funny way it has become more import­ant because we’ve got a stage (or a screen) where the films can be shown and not lost in the deluge, and people like your­self, for example, and indeed this con­ver­sa­tion that we’re hav­ing now, mean that films like ours do get poin­ted out.”

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Also in July

 

ERNEST & CELESTINE (Stéphane Aub­i­er, Vin­cent Patar, Ben­jamin Renner)

Opens 3 July: I’m sure I’ve men­tioned this film in these pages more than once, but per­petu­al release delays means I’m recom­mend­ing it again. This is the Eng­lish-lan­guage ver­sion of an ador­able French anim­a­tion. For all the famille.

 

CALVARY (John Michael McDonagh)

Opens 3 July: A cast to die for (includ­ing Brendan Gleeson, his son Dom­h­nall, Chris O’Dowd and Dylan Mor­an) in the fol­low-up to the hit com­edy The Guard.

 

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (Matt Reeves)

Opens 10 July: If it’s been a bit quiet in Miramar dur­ing the last few months it’s because every­one has had their heads down fin­ish­ing the amaz­ing effects for this well-deserved sequel.

 

THE DARK HORSE (James Napi­er Robertson)

Opens 31 July: Cliff Curtis returns to New Zea­l­and cinema after a too-long absence, this time as pro­du­cer as well as star. Based on a true story, he plays Gen­es­is Potini, a former chess cham­pi­on try­ing to get his life back on the board. Boy’s James Rolle­ston also stars.

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