Martyn Sanderson

Barry Barclay: The Camera on the Shore

Barry Barclay was a New Zealand/Aotearoa director of documentaries and feature films. He is regarded as one of the world's first, and very influential, Indigenous film makers. The film The Camera on The Shore is a feature length introduction to Barry, and to his film making.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Young hobbit Frodo Baggins, after inheriting a mysterious ring from his uncle Bilbo, must leave his home in order to keep it from falling into the hands of its evil creator. Along the way, a fellowship is formed to protect the ringbearer and make sure that the ring arrives at its final destination: Mt. Doom, the only place where it can be destroyed.

Cow

Two old men with Confucian beards are adrift in the ocean, a placid Friesian cow in tow. A surreal study on how quickly a minor event can evolve into something far more extreme, the film features no dialogue; rather, a guitar duet that escalates to a duel.

Christmas Oratorio

The 1930s. Sidner's mother Solveig dies in a very unfortunate bicycle accident involving some cows. Sidner, his sister and his father Aron move to Sunne to work at a hotel. Aron tries hard to leave the sweet memories of his wife behind him but that isn't made easier by the fact that he always meets her ghost. Aron gets himself a pen friend, a young girl in New Zealand called Tessa. He starts to dream of beginning a new life on the other side of the world. Will his dreams come true and can they help him to cure his regret over the death of his wife?

Chicken

On the premise that his albums will sell better if he is dead, an aging pop-singer fakes his own death. True enough, the money rolls in, but no one can get their hands on it because of the seven year waiting period before a missing person can be declared legally dead. However, a crazed animal rights terrorist, who knows he isn't dead, is trying to kill him, because of the singer's advertisements for fried chicken restaurants. Eventually, it turns out that the singer's manager is paying the terrorist to kill him.

Dirty Creature

A little girl and her dog impersonate a crocodile at the edge of a muddy bog and then go on a chaotic rampage through the suburbs of Wellington.

Savage Play

During a rugby tour of Britain and Ireland in 1888, a young New Zealander searches for his father who he has never met. While there he falls in love with the daughter of an aristocrat.

The Last Tattoo

In 1943, U.S. marines are stationed near Wellington. One of them is murdered by the boss of the Hotel Workers Union, who is sitting pretty, exempt from military service and living it up on black market profits. Girls under the control of the union - of whom the victim's fiancee, Rose, is one - give sexual favours to the Americans, in return for information. The marine assigned to investigate the murder, tries to find Rose through a public health nurse who traces VD infections. However they discover there it more going on than they realized, involving a conspiracy amongst the Union, the government and the U.S. military.

Drag

The world is dead. A lone woman, Victoria, struggles valiantly to stay alive on this desolate planet once known as Earth. But Victoria is not alone here. She shares her horrifying new world with beings of a different kind... the living dead, ferocious beasts hungrily searching for human flesh. With a sawed-off shotgun strapped to her back, Victoria drags a dead body through this horrifying new world in a desperate attempt to hold onto her humanity... to hold on to her past.

Old Scores

Former Welsh rugby hero Bleddyn Morgan has his life in New Zealand interrupted by a deathbed confession that leads to a replay of a controversial 1966 All Blacks/Wales rugby match - with the original teams. The now old men pull on their jerseys one more time while Morgan deals with his past on his return home.

An Angel at My Table

Based on the autobiographical work of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, this production depicts the author at various stage of her life. Afflicted with mental and emotional issues, Frame grows up in an impoverished family and experiences numerous tragedies while still in her youth, including the deaths of two of her siblings. Portrayed as an adult by Kerry Fox, Frame finds acclaim for her writing while still in a mental institution, and her success helps her move on with her life.

Never Say Die

Investigative journalist Alf Winters (Morrison), meets his American girlfriend, Melissa Jones (Eilbacher), at Auckland airport. As they park outside Alf's house, it explodes. It is soon apparent that persons unknown want them dead, but the police are either skeptical or in the pay of those responsible. They play hide and seek around New Zealand with the stalkers, all the while coping with car chases, plane crashes, bullets and explosions.

The Tale of Ruby Rose

The year is 1933. Ruby Rose (Melita Jurisic) is an Australian woman living with her Welsh immigrant husband Henry (Chris Haywood) in the Tasmanian highlands. Cut off from her superjudgmental family, for whom Henry had once worked as a humble farm hand, Ruby remains isolated in her tiny house. Superstitiously terrified of the dark, she begins developing her own folklore about the inky blackness that surrounds her each night; this folklore eventually develops into Ruby's own personal religion, created to ward off the evils that she imagines lurk in every corner. Only by venturing out of her house and rekindling her relationship with her embittered father is Ruby able to exorcise her fears. Almost hypnotic in its stark beauty, Tale of Ruby Rose is proof enough that writer/director Roger Scholes deserves to be far better known.

Poor Man's Orange

Like its predecessor The Harp In The South, Poor Man's Orange was also adapted for Australian television by the Ten Network in 1987. It continues the story of the Darcy family, living in the Surry Hills area of Sydney. Originally a novel by New Zealand-born Australian author Ruth Park, the book was published in 1949. The Darcys a poor, working class family of tough Irish stock - Mumma (Anne Phelan), dad Hughie (Martyn Sanderson), Roie (Anna Hruby) and the younger daughter Dolour (Kaarin Fairfax), through whose eyes we hear their story.

The Harp in the South

We first meet The Darcys, a poor, working class family of tough Irish stock through whose eyes we hear their story. A story that centres on the bittersweet first and last loves of Roie, who becomes a woman too quickly living among the tenement houses, razor gangs, brothels and sly-grog shops of inner city Sydney.

Sylvia

New Zealand chronicle of the life of noted writer and teacher, Sylvia Ashton-Warner. An interesting look at the unusual teaching methods she used while working with the children from the indigenous Maon.

Trial Run

Housewife Rosemary Edmonds leaves her family to take up residence in a remote cottage on the Otago coastline so that she can conduct a photographic essay on the yellow-eyed penguin. No sooner has she moved in than she becomes the victim of a series of increasingly more malevolent attacks from an unknown assailant.

My First Suit

14-year old Steve is caught between creatures he does not fully understand: two parents with very different ideas about the suit he should wear to his first school dance. Meanwhile everywhere he seems to look, images of men are taking control of his imagination. In Stewart Main's comical coming of age story Steve escapes his parents' good wishes, to discover his true desires. They aren't quite what his no-nonsense father had in mind.

Wild Horses

Amid the high country of the North Island interior, wild horse roam and breed. With the trees gone, Dan Mitchell and the Sullivan brothers, turn to the wild horses as a source of income. With rope and snare - and the help of an experienced horse catching team - Sam and Sara's example, the rough ex-loggers learn to respect a delicate balance between the wild horses and their catchers. The best stallions are left to breed and their riding horses are retired back into the wild herds.

The Lost Tribe

Anthropologist Max Scarry mysteriously disappears while doing excavation/research of a lost New Zealand tribe on a remote island. His wife and his twin brother Edward are clueless as to what could have happened, a situation complicated by their city's police suspecting that one of the brothers murdered a local prostitute who was found with a strange tribal charm on her body matching one found in Max's abandoned hut. What most certainly isn't helping matters is the strange behavior of Max's daughter as she seems to have visions beyond possibility, warnings of a supernatural threat and her uncle's fate - and she's the film's narrator, to boot. Edward decides to go to the island to find out exactly what happened, but the deeper he goes into the mystery the more perilous and unknowable his world becomes, leading towards a shocking fate that raises more questions than it answers. (cont. http://view-from-the-paperhouse.blogspot.de/2014/10/the-threat-of-ancient-echoes-lost-tribe.html)

Bad Blood

During World War 2, a farmer in New Zealand murders seven people. The police, along with local Maori trackers, hunt him in the bush country.

The Scarecrow

The same night as a girl is slain in the woods, the teenagers Sam and Les are robbed of all of their hard earned hens. In the quest for their hens they cross the murderer's path.

Squeeze

Richard Turner made Squeeze to break the "conspiracy of silence" about homosexuality. A pioneering early portrait of Auckland's LGBT scene, Squeeze centres on the relationship between a young man (Paul Eady) and the confident executive (Robert Shannon) who romances him, then mentions he has a fiancée. The film was discussed in Parliament after Patricia Bartlett campaigned against the possibility it might get NZ Film Commission funding (it didn't). Kevin Thomas in The LA Times praised Squeeze's integrity and the "steadfast compassion with which it views its hero".

Beyond Reasonable Doubt

A docu-drama covering one of the most famous cases in New Zealand history, the murder of Harvey and Jeanette Crewe in 1970.

Keskidee Aroha

Keskidee, a small Jamaican bird resilient in the face of hardship, is also the name of a self-help black arts centre in London, and the theatre group who work there. Keskidee's actors and musicians were brought to New Zealand to work with communities who face similar day-to-day dilemmas and who might be encouraged to express their frustrations and anger in drama, poetry and music. Keskidee were to act as a catalyst. the film shows some of their work and their response to the people they met. Tribal elders try to show keskidee the depth of Maori roots in the land, and the complexity and pain of their present struggles: against the loss of Aroha; against the laws of pen and paper; the alienation of their land; the suppression of their language; the devaluation of their people and culture.

Solo

When a young Australian hitchhiker, Judy (Peers), enters a prohibited forest area, she encounters Paul (Gil) whose job is spotting fires from a plane. She is invited to stay with him and his teen son, Billy. Later they go on a sightseeing flight in a "Tiger Moth" bi-plane, but having a forced landing, are accommodated by an odd elderly couple.

Autumn Fires

Actor Martyn Sanderson returns in 1977 to the Hokianga of his youth and visits his elderly and romantic aunt, Olive Bracey. Her reminiscences of pioneer life mesh with nostalgic songs and readings from her fiction.

Wild Man

The story of two itinerant con men, the Wild Man and the Colonel, who operate on the West Coast gold mining towns of the New Zealand South Island during the latter part of the last century.