Aotearoa New Zealand experimental film program
curated by Dean M Roberts
on friday 10 march 2023 at Casa Morra Napoli

free entrance – program starts at 7:30pm

Ronnie Van Hout
The Other Mother
2011, New Zealand, digital film, color, sound, 10 min.
“Remake of the blood-testing scene from John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing where I play all the characters as well as shot edited, etc. Backgrounds images were taken at Scott Base in Antarctica. The title comes via John Campbell the writer of Who goes there (the story the Thing is based on). His mother had an identical twin sister that he confused for his own”. (Ronnie Van Hout)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_van_Hout

Sam Hamilton
Apple Pie
2014, New Zealand, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 20 min.
Shot on super 16mm film in Aoteaora New Zealand, Samoa, and during a 5-day meteor shower filmed at a remote mountaintop astrophysics observatory in North America with a large cast of performers and artists including Samoan dance artist Chief Ioane Papali’i, Apple Pie’s experiential tonality has been described as “beautifully poetic and mesmerizing” to the “terrifically intense” and “epistemology off-piste.”
Modeling its structural architecture from the solar system, Apple Pie is designed to anatomically function as an existent complex structure (like the world itself).
The ‘narrative’ of the film follows a messy but vibrant trajectory, oscillating between anchors of meaning amidst a cosmic ocean of ecstatic potential and possibility, noise and silence, matter, meaning, and the resonating chambers of nothingness.
https://samhamilton.org/apple-pie/

Jessica Bluck
Horse
2012, New Zealand, digital film, color, sound, 11 min.
New Zealand in the 1860s was a land at war. A boy with a horse and a gun soon became a soldier.
The story is inspired by an incident in 1869 during the New Zealand Land Wars when a young trooper, Michael Noonan carrying military dispatches, was shot within sight of the camp at Lake Waikaremoana by an ambushing party.
https://www.jessbluck.com/

Gavin Hipkins
Erewhon
2014, New Zealand, digital film, color, music by Rachel Shearer, sound by Ben Sinclair and Chris Todd, 11 min 52 sec.
Narrator: Mia Blake / Dialogue Editor: Chris Todd
Shot over two years in New Zealand, Australia, and India, Erewhon is Gavin Hipkins’ first feature-length film and is an experimental adaptation of Samuel Butler’s anonymously published 1872 novel Erewhon; or, Over the range.
An anagram of the word ‘nowhere’, Erewhon has been described as a utopian satire, and Butler's poetic meditations on industrial society and colonialism remain a timely reflection on contemporary society and our technological dependencies. Calling on Butler’s strategies of inversions and reversals in the essay film genre, Erewhon charts the narrator’s journey from a Canterbury high country sheep farm to a fictional society where vegetarianism is the law and machines are banished for fear of their becoming conscious.
https://www.circuit.org.nz/work/erewhon-trailer

Dean M Roberts
solo performance

free entrance – solo performance starts at 9:00pm

Dean M Roberts is known as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading practitioners in the field of contemporary music, practicing since the mid-1990s to present. He has produced a number of albums and works to critical acclaim. With releases on European labels Staubgold, Mille Plateaux and Kranky and Erstwhile Records in the USA are regarded as touchstones of contemporary experimental music. Weaving elements of rock, electro-acoustic, minimalism and free improvisation into unusually affecting song cycles that sound equally avant-futuristic and hauntingly ancient, like ghost of songs past. He performed and recorded regularly as a member of the group Tower Recordings and working in Europe with musicians Werner Dafeldecker, Martin Brandlmayr and Chris Abrahams. He created 3 albums which are timeless majestic examples of the possibility of experimental sound. His unusual juxtapositions of instrumentation, verse and sonic experiments reveal the art of the song as a far more suggestive and highly experimental medium. Drones and textures now often heard in popular music are given the treatments of an avant-garde composer.
Roberts has a strong connection to the Italian music scene beginning in 1999 when Blow Up Magazine voted his LP ‘All Cracked Medias’ #1 album of the year in the critic’s polls, and subsequently became a resident of Bologna and there he worked extensively with Italian musicians Valerio Tricoli, Stefano Pilia, Andrea Belfi and Giuseppe Ielasi. In the early 2000’s his cult following lead to playing up to 60 concerts a year in Italia in the years 2000-2008. In 2007, Dean M Roberts performed with Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti in the program Speculum Celestiale - Giugno Neoplatonico at Vigna San Martino Napoli.
Roberts is a professor of Critical Studies and Contextual Awareness in Contemporary Music and Sound Arts at the dBs University in Berlin, University of St. John and St. Mark’s UK and is a participating partner in The Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry: Collaborative Experimentation in Sound: Berkeley University in Portugal.

https://deanrobertsmusic.bandcamp.com/
https://deanroberts.org/