Travelling in the reel

Adam Hartzell, a writer for US film blog Daily Greencine, “travels, reads, watches and sips his way through NZ”. On his five-day tour he (ironically) attends the Latin American Film Festival in Wellington, the Australian Film Festival in Auckland, visits the NZ Film Commission and reads essays by director Peter Wells and poet Kate Camp in Four Winds Press’s On Going to the Movies. With the aim of extending his knowledge of the country, Hartzell also purchases Sam Edwards and Helen Martin’s New Zealand Film 1912-1996, Jill Caldwell and Christopher Brown’s 8 Tribes: The Hidden Classes of New Zealand and Speaking Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals Rethink New Zealand by Laurence Simmons. “[This] is the benefit of traveling in the real along with the screen,” he writes. “We are confronted with the complexity of the reality on the ground that cinema can’t fully represent. Just as films can frustrate simple genre classifications, the beautiful clerk at the front desk in Wellington made sure I knew that all of New Zealand wasn’t the rugby mad nation I presumed.”