This year the Show Me Shorts film festival is offering a half day workshop in Wellington open to anyone interested in short films. The workshops are a unique opportunity to meet experienced and up and coming filmmakers, see some great films and learn more about the craft of developing a good short film.
When & Where: Saturday 14 November at Paramount Theatre
Cost: $10
Registration: 9am
Session One: Script development 9.30am – 11.00am
Filmmakers Louis Sutherland (Run, The Six Dollar Fifty Man) and Paul Ward (The Graffiti of Mr Tupaia, Choice Night) will screen and talk about one of their own short films and discuss with producer/director Paul Swadel (Poppy,No Ordinary Sun) what makes a great short film. There will be time for Q&A at the end of this session.
Morning Tea: 11am – 11.30am (food and beverages provided)
Session Two: 11.30am – 1.00pm: New Shorts Showcase
Filmmakers Sally Tran, Andrew Campion, and Rollo Wenlock screen recent work and discuss the pleasures and challenges of making shorts.
Register for the workshop online here.
Or contact anna@showmeshorts.co.nz for more information.
For the last couple of weeks, Wellington has been teased with the sight of grim reapers going about their business around the city. These hooded folk were promoting the new play "Good Night – The End", which has recently opened at Downstage. Written by the multi-talented Jo Randerson, the play looks at a group of three grim reapers (and their zesty Italian administrator), just spending time in their break room between reaping.
And like most people, the stuff that gets discussed on breaks is often nothing to do with their work. So instead it’s arguments about doing the dishes, using all the Milo, and Cheezels, pies, pizzas and hash browns, coming across as an unruly mix of between The Office, passiveaggressivenotes.com, Big Brother and a bit of the Mighty Boosh thrown in for good measure.
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This Saturday is the main event for Wellington’s Japan Festival which kicked off 6 July with the Friend to Friend exhibition in the Fletcher Challenge Foyer. The organisers Asia New Zealand Foundation, Wellington City Council and the Embassy of Japan (along with the sponsors of course) are always bringing us beautiful free cultural events.
Thanks for that.
Our recent guest poster was rightly excited about Music Fair of Japan that is part of the Japan Festival, unfortunately both concerts are fully booked. Zannen desu ne! However don’t despair, there is plenty of Japanese culture to partake of:
More details can be found on the asia:nz website (now with RSS for their event calendar).
If you don’t make it along, don’t forget that the Japanese Embassy runs free movie nights on the last Tuesday and Thursday of every month at 6.00pm. They often sponsor other free events that usually book out fast. You can find details on their website here.
Tanoshi so desu!
We have a guest post for you by the voluble Anna Jane Wilson who also likes hats, boots, coats and scarves.
My goodness, it’s already July – I can’t quite believe we’re halfway through our Roman calendars, but all evidence says – 10 July 2009. July, albeit cold and windy in this wonderful city, is going to be a large one.
The four main things that keep me warm in winter are jazz, walking, films, and dance. I’m new to Wellington, but apparently this city has a lot of jazz, thus, my soul will be kept very warm.
continues after the jump…
It’s a Tuesday night. Rather, it’s 5.55pm, approximately. You walk into a restraurant that has its ‘OPEN’ sign up. The man behind the counter talking on the phone that gives you a "I am on the phone" look. You nod politely and look around the restaurant. It is totally empty. When he finally pauses his phonecall, he gestures you towards the six-seater right in front of the door and disappears again, apparently to finish off his terribly important phone call. You retrieve a bottle of wine from your bag, even though a glass of water first would be nice. The wine is a screw cap, but it takes you a couple of minutes to crack. No sign of water or menus, so you pull out your copy on NW and start the sudoku, even though you’d really rather order an entree before the rest of your friends arrive because you’re totally starving. and the intense heat in the restaurant and the HI NRG Bangra is really really offputting.
However, even though you’re not particularly fast at Sudoku, you manage to complete the entire thing before the waiter returns with menus for the whole table. You order some samosas, and turn your attention to the smaller crossword, which you plow through before your little pastry parcels show up. The crust of the samosas is not melty, the cabbage scattered on the plate has definitely seen better days, and the tamarind sauce seems unusually concentrated. For $5.50, it is acceptable, but not with that kind of service.
There’s been a bit of action going on at the old Bucket Fountain, icon of Cuba Street.
First, it mysteriously disappeared:
We initially thought this was a retro ’80s David Copperfield-style magic trick, but it turns out it was just taken down for maintenance.
The fountain returned, with a fresh coat of paint, ready to splash the good folk of Cuba Mall once again.
But then a hand-written sign appeared up the top. It’s not so legible from the street, but zooming in revealed this message:
"Prove your hunter-gatherer skills by finding food in the forest at Te Papa."
Perhaps, with the Current Economic Situation, Te Papa is right to put the emphasis on natural history and away from art.
And if you’d like to escape the misery of modern life, you can now journey back in time to when the Bucket Fountain was first installed in 1969, thanks to the WCC’s The Cuba Street Memories Project.
From this, we learn that the Bucket Fountain was originally nicknamed the Sugar Shovel Fountain and it was painted yellow and black (so 2000s!).
For those of you more inclined towards UK roots reggae culture than euro-beats, there’s a little something for you at the Film Archive this Thursday 7th.
The Archive, in collaboration with NiceUp – local reggae forum and dancehall specialists – present the premiere Australasian screening of Musically Mad, a doco that examines sound system culture and the UK roots reggae scene, interviewing some of the shining lights of the community, past and present, and providing an historical context for the Caribbean-influenced musical culture. The film is brand spanking new and Nice Up are keen to show it off to the local scene, so much so that they (and their sponsors) invite you to come down early, at 6pm, to the Archive – on the corner of Ghuznee and Taranaki Sts – for food, drink and socialising prior to the movie screening at 7pm. Read more here.
Tickets are on sale now from the NZ Film Archive for $8/$6 concession, as well as available on the night.
This is in the vein of The Wellingtonista Bar Fly-les, but I thought I’d give it another name since it’s about food & coffee as well as drink.
A different long weekend away provides another opportunity to reexamine the age-old battle. After our first chapter, Secret Agent Robyn came down from Auckland to check out our city. This is her report…
Getting there: The airport bus runs past my place every 20 minutes. I waited for 30 minutes, but there was no sign of the bus. I started to panic and called a taxi. $50 later I was at the airport, but too late for check-in. Oh no! But fate smiled upon me — due to ‘weather’ in Wellington, the plane was late, so they could check me in after all. In Wellington, the taxi to my hotel was cheap, but slow in a way that proves the bypass was a dumb idea. Wellington wins this one for delaying my flight.
It doesn’t happen all that often, but occasionally the Wellingtonistas will plan excursions with friends from out of town that don’t entirely revolve around a bar. And on those times, we want to do things that are a little bit touristy, but not overly so, so this is how we do it.
How I entertain those from out of town who might not want to drink all day:
After the jump, tourist activities ho!