Best of the Best at NZ WebFest

The 2023 NZ Web Fest selection is stacked with DEGANZ members, with some nominated for awards!

NZ Web Fest was created in 2015 to celebrate web series and online video content. Over the years, the festival has evolved and was accepted as a participating festival in the Web Series World Cup in 2017 and expanded to include podcasts in 2022. The festival will occur online this November.

Short Film – Narrative

Solitaire

A dark comedy about a desperately lonely security guard who seeks companionship as their playing cards come to life during a game of solitaire.

Writer/Director: Brian Gill

* Nominated for Best Student Film, NZ Short Fiction & Best Performance, NZ Short Fiction

Walk

Amelia Merton takes a seemingly casual walk in the wilderness. The innocent and carefree nature of the walk is juxtaposed with the dark secret of the protagonist’s actions, creating a dramatic and unexpected ending.

Writer/Director: Joe Murdie

* Nominated for Best Directing, NZ Short Fiction

The Reunion

Joel is about to walk into a small graduation party he’s having with some friends when he gets the phone call telling him that his best friend, Terry, has died.

Editor: Max Helbick

* Nominated for Best Student Film, NZ Short Fiction

Strangers

We’ve all been there. The nervousness, the pressure. Making. That. First. Impression. Set in a lush beautiful cafe on the perimeter of Auckland City, an awkward journalist’s first date is upended by a man spotted in the cafe window.

Writer/Director, Producer, & Editor: James Fink-Jensen

* Nominated for Best Writing, NZ Short Fiction & Best Performance, NZ Short Fiction (x2)

Short Film – Documentary

Ultimately Lacks Polish

Freya Daly Sadgrove is an emerging New Zealand poet, riding the success of her collection Head Girl — but acutely aware that something has to come next. With her multi-poet show Show Ponies, she’s determined to jam together poetry, punk, sex, sizzle, and theatre, shaking poetry performance loose from its conventions. But not everyone is supportive of her unconventional ideas.

Director: Kathleen Winter (Incubator 2020)

Editor: Amanda Mulderry

* Nominated for Best Directing, Short Documentary

What’s the Disabili-Tea: Misty Frequency

Drag Icon Misty Frequency’s kaupapa is to celebrate Autistic and Takatāpui excellence. They are looking to storm the stage at the Drag Wars competition with a cash prize up for grabs.

Director: Justin Scott

Editor: Brendon Chan

Assistant Editor: Laura McBeath

* Nominated for Best Directing, Short Documentary & Best Film, Short Documentary

Music Videos

Boofhead – Ingrid and the Ministers

Co-Director & Editor: Kathleen Winter (Incubator 2020)

* Nominated for Best Music Video, NZ

Don’t Expect the World – Gina Malcolm

Director & Editor: Joe Murdie

* Nominated for Best Music Video, NZ

Web Series – Pilot

Te Pāmu Kūmara

A live-action children’s drama about Tai and her superman whānau who run their local vege shop from their kūmara farm.

Editor: Te Rurehe Paki

Well, Well, Wellness

A comedy taking the mickey out of a bunch of wellness nerds running a dire silent retreat.

Co-Creator: Jack Nicol

Web Series – Narrative

Ahikāroa

Follow a crazy group of city-based rangatahi, they’re young, kura kaupapa raised and dangerously onto it. Their world orbits around getting cash, cutting corners, and charging their phones.

Editor, Writer, Storyliner, & Script Editor: Onehou Strickland

1st & 2nd Assistant Director: Maza White

Web Series – Factual

2000s Baby

You’re invited to Misha, Rāwhiti, Poe Tiare, Alison, and Tristan’s 21sts, getting a snapshot of what it looks like to become an adult across different walks of life in Aotearoa.

Editor: Damian Golfinopoulos

ConspiraSeries

A silly, joyful, tongue-in-cheek investigation series into the why, how, & what the ?! of some of NZ’s most outrageous conspiracies.

Creator, Director, Co-Producer: Jaimee Poipoi (Incubator 2023)

Conversations with My Immigrant Parents

Immigrant whānau across Aotearoa have frank conversations covering love, ancestry, home, food, expectation, and acceptance.

Co-Director: Julie Zhu

Editor: Josh Yong

Dating While Asian

Pan-Asian New Zealanders tell stories from their love lives on their own terms, from situationships and mediocre hookups to devastating breakups and complicated emotional needs.

Editor: Josh Yong

Assistant Editor: Frangipani Foulkes

Additional Editing: Damian Golfinopoulos

Fight or Flight

A partly animated doco series about resilience and anxiety, Fight or Flight interviewed 12 young people about their challenges with anxiety or depression.

Director: Michelle Mae Cameron

K’ Road Chronicles

A look at homelessness from the inside. A colourful, diverse, harsh, and often tragic world of the people living on and around Auckland’s Karangahape Road.

Assistant Editor: Benjamin Murray

No Place Like Home

Following the 2020 Covid travel restrictions, No Place Like Home follows six couples as they return to New Zealand after those years spent abroad to rebuild their lives, often from scratch. Their stories are in turn uplifting, challenging, heart-breaking, and joyful.

Director & Producer: Naashon Zalk

POV (Point of View)

A docu-series that tries to figure out what’s going on with young people post-2020 f**kery. How do Aotearoa’s rangitahi feel about “these unprecedented times”? Do we fixate on the demise of civilization every night before bed? More importantly, what do we care about? Seventeen participants spread across seven small towns and one big town make up this intimate, funny, and thoughtful series.

Director: Jaya Beach Robertson (Incubator 2023)

Editor: Sam Small

TransGenerations

An eight-part web series, that tells the stories of transgender Kiwis from their late 70s to early 20s, documenting the history of trans experience in New Zealand and dispelling stereotypes about who trans people are.

Editor: Jai Waite

Assistant Editor: Charlotte Evans

Executive Producer: Ramon Te Wake

What’s the Disabili-Tea: Misty Frequency

Drag Icon Misty Frequency’s kaupapa is to celebrate Autistic and Takatāpui excellence. They are looking to storm the stage at the Drag Wars competition with a cash prize up for grabs.

Editor: Brendon Chan

Assistant Editor: Laura McBeath

* Nominated for Best Directing, Short Documentary & Best Film, Short Documentary

Last updated on 12 October 2023

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What Can We Take From The Strikes?

View from the Top banner

By the time you read this the Writer’s Guild of America’s (WGA) strike will be over. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists’ (AFTRA)—not yet.

So what can we take from the strikes? I saw one placard from the picket lines I thought was very pertinent: A Career Not A Gig.

In simple terms—the concerns of Artificial Intelligence (AI) aside—the writers wanted to be paid fairly, to ensure that their opportunities for work were safeguarded, and that there was a development path for new and junior writers into sustainable careers.

Fair pay relates to both the amount they are paid for the work they do as well as residuals, which are payments for the reuse of the work after the initial play. While broadcast and other reuse such as on cable, etc. generates residuals, streaming does not. And with streaming dominating the world and other reuse declining, writers weren’t getting the income they used to get from residuals. And they weren’t getting any from streaming.

In America, writers, directors, actors and some other key creatives get residuals, all of which are negotiated by the guilds there, to help contribute towards sustainable careers for their members.

Do we have residuals in New Zealand? Sort of.

Screenrights collects revenue for reuse from Government, Education and Retransmission in Australia, but in New Zealand only from Education. The Australian Screen Directors Authorship Collection Society (ASDACS) collects any revenues owing from Screenrights and distributes them to NZ directors.

International organisations who collect revenues from a variety of rights on behalf of directors also pass this on to ASDACS for distribution to its members.

A share of the back-end, typically being net profit, is kind of a residual, but is dependent on sufficient revenue coming back from the income of the production and there being something left after all of the other obligations and costs have been deducted. Directors must negotiate a net profit share in their contracts to get it.

A share of the producer’s corridor that flows to the producer from NZFC for non-New Zealand Screen Production Rebate films, and a share of Producer’s Equity from New Zealand Screen Production Rebate films and TV shows can also be negotiated by the director in their contract with the producer.

Screenrights, ASDACS, producer’s corridor and NZSPR producer equity are all mechanisms by which directors can help build sustainable careers for themselves. And the opportunity to do this should be taken advantage of.

With the Screen Industry Workers Act, we hope to remove the need for directors to negotiate individually for their shares of these revenues through collective bargaining, just like the DGA does for directors, the WGA does for writers, and SAG/AFTRA does for actors in regard to residuals.

The news coming out of the negotiations is that the WGA got a lot of what they were after, including residuals from streamers. We expect that SAG/AFTRA will now quickly conclude their negotiations as well.

For New Zealand guilds, we are working towards having our negotiations in the first half of 2024. For us at least, residuals are definitely on the agenda for collective bargaining.

 

Tui Ruwhiu
Executive Director

Last updated on 29 September 2023

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Netflix’s ‘Sex Education’ Gets the Savill Treatment

Season 4 of the beloved Netflix series Sex Education is out now, with two of the eight episodes directed by 2018 Incubator alum Michelle Savill.

The show is known for being awkwardly hilarious, following the lives of the students, staff, and parents of an English secondary school. As the name implies, the show isn’t one to shy away from taboo topics. One of the show’s ongoing plots is the main character Otis’s involvement in an underground sex clinic for his peers.

However, Michelle’s episodes this season dive into darker themes of death, grieving, and postpartum depression. As the series comes to a close, with season four being the show’s finale, the characters and their relationships face their biggest challenges yet. Despite the heavier drama, Michelle’s episodes still balance the comedy just right, covering more sexually awkward topics.

In an interview with Stuff earlier this year, Michelle talked about how ending Sex Education will be bittersweet. She shared,

It’s been such a great project. I’ve loved everyone I’ve worked with. On every film or TV show you become a family and then the project ends and you will leave and there is a sense of sadness because you will never be together like that again. But it’s nice to move on and catch up on sleep and spend time with your family – and release what you’ve made into the world.

You can catch Sex Education on Netflix now.

Last updated on 28 September 2023

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Tansley is as Good as Gold at the Golden Prague Festival

Congratulations Rebecca Tansley (DEGANZ) for winning the Special Mention Award for Extraordinary Artistic Achievement at the Golden Prague International Television Festival for her film The Strangest of Angels.

The Strangest of Angels is a chamber opera inspired by the life of author Janet Frame, which Rebecca directed and produced for the New Zealand Opera. It premiered earlier this year at NZIFF and received praise for its moving depiction of the imagined relationship between Janet and her fictional nurse, caught between duty and empathy.

The judges provided the following justification for the film’s win:

New Zealand film director Rebecca Tansley successfully transforms the chamber opera The Strangest of Angels into a film on location, raising doubts about who is sane and who isn‘t.

The festival showcases productions centered around music, dance, and theatre. Each year they award the Grand Prix Golden Prague, the Czech Crystal award for three categories, and the Special Mention for Extraordinary Artistic Achievement. Competition was tough this year, with 30-odd films in the running for the single Special Mention award of the night.

Rebecca shared with DEGANZ how excited she was to be part of the awards show, which was broadcast live in Czech. She said it was even more exciting when her name was called out!

Last updated on 28 September 2023

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Rangi’s Directorial Debut with Semi-Autobiographical Feature

DEGANZ member Shane Rangi (Ngāti Porou) is set to have his directorial debut with his semi-autobiographical feature film, Taonga. Long-time collaborator and Oscar-winning filmmaker, James Cameron, is one of the production’s executive producers.

While this is Shane’s first excursion into directing, he is one of Aotearoa’s leading motion capture and stunt performers. He is best known for his work on a plethora of blockbuster films including Thor: Ragnarok, The Wolverine, the Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, and Narnia franchises, and both Avatar films. He met Cameron through his work on Avatar, and the two continued working together through the development of Taonga.

The film is inspired by Shane’s life. It follows an indigenous Polynesian rugby star who becomes homeless and barely survives a violent encounter with law enforcement. While writing the script, Shane aimed to tackle the realities of homelessness and modern-day policing.

Fandomodo Films, a boutique film and television development, production, and financing company, is independently funding the film. The company aims to raise underrepresented voices, telling stories that accurately reflect our society with all the horror, pain, and love that exists in every human being.

The hope is for filming to begin in Aotearoa in 2024 but will depend on the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Read more.

Last updated on 28 September 2023

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