Runaway, Pacific Films, 1964

Producer/director: John O’Shea
Screenplay: John Graham, John O’shea
Music: Robin Maconie
With: Colin Broadley (David Manning), Nadja Regin (Laura Kossovich), Deirdre McCarron (Diana), Kiri Te Kanawa (Isobel Wharewera), Selwyn Muru (Joe Wharewera), Barry Crump (Clarrie)
B&W, 102 minutes, PG

“’He was a young man in a hungry hurry – his blood on fire’, bluffed the ad campaign for New Zealand’s first road move, John O’Shea’s Runaway, and that was where the resemblance to American moviemaking ended. The kiwi Angry Young Man of 1964 is actually a much cooler customer. David Manning (the handsome, fair and fine-featured Colin Broadley) is a yachting, nightclubbing young blade about Auckland who gets caught ‘borrowing’ from his employer, and hits the road north. In the Hokianga he divides his time between the gentle courtship of a gauche and lovely young Kiri Te Kanawa, and toy boy duties with the bored and dangerous young Euro-trash wife of the local big noise. (The sultry Nadja Regin’s credits included From Russia with Love). When this gets too much there’s only one direction left: south to his roots, via Wellington and Christchurch and into the icy clutches of the Alps. In a mountain hut waits the nemesis of any sensitive lad: Barry Crump.” — Bill Gosden, New Zealand International Film Festival, 2002

“Runaway connects strongly with a local theme that can be summed up in the phrase ‘man alone’, which harks back not only to John Mulgan’s 1939 novel (Man Alone) but also to related fiction by Erik de Mauny and Gordon Slatter. In addition to this literary stream, the film also indentifies with photographic representations of the South Island landscape as ‘uplifted high’ and ‘silent’. However, these nationally specific themes and motifs are so profoundly shaped by the film’s stylistic immersion in the European art cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s that they are transfigured into something quite unprecedented in local film making.” — Lawrence McDonald, New Zealand Film: an Illustrated History

Preceded by
Bowl Me Over, Pictorial Research Group, 1995
Scratched and hand painted by Lissa Mitchell
From 16mm, 4.40mins

A mini-epic South Island travelogue/road movie and homage to artists Colin McCahon, Mina Arndt and  Rita Angus. Rendered in angular, woodcut-style scratches with rich washes of colour. Hand painted directly onto film.

Filmland Neuseeland
This film programme was presented during October at the Filmmuseum in Frankfurt as part of the cultural activities accompanying New Zealand’s Guest of Honour role at the Frankfurt Book Fair. New Zealand literature has had a huge influence on film production here; not only as a source of stories and themes, but also as a starting point for thinking about style and approach (the liking for naturalism and an interest in local details and ordinary people, for example). The programme is drawn from the DVD that accompanies New Zealand Film: an Illustrated History. The selection surveys New Zealand film from the early silent period to the end of the 20th century. Through the mix of features and documentaries with short films we hope to illustrate the emergence of a distinctive style of film making and story telling.