New Zealand International Film Festival and City Gallery present Art Shorts.
From the sinking city of Venice to the disappearing islands of the Pacific, four films explore themes of loss and memory. New Zealand artists Gavin Hipkins and Virginia King explore foreign but familiar spaces. Dane Mitchell’s 2019 Venice Biennale installation explores vanished phenomena as the city slowly sinks, while Italian collective Flatform brings the effects of global warming in the Pacific to life.
Dir. Gavin Hipkins Album 2020
New Zealand | 15min
A young man’s letter to his mother, sent home to New Zealand from England during World War I. London’s Royal Parks provide a painterly setting for this meditation on Empire, travel and longing, which features Gavin Hipkins’s grandfather’s photography and writings from his enlisted travels.
Dir. Virginia King Lettre de Venezia 2020
New Zealand | 7min
Virginia King's text sculpture Floating Alphabet drifts through the Grand Canal during the 2019 Venice Biennale, intercut with images of the faded opulence of the sinking city’s fifteenth-century buildings and the gorgeous illuminated manuscripts her work echoes.
Dir. Adam Luxton A List of Lost Poems 2020
New Zealand | 28min
For his Post Hoc exhibition for the 2019 Venice Biennale, Dane Mitchell employed modern technology to invoke lost things. This film follows the work's development from the artist's Auckland studio to a Guangzhou cell tower factory to Venice.
Dir. Flatform That Which Is to Come Is Just a Promise 2019
Italy/Netherlands/New Zealand | 22min
A single shot takes us through Funafuti in Tuvalu, as overheated seawater rises up through drought-parched earth and floods the atoll. A portrait of a territory in flux, land becoming ocean—the concrete effects of global warming writ large.
73min | G | Door sales thirty minutes prior to screening. All seats are general admission.
