notes for a coastline

quite soon after meeting documentary filmmaker Zoe Roland on her move from Auckland to Christchurch, she commissioned me to write the script for a short experimental film she was working on, based around the 'bach' (holiday house) culture of the South Island seaside settlement of Gore Bay.

This film eventually became Notes for a Coastline, which drew on documentary, oral history, B&W 16mm shot on vintage Bolex cameras, found archival super-8 and experimental radiophony, layering a palimpsest of film and digital video footage, and audio interviews with community members with an essayistic monologue.

It had its inaugural screenings in the 2004 Homegrown programme of the NZ International Film Festivals (Wellington and Auckland), and a screening at the 5th biennial New Zealand Expanding Documentary Conference (2004). It went on to be included in the official selection of the Navarra International Documentary Film Festival (Spain) in 2005, as well as having a hometown showing that year at The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space

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"Notes for a Coastline” is an essayist documentary about cultural memory in regard to place; in this instance, Gore Bay, a beach settlement in the South Island of New Zealand. The narrative is a poetic exploration into the art of storytelling, which presents and muses upon the subject from a number of angles. It is “about” storytelling, a semi-scientific portrayal as well as a personal portrayal of the search of stories."

Director: Zoe Roland
Screenplay: Sally Ann McIntyre
Music: Ryan Smith
Sound: Zoe Roland, Sally Ann McIntyre, Nigel Bunn

Director of Photography: Nigel Bunn
Producer: Zoe Roland

the Forbidden Room

discussions with devised / media theatre group The Clinic (who were, at the time, much esteemed theatre critics on the Arts radio show Mag:net, which I was hosting on RDU98:3FM) about a project involving their workshopping my writing eventually led to the three act piece The Forbidden Room.

This piece was performed at Enjoy Gallery, Wellington, as part of the Wellington Fringe Festival (where it picked up the prize in Multimedia) and in Christchurch for a short run at the Physics Room Contemporary Art Space.

The first act involved interaction between screen based and live characters with a plot based loosely around incidents in the domestic life of Louis Althusser, the second act's puppet-like physical momentum was largely driven by a typewriter score, and the third act included references to the writing of Marguerite Duras as well as a live radio show, complete with performative foley effects.

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"The Forbidden Room is a collaboration with a writer, focused on the relationship between writing and acting, the text and the body. Taking the myth of Bluebeard as a narrative structure, we examine three different male-female and writer-written relationships. Performed in art galleries, the show also took a critical look at the 'forbidden room' of the world of contemporary art."

Director - Anastasis Dailianis
Scriptwriter - Sally McIntyre
Film design - Julieanne Eason
Performers - Lucette Hindin, Anastasia Dailianis
Additional direction – Haydn Kerr