The Strength of Water at the Film Archive

The Strength of Water (2009)

Listing details: The Strength of Water (2009) film screening

When: 7pm, Wednesday through Saturday, 26 - 29 June

Where: The New Zealand Film Archive, 84 Taranaki St, Wellington

Ticket price: $8 public / $6 concession

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Strength of Water at the Film Archive

The Hokianga landscape and sea in this film are haunting and stunningly filmed, but also alive in a different way than usually depicted. 10-year-old twins Kimi and Melody have a relationship with their environment that goes beyond what others can see.

This is not a rendering of spooky Māori otherness, but a vision of a natural world that includes all dimensions. The film suggests that despite the changes that have taken place since colonial settlement, evidenced in the rundown, sparsely populated rural setting, some children continue to have a rich relationship with land and sea that includes forces not easily explained outside Māori culture.

The Strength of Water (2009) is kiwi director Armagan Ballantyne’s first feature film.

The script was written by acclaimed New Zealand playwright Briar Grace-Smith.

The film screened at festivals worldwide, including Cannes and the Berlin International Film Festival.

“It possibly risks giving away too much to remark that there’s a strong thread of magical realism running through the film’s second half. But it’s quite unforced and seems all of a piece with the effortlessly spiritual tone of the tale. [...] Grace-Smith has created that wonderful thing: a story that is richly and intensely of this land but whose concerns are so universal that it could, with small adjustments, be set in Iceland or Japan. It is a remarkable achievement.” - Peter Calder, New Zealand Herald, 27 August 2009

The Strength of Water screens in conjunction with The Film Archive’s mediagallery exhibition, The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao, curated by Tina Makereti. The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao is the first of a series of three exhibitions in the Magic Playgrounds: Historical Images of New Zealand Childhood series, in which Makereti will illuminate the social history of childhood in Aotearoa / New Zealand.

The audiovisual exhibitions look at the ways children have been represented across our nation’s filmic history - including documentaries, television footage, home movies, feature films and rarely seen films from the early 1900s.

The Strength of Water will screen at 7pm, Wednesday through Saturday, June 26 - 29. At The Film Archive, 84 Taranaki St, Wellington.

ENDS

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