A Small Life

A Small Life allows itself to explore intense emotion without flinching.

A Small Life, New Zealand, 2000

Director/screenplay:Michael Heath
Production co: Gumption Films
Producers: Stephen Latty, Michael Heath, David Downes
Executive producer: Bhim Singh Chouhan
Composer/musical director/editor/sound/Digital FX: David Downes

With: Mahinarangi Tocker, Kelly-Leader Tropman, Hera Dunleavey, Geoffrey Machin, Leon Kiel

DV Video, 50 minutes

“Haunting – a beautiful soundtrack and stunning photography.” — Onfilm, October 2001

There is something satisfying about how the simplicity and primordial quality of the story and theme of A Small Life are matched by a small-scale team and an economy of means in its production. Within 50 highly concentrated minutes, the last day in the life of a small boy (Tama), and particularly the response of his mother (Ana), is given powerfully expressive treatment.

One of the most notable features of the film is the intensely collaborative nature of the process behind its realisation. The three producers have together worked the major components of the film into a flexible structure, giving the central performers the time, place and space to touch the viewer/listener in a manner quite rare within the context of current New Zealand cinema.

Screenwriter/director Michael Heath has had a longstanding commitment to exploring the world of the child on film and has constructed a minimal, indeed elemental, scenario within which powerful emotions can be expressed without superfluous or distracting plot and background devices. David Downes’ previous experience as composer for choreographers and videographer of dancers has strongly shaped the composition of the scenes and their relationship to his complex, multi-layered soundtrack that mixes field recordings with instrumental music. DOP Stephen Latty’s use of the Canon XL-1 DV camera has resulted in images both sublime, and intimate; and editor Downes’ sparing use of CGI in his treatment of certain of these images enhances the film’s expressiveness.

A Small Life allows itself to explore intense emotion without flinching. It’s no exaggeration to say that the film is working within a cinematic framework comparable with Alexander Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997). Both films situate their maternal/filial figures within powerful, enveloping landscapes. Sokurov has spoken of his interest in ‘those feelings that only a spiritual person could experience. The feelings of farewells and separations’. I think the drama of death is the separation. These concerns are also those of A Small Life – but its touchstones are more musical than painterly – and they place it within an emergent, international cinematic context. Its theme is universal but it’s given a specifically Maori inflection by the commanding presence, lyrics, singing and acting of Mahinarangi Tocker. A Small Life is a relatively short film but it’s every bit as large as life. — Lawrence McDonald, The New Zealand Film Festival 2000

Screenings: A Small Life screened in October 2004 (with Australian mini-feature One Night the Moon) as part of a season of musical films selected by Lawrence McDonald. Lawrence McDonald has written extensively on New Zealand film for various publications, especially Illusions, a New Zealand film journal that he also edits.