Dome Cinema Gisborne

"Come on a surf trip, meet the people connect with the land, and experience Longboarding", this is what the up-coming surf documentary 'SEWN - New Zealand seen through Longboarders' proposes to you.


Longboarding is a discipline of surfing that uses boards longer than 9 feet (2.84m) along the length of which the surfer can walk up and down. There is a subtle blend of hydrodynamics with bodily expression and movement, the surfer virtually walks and dances on water.


Directed and produced by award-winning French filmmaker Nicolas Brikke, who has lived in NZ for over 5 years, SEWN takes you around the four stunning coasts of the North Island of New Zealand (SEWN being an acronym for South East West North). In each coast, we meet up with a surfer from an older generation, who has lived through the shortboarding revolution but remained true to the longboard. Just as importantly, we’ll also meet a surfer from a younger generation that lives and surfs with a similar spirit and passion.


This film explores why these people chose longboarding, and how they manage to keep it as an important part of their daily, family and professional lives. SEWN takes you inside the longboarding experience. It brings you up close and personal with the surfer through challenging viewing angles. Finally, the film illustrates that to be a surfer in New Zealand, is to have an intrinsic connection to the land, through the relationship with the sea and surf but also through the Maori legends behind the landmarks and the names of places (in Te Reo Maori).


SEWN is the first NZ-made Longboarding film in over a decade and its internet promotional campaign (in 3 languages: English, French and Spanish) has had a wide national and international following.


The team is led by Nicolas Brikke, who as well as being an accomplished filmmaker and Geophysics student, performed in the European Longboarding Tours of 2002 and 2003 as well as national competitions in New Zealand.


Will Moore is a director and editor who has worked with company Fish n Clips productions and on the music videos of some of NZ most well known artists, including Brooke Fraser, Scribe and The Mint Chicks.

Iconoclastic Danish director Lars von Trier follows up his controversial Antichrist with this sci-fi disaster drama, starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kiefer Sutherland.
A disaster film, of sorts, Melancholia tells the story of two sisters coming to terms with the imminent death of the planet as a large foreign body takes up a collision course. Justine (Dunst) becomes melancholic and calm when Earth is threatened, meanwhile Claire (Gainsbourg) fears for her life.
Von Trier considers his previous films to have happy endings, and promises ominously that this will be the first with an unhappy one.

After years of back-breaking toil in ground ravaged by the effects of man-made
growing systems, Paul Gautschi has discovered a taste of what God intended
for mankind in the garden of Eden. Some of the vital issues facing agriculture
today include soil preparation, fertilization, irrigation, weed control, pest control,
crop rotation, and PH issues. None of these issues exist in the unaltered state of
nature or in Paul’s gardens and orchards. “Back to Eden” invites you to take a
walk with Paul as he teaches you sustainable organic growing methods that are
capable of being implemented in diverse climates around the world.

Riva is a small time operator who has just returned to his hometown of Kinshasa, Congo after a decade away with a major score: a fortune in hijacked gasoline.

Wads of cash in hand and out for a good time, Riva is soon entranced by beautiful night club denizen Nora, the kept woman of a local gangster. Into the mix comes an Angolan crime lord relentlessly seeking the return of his stolen shipment of gasoline. Director Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s Kinshasa is a seductively vibrant, lawless, fuel-starved sprawl of shantytowns, gated villas, bordellos and nightclubs and Riva is its perfect embodiment.

"A blast from start to finish."
VARIETY

From director Rodrigo Garcia (Mother and Child) Albert Nobbs is a witty period drama about the lives of staff at one of Dublin's most luxurious hotels - Morrison's - and the hotel's butler, Albert Nobbs... a woman who disguises herself as a man to survive.
19th Century Ireland: for a woman to be independent and single, she must deceive everyone - by passing as a man. Albert, a shy butler who keeps himself to himself, has been hiding a deep secret for some thirty years - ‘he' is a woman who has had to dress and behave as a man in order to escape a life of poverty and loneliness. As Albert Nobbs begins to question the world she has created for herself, and thinks she may have found a soul-mate, she dares to hope that she might one day live a life free of secrets.
Glenn Close stars in the title role of Albert, an award-winning role she played on stage more than twenty years ago. Close puts in a remarkable, heart-rending performance as the complex character and pulls off an incredible transformation. Albert Nobbs is a wonderful drama full of humour, pathos and tenderness.

In a small, remote mountain top primary school in the Kenyan bush, hundreds of children are jostling for a chance for the free education newly promised by the Kenyan government.
One new applicant causes a stir: he is Maruge (Oliver Litondo), an 84 year old war veteran, desperate to learn to read at this late stage of his life. Maruge fought in the 1950s (when Kenya was known as British East Africa) for freedom from British colonial rule, and now feels he deserves the chance to an education. A teacher (Naomie Harris) supports his plea against opposition from parents and officials who see it as time wasting. The movie explores the relationships he builds with his six-year-old classmates and highlights the effect of colonial rule in Kenya which included British detention camps.
From the director of The Other Boleyn Girl, this true story was shot on location and involved Kenyan kids who had never even seen a film or television set before let alone been involved in a filming process.

In Mid-August Lunch, Di Gregorio was single and lived with Valeria; in The Salt of Life he is married, with a stroppy daughter, and paranoid that his increasingly erratic mother is blowing all the family money on expensive food and extravagant gift giving. (Indeed, the opening scene sees Gianni attempt to foist a power-of-attorney on her, but is too sappy to actually pull it off).

But Di Gregorio's central concern here is the romantic life of his screen alter-ego: his feminised existence, as nursemaid to his mother and house-husband to a not-especially-sympathetic wife, is jolted out of its torpor when he notices the voluptuous home help employed by his mother. (Never is Di Gregorio's distinct resemblance to Robert Mitchum more ironic as he drunkenly tries to put his feeble moves on her.) Still, it awakens some long-buried desire to assert his masculinity, a desire only amplified by the sense that all the other ancient gents around him are snaring beautiful young things left, right and centre; and Gianni tries his polite, utterly gracious best to generate some kind of love life. He looks up old girlfriends, suffers the ambiguous attentions of his party-girl neighbour and, in one hilariously painful sequence, finds himself on a double-date with blonde identical twins.

★★★★ 1/2 "The multitalented star of MID-AUGUST LUNCH returns with an equally funny and touching film which explores the frequently absurd complexities of male-female relationships and effortlessly skewers the concept of Berlusconi-era Italian machismo. This charming one man show is an unmitigated treat." John Underwood, BESTFORFILM.COM

French drama about a 10-year-old girl who assumes a male identity in order to fit in with the other children when her family move to a small village.

"Confirming the talent shown in her debut Water Lilies, Céline Sciamma explores children’s notions of gender and identity. 10-year-old Laure and her family have just moved to a new neighbourhood. Her mother is heavily pregnant with a third child, a baby brother for Laure and little sister Jeanne. Androgynous Laure hovers between childhood and something else, still romping around at home with giggly Jeanne in her thrall, but also keen to strike out on her own and enjoy what’s left of the summer holidays. When Lisa, a next-door neighbour Laure’s age, asks Laure her name, she forthrightly responds ‘Michaël’. Soon Michaël, barechested and bold, is playing soccer with the local boys. However, trying out boys’ stuff requires deception that Laure will have difficulty maintaining." (Source: NZ International Film Festival 2011)

Kathryn Bolkovac is a Nebraska cop who accepts a well-paying UN peacekeeping job in United Nations regulated Bosnia. She works as part of a private corporate army, training Bosnian police to restore order to the war-torn country.

As she begins to get the lay of the land in her new environment, Kathryn starts to see signs of a terrible underground sex-trafficking industry whose patrons are not only from within the corporation but from within the United Nations as well. After finding a woman who has escaped from a human trafficker selling sex slaves to hidden brothels in the area, Kathryn begins to see how expansive an industry it has become in the years following the war.

Featuring a remarkable performance from Rachel Weisz, THE WHISTLEBLOWER is a harrowing political thriller based on the true story of a single woman’s quest for justice in the face of a truth no one wanted to expose.

Michael Winterbottom (A Cock and Bull Story, 24 Hour Party People) directs brilliant British comedians Steve Coogan (I'm Alan Partridge) and Rob Brydon (Gavin & Stacey) playing fictionalised versions of themselves on a road trip around the UK, ostensibly working as restaurant critics.
Coogan is asked by The Observer newspaper to tour England's finest restaurants. But when his girlfriend pulls out, his perfect holiday falls through and he asks his friend and source of eternal aggravation, Brydon, to join him. Dining their way around the English countryside, they drive each other up the wall with with constant competition, bad moods and personal crises.
The film was put together using footage from their BAFTA winning TV series of the same name.

When notary Lebel sits down with Jeanne and Simon Marwan to read them their mother Nawal's will, the twins are stunned to receive a pair of envelopes - one for the father they thought was dead and another for a brother they didn't know existed.
In this enigmatic inheritance, Jeanne sees the key to Nawal's retreat into unexpected silence during the final weeks of her life. She immediately decides to go to the Middle East to dig into a family history of which she knows next to nothing.
Simon is unmoved by the posthumous mind games of a mother who always distant and cold. However, the love he has for his sister is strong, and he soon joins her in combing their ancestral homeland in search of a Nawal who is very different from the mother they knew.
With Lebel's help, the twins piece together the story of the woman who brought them into the world, discovering a tragic fate forever marked by war and hatred as well as the courage of an exceptional woman.

Incendies is a masterful cinematic achievement. A powerful and gripping film, its for those who enjoyed THE LIVES OF OTHERS. Incendies was nominated at the 2011 Oscars.