When an awkward but brilliant Chinese student wins a scholarship into a prestigious New Zealand University, she finds a new way of achieving the popularity she craves one bloody body at a time.
Munro, a soldier turned lay preacher, comes to New Zealand to minister to the first British colonists, but he is converted by the powerful chief Maianui to serve a different purpose.
When a self-destructive teenager is suspended from school and asked to look after his feisty alcoholic grandmother as a punishment, the crazy time they spend together turns his life around.
With better luck, better choices, better posture...Josh Corman could’ve been a rock star. Now he teaches fifth grade, and though he loves his students, he still struggles to find happiness and meaning in a world that sometimes feels short on both.
London, England, April 1980. Six terrorists assault the Embassy of Iran and take hostages. For six days, tense negotiations are held while the authorities decide whether a military squad should intervene.
A documentary portrait of the pioneering indigenous filmmaker and activist Merata Mita, Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen is an intimate tribute from a son about his mother that delves into the life of the first woman from an Indigenous Nation to solely direct a film anywhere in the world. Known as the grandmother of Indigenous cinema, Merata’s independent political documentaries of the ‘70s and ‘80s highlighted injustices for Māori people, and often divided the country. Mita was fearless in her life, her activism and her art. Chronicling the director’s journey to decolonize the film and television screens of New Zealand and the world, the film documents her work, her early struggles with her family and her drive for social justice that often proved personally dangerous.
It's 1984, and Michael Jackson is king - even in Waihau Bay, New Zealand. Here we meet Boy, an 11-year-old who lives on a farm with his gran, a goat, and his younger brother, Rocky (who thinks he has magic powers). Shortly after Gran leaves for a week, Boy's father, Alamein, appears out of the blue. Having imagined a heroic version of his father during his absence, Boy comes face to face with the real version-an incompetent hoodlum who has returned to find a bag of money he buried years before. This is where the goat enters.
Wealthy and precocious teenager Juliet transfers from England to New Zealand with her family, and soon befriends the quiet, brooding Pauline through their shared love of fantasy and literature. When their parents begin to suspect that their increasingly intense and obsessive bond is becoming unhealthy, the girls hatch a dark plan for those who threaten to keep them apart.
In `60s New Zealand, at the bottom of the world, Burt Munro takes a 1920 Indian motorcycle and, delightfully without resources other than his own obsession and a Kiwi #8 wire mentality, spends his retirement rebuilding the bike and following his dream to go to Speed Week at Salt Lake in Utah. Under funded, without the support of a team and against all the odds he not only makes it to Bonneville, he sets a national land speed record, not once, but again and again.
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Saginaw Grant, Diane Ladd, Walton Goggins, Christopher Lawford
Directed by Roger Donaldson
English language with latvian and russian subtitles.
The film will be demonstrated within film festival "Spektrs VI": http://www.forumcinemas.lv/Events/Spektrs/.
If Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino made a film together, this is what it would look like: an eccentric Western consisting equally of romance, adventure, shoot-outs and black humour. This is John Maclean's, a former musician with The Beta Band, debut feature; it has been praised by critics for its imaginative take on the classic genre, earning it a Grand Jury's Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
In the 1870s, sixteen-year-old Jay comes to America from Scotland to look up his first true love Rose. The lad is taken under his wing by certain Silas Selleck, a mysterious traveller who has seen it all. Together, they set off to the Wild West, a journey that could teach a lesson or two to both the dreamer as well as the cynic.
This blood-soaked horror comedy is the story of Henry Oldfield (Nathan Meister), a New Zealander with an unfortunate phobia...of sheep. When Henry was a boy, his father was killed in a herding accident on the land, and Henry fled to the big city. Now, years later, he has returned to sell his half of the farm and--at the behest of his therapist--to face his fears. Meanwhile, Henry's sadistic older brother Angus (Peter Feeney) has taken over the family business, and become widely known for his controversial genetic experiments on the animals. When two animal activists release one of Angus's genetically-altered lambs, Henry's trip quickly turns into his worst nightmare, as the lamb's zombie-like bite turns sheep and people into vicious flesh-eaters. Henry joins forces with one of the animal activists (Danielle Mason), and together they try to escape the sheep and find an antidote for the virus.
Cast: Nathan Meister, Danielle Mason, Peter Feeney
Directed by Jonathan King