NZ Film Festival: After the Waterfall

World Premiere.

This close dramatic study of a bereaved father’s devastation and recuperation marks a boldly individual directorial debut for Simone Horrocks and a thorough triumph for actor Antony Starr. He plays John Drean, a forest ranger living close to Piha with his wife, who hasn’t integrated quite so happily into the tiny isolated community, and their bright spark of a four-year-old daughter, Pearl. When Pearl disappears suddenly, possibly irrevocably, everything else that defined John’s life begins to disappear too.

Horrocks concentrates her film intently on his existential crisis – and on Starr’s startling self-effacement, inviting us to consider what remains dormant when a person loses everything. As the award-winning shorts she made in the UK already made apparent, she’s a filmmaker in a distinctly European mode, adept at capturing psychological complexity in amazingly exact and intimate flickers of sensation, mood and emotion. — BG

Director: Simone Horrocks
Year: 2010
Running time: 94 mins

Producer: Trevor Haysom
Screenplay: Simone Horrocks. Based on the novel The Paraffin Child by Stephen Blanchard
Photography: Jac Fitzgerald
Editor: Cushla Dillon
Production designer: Andy McLaren
Costume designer: Kirsty Cameron
Music: Joel Haines

With: Antony Starr (John), Peter McCauley (George), Sally Stockwell (Ana), Cohen Holloway (David)

Event listed by MCH Admin

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