Debate X NZIFF

REVIEWS | ARTS | PŪRĀKAU / MYTHOLOGY

Reviews by Daniel Tang (he/him) | @daniel941 on Letterboxd | Contributing Writer

Urchin (2024)

Directed by Harris Dickinson

Homelessness remains a feature, not a bug, of capitalism and intentionally failed neoliberal reform. For immigrant workers, for working-class families, and for precariously homeless adults and children – ‘urchins’. Rising actor and creative Harris Dickinson’s feature film debut swings for the socially critical fences. Centring on Frank Dillane’s excellently played Mike with a colourful and flawed set of supporting roles, including Dickinson’s Nathan as Mike’s foil, Urchin is a manifestation of how frustratingly under-supported and hostile London’s social safety system remains for those most in need. The film opens with Mike waking up on an urban sidewalk as he grows frustrated with a preaching street pastor. He hustles for money and his next warm meal while struggling with his personal demons, eternally trying to find belonging and security through whatever means necessary. Without lived experience, I cannot ascertain the film’s presentation of homelessness compared to reality and how it dismantles or reinforces harmful narratives. However, the audience and I felt the rage, despair, and complexity of Dickinson’s vision. 

A Greek Tragedy, we rose and fell with Mike while he navigated through fatal flaws prevalent across oppressed, precarious communities – from addiction and sobriety to intimacy and the vicious cycle of social services. There is also bittersweet humour in the absurdity around Mike. Precarity can turn first dates into living space shopping. Showing personal growth for a rehabilitation programme can fill impersonal transitional housing with a dated recording of self-help instructions. There is beauty, visual and sociological, in delving as deeply as a sub-100-minute film can for a realistic character study of housing precarity and substance sobriety. Dickinson demonstrates immense promise as a director, even if there is amateurishness evident, further injecting spiritual surrealism into these realist pictures. Sprawling tree roots. Light-filled caves. DNA strands. The film is bookended by a motif of God and the trilemma debate. If God exists, is she not all-knowing and good? And if so, how can she let evil exist? Mike and his story in Urchin ends in the liminal space between chilling, Mike Leigh-esque realism and religious drug-abetted surrealism, falling, barrelling, lost.

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Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda) (2024)

Directed by Rohan Parashuram Kanawade

A last-minute addition to my festival schedule, I sprinted (literally) to see queer Indian drama Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda) only for my sweaty, stress-ridden state of mind to be met by this film’s opening sequence. 30-year-old city-boy Anand, played outstandingly by newcomer Bhushaan Manoj, rests eyes closed in a long, silently still close-up portrait shot. Anand’s father had finally passed away after a long period under Anand’s dedicated care. Compelled by entrenched customs in India and his chiding mother, they make the journey back to their rural hometown for ten days of mourning. Meditative, the film is beautifully shot and each supporting character has the naturalistic demeanour of non-professional actors playing themselves or someone they know to an incredibly compelling effect. The first Marathi language film to ever premiere at Sundance, debut director Rohan Kanawade hones in on Anand’s time there. His unspeakable loneliness as an impoverished son who left for the city, away from those he knew. His soulful grief for his father, accepting enough of his son’s queerness and clearly beloved by his community. Most of all, his unravelling when met with his childhood friend Balya in their hometown. Their separation, apart from time and cultural stigma rather than any agentic choice, is also met with magical closeness and a kind of chemistry that persists despite the nuanced intersectionalities active in their relationship. Compulsory heterosexuality runs abound while relatives bombard them with constant homophobic expectation of when they will find a female partner and start their lives. As remains common for many, if not most queer non-diaspora Asians, the pair are selectively closeted. Their other priorities pry their attention from each other whilst they always orbit each other in difficulty and in happiness. Balya grieves for Anand. Anand grieves for Balya. Support and be supported. Connect and disconnect. Love and be loved.

Twinless (2025) 

Directed by James Sweeney

Everyone lies. By omission. Partial truths. Little white lies. And it’s harmless, usually. To make someone’s day. To save your skin. To smooth over awkwardness. To a teacher, a recruiter, a stranger. But sometimes a lie gets carried away. You forget what you said. You lie to cover a lie. Consequences build load-bearing pillars of a relationship. Dishonesty lingers; rotting butterflies into a pit in your stomach. To your mates, your loved ones, your other half. So you fess up and amend any damage done. Transparency and forgiveness. Or… you become a freaky pathological liar sucking Dylan O’Brien’s toes as bereavement bonding.

Directed, written, and co-starred by James Sweeney (playing Dennis), Twinless is a must-see, breezy queer dramedy about two lonely souls who have lost their twin. O’Brien soars in his most complexly written character to date as twins Rocky and Roman. Rocky, the (spoilers: freshly dead) golden child of gay promiscuity and self-assuredness; Roman, the straight fuck up bereft with grief. O’Brien and Sweeney’s chemistry, in all its heartachingly beautiful and viscerally disgusting forms, works movie magic for this Sundance film. What Twinless somewhat lacks in depth or substance, it compensates for in style and creative writing. It’s stealing Pokémon from your lover’s childhood closet. It’s accidentally killing your self-insert in Sims. It’s about parasociality and young Americans’ cultural deficiencies in a time of immense individualism. But it’s really about a lie. The most destructive, mythomaniac, and ridiculously camp lie when Roman and Dennis become Twinless.

Lesbian Space Princess (2025)  

Directed by Leela Varghese & Emma Hough Hobbs

Lesbian Space Princess is a camp, chaotic, and comprehensive rejection of Australian and Anglospheric cultural conservatism. Directors Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs set the tone of the “Queer as F*CK Sci-Fi Comedy” film with their in-person introduction at The Civic’s Aotearoa premiere by quoting the queen of drag, RuPaul Charles: “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else, amen”. The lower-budget indie 2D animation, like the audience judging by their raucous energy throughout, felt like a steadfast community of pleasant progressivism with a dying strain of social conviction rooted in playful optimism. Lesbian Space Princess is a true bundle of queer joy and creativity that’s far too rare in cinema, and especially in Australasian cinema. Up-and-comer Shabana Azeez delivers an outstanding voice performance as the titular Princess Saira, showcasing an impressive range that includes singing. I look forward to what Varghese and Hough Hobbs do next, and I join the audience in manifesting more queer, and especially sapphic, cinematic artistry by, about, and for Lesbians in this heteropatriarchal hobby and industry.

Unfortunately, I enjoyed the film less than my peers in the audience and online. More often than not, it undershot the viewer’s readied eagerness to get on board with a bit. Evil penis lairs, vagina extras, deceitful drag queens, and undetectable clitoris planets are fun, but one-note and end up indicating the boundaries of the film's social critique. A layer or two of irony is missing when the straight white men turn into polyamorous bisexuals, and there is an unacknowledged and likely unintended implication of gender essentialism. Delightful adventures into under-tapped queer creativity also mean potentially undue hyper-awareness about missed opportunities and, in my case, insider-outsider group criticisms. Regardless, Lesbian Space Princess remains a wholly unique and wonderfully fun queer romp.

Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Best (2025) 

Various Directors

It would not be Whānau Mārama (New Zealand International Film Festival) without its competition programmes for short films made in Aotearoa by and about all of our tangata whenua, tagata moana, and tangata tiriti. Formerly, these were respectively the Ngā Whanaunga Māori Pasifika Shorts and New Zealand’s Best Shorts programmes. For the first time ever, these two programmes have merged into Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Best 2025. This being in my third year in attendance, I am delighted to review the 13-strong finalists that screened across two programmes at the SkyCity Theatre. From strengths and weaknesses to speeches and cash prizes, let’s see what Aotearoa’s established and up-and-coming creatives in film have to offer in 2025.

Cannes-selected bildungsroman When the Geese Flew, directed and written by Arthur Gay, opened the first programme and tells the story of a boy’s coming-of-age as his older sister gets pregnant and prepares to move out of the family nest. Unwilling to let go, he fixates on doing one last good deed for her, taking back her stolen motorbike from the local bikers. Set in a crisp mountain valley town, the film treads a familiar narrative path but more than compensates in visual storytelling. Grainy film (simulated or not) accentuates the cold, quiet setting, and the colour grading stunningly adds to the mix of artificial and natural lighting. Its gorgeous cinematography deservedly earns the Best Artistic Contribution Award for Cinematographer Michael Cong. 

Co-Winner of the Letterboxd Award for Māori Pasifika Talent is one of my personal standouts, Picking Crew, directed and written by Tanu Gago. Identifying and resisting racialised masculinity, the Samoan main character joins an apple farm picking crew, working, sleeping, and praying at the farm. As helpfully identified in the Q&A afterwards, “loneliness in Pacific men is exposed in a meaningful way”. Loneliness by compulsory machismo against softer forms of masculinity. Towards a Samoan form of the heteropatriarchy against queer masculinity, whilst remaining grounded in the characters’ lives and experiences despite the film’s runtime constraints. Coherently, freshly fallen apples and their apple trees become a metaphor in this commentary. For the main character, like father, unlike son: “love him, don’t want to be him”. 

The first programme continued with a series of short films (un)intentionally depicting womanhood in contemporary Aotearoa to mixed-to-great outcomes, including motherhood, young womanhood, and queer womanhood. Chrysanthemum, directed and written by Jolin Lee, depicted an Asian mother’s grief and how it could manifest in the strangest of circumstances – an undying shop-bought Chrysanthemum plant. Lee described the promising film in part as “how grief haunts you and shows up out of nowhere”. By contrast, Our Party, directed and written by Joshua Prendeville, is a class commentary drama starring actors and sisters Davida and Thomasin McKenzie. Unfortunately, I found their bourgeois Parnell-resident characters less than sympathetic, and the screenplay underswung its deliberate use of flawed characters to miss some needed nuance and criticality. Most memorably, and opening to possibly the loudest hoots and hollers and of the Sunday afternoon was queer tragicomedy Wild Nights, Wild Nights! directed and written by Alex Farley. Bluntly summarised, a gay girlfailure struggles to leave her toxic relationship with a newly engaged closet case who wears her ring out clubbing and laughs along with lesbianphobic jokes from her straight mates. Despite some inconsistent writing and a limited budget, I find Farley’s intention admirable in showing that “women are allowed to be complex and messy in love”.

However, my favourite foray into womanhood in the first programme was Stella Reid’s Stage Challenge starring an ensemble cast of diverse young women as part of Toi Whakaari down in Welly. A high school comedy, the film is inspired by the pandemic, when the girls gather after school to prepare for a ‘Stage Challenge’ dancing performance competition. Chock full of camp and heart in equal parts, the film accurately captures the priorities and anxieties of youth and young women in 2020s Aotearoa. The girls panicking at an emergency mobile alert. A girl in a globe costume vaping. The girls’ silly self-seriousness when incorporating oil spills into their dance “about the future”. A girl suffering the grooming of a music teacher reminiscent of Epsom Girls Grammar headlines last year. This film is a true standout, and I am ecstatic that it won the Wellington UNESCO Creative City of Film Emerging Talent Award.

After a half-hour de facto intermission, the second programme felt like the first’s darker, more dramatic sibling. These dramas included character study films Growing Still, directed by Alyx Duncan, Nausea, directed and written by Elliott Louis McKee, and I Am Not Your Dusky Maiden, directed by Vea Mafile’o. Growing Still, what I found to be the slightly less captivating of the three, focused on an elderly woman in rest home care and her inseparable connection to nature. Winner of the Auckland Live Spirit of the Civic Award, the film delved into surrealism and highlighted the lonely and unsafe insufficiencies plaguing rest homes and palliative care facilities, including tacit reliance on unreliable and unpaid relatives to pick up the slack of overworked and understaffed rest home workers. 

In turn, Nausea was shot 14 years ago; its significantly delayed release a testament to the need for further film industry investment and mental health crises in Aotearoa. Dedicated to loved ones Arlo MacDiarmid and Mick Innes, the film earned a Special Mention from the Jury. Set in the South, it beautifully highlighted what the Q&A noted as the “corporatisation of farming and the dissipation of what masculine southern men value” when confronted with men’s mental health.

My favourite of the three, I Am Not Your Dusky Maiden is a psychothriller drama elevated by Nora Aati’s stellar performance as someone with dissociative identity disorder. Taking place exclusively in a therapist’s room during a therapy session, Aati convincingly and fluidly engages and disengages from her character’s various selves as she processes an abusive relationship. Without spoiling its ending, Nora Aati more than deserves her Jury Best Performance Award.

More than retaining and expanding on Māori cinema and emerging Māori creatives post-merge, there were three shorts that unconventionally presented Māori life in contemporary Aotearoa. Allan George’s Mirumiru, an end-of-life fantasy drama and the sole animated short of this year’s selection, focuses on a kuia and koro at a healthcare facility. While she’s losing her memory to dementia, including their memories together in a creatively depicted relationship, he gathers their memories into their whānau waka and recounts them to her. Simple and dialogue-less, the film was wonderfully thoughtful and was the Co-Winner of the Letterboxd Award for Māori Pasifika Talent. 

Puti, directed and written by journalist and creative Aroha Awarau, similarly worked with its somewhat limited budget by screening in black and white and shooting in public around Wesley, Tāmaki Makaurau. The titular Puti is a single, struggling Māori mum and, as intentionally indicated by Awarau, represented not a movie or news story but reality. 

Finally, Womb, directed and written by Ira Hetaraka, stood out as an expertly directed drama about a Māori girl adopted into a white family and how a Māori nanny complicates discourse about cross-cultural and colonial adoption practices. Winning the Umbrella Entertainment Best Short Film Award, the film imbued soulful significance into understanding and speaking reo Māori. Notably, the film opened with a live horse birth, achieved with great patience according to the Q&A, with horses remaining thematically important throughout the film. From cradle to grave, Māori lives and stories matter in all forms and nuances – Toitū te Tiriti.

Ending the 13-film screenings was one of my favourite films of the day, Cantonese action romcom Let’s Settle This. The film, directed and written by Jack Woon, played to the audience, including myself, and is wholeheartedly deserving of the Audience Award, which was given to audience attendees, including myself, as a ballot voting system after each programme. Focused on romantic ‘yuanfen’ or ‘fateful red string theory’, the kung fu film is set in an Auckland Cantonese restaurant. The central pair arrive for a first date, and after some back-and-forth, engage in a delightfully eccentric battle over the bill. Cultural dining practices abound, particularly endearing to me since I follow these practices with renewed loyalty, this film’s attention to detail was magical to experience. Its audience award was earned with every tightly choreographed kung fu sequence, every witty exchange of Cantonese dialogue, and every self-aware indulgence in C-drama tropes. 

Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Best 2025 was an outstanding experience of Aotearoa’s diverse creativity, from people turning into trees and Kung-Fu masters to personal firsts in Māori animation and Pasifika gentle masculinity on screen. I highly recommend that you come see what Aotearoa’s indie film creatives are capable of and choose the next recipient of the Audience Award for years to come. It is only fitting that my review of this outstanding pillar of Whānau Mārama closes my coverage of the 2025 film festival.