Top 5 NZ Feature Films

The New Zealand film industry may have been built with No. 8 wire but its legacy is electrifying.

In the 30 or so years since director Roger Donaldson and star Sam Neill unleashed Sleeping Dogs, their peers have carved out an eclectic slate of crowdpleasers, award-winners and failures that if not always honourable at least were mostly fair-dinkum.

As the film reviewer for The Evening Post from 1987 to 2002, I witnessed the cresting of a second wave of filmmaking that began with Peter Jackson's Bad Taste and culminated in his final instalment in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, winning 11 Oscars, including best picture.

Moreover, the latter was released the same year Whale Rider became the country's most popular independent movie (and earned newcomer Keisha Castle-Hughes her own Oscar nod 10 years to the ceremony after Anna Paquin won for The Piano).

The Piano and Once Were Warriors were the stars of another benchmark year, 1994, while 1987 was notable for Jackson making his feature debut alongside two other distinguished directors, Barry Barclay (Ngati) and Leon Narbey (Illustrious Energy).

Jackson's preference for bringing Hollywood productions here rather than going there to make them has been a sensational boon for the local industry but other factors also have been pivotal, from the Film Commission spending substantially more on development, to the deregulation of television and the growth of production houses like South Pacific Pictures, to the nationwide multiplexing of screens.

For instance, The World's Fastest Indian and Second-Hand Wedding profited hugely from exhibitors keeping them going even when they were down to single sessions, a box office strategy that wouldn't have been feasible 10 years earlier.

At the same time, more local production on the small screen has helped to fine-tune talent for the big screen - and develop audience demand for Kiwi content -- while opening up funding opportunities through NZ On Air (one of the industry's biggest critical and commercial hits of late, Out of the Blue, was commissioned for TV -- as was Jane Campion's break-out 1990 drama, An Angel at My Table).

NZ has traditionally been renowned for its "cinema of unease" school of filmmaking and the quirky likes of Topless Women Talk About Their Lives and Eagle vs Shark.

Yet many of our most memorable movies have been smaller titles that came and went with less fanfare, from Middle-Age Spread, which nailed suburban middle-class mores, to Skin Deep, which indelibly got under the skin of small-town hypocrisy, to Savage Honeymoon, which spawned the Westie DNA for TV's Outrageous Fortune.

Culling a top five for this exercise was much tougher than I thought it would be. There were just as many contenders that could have been: Rain, for its sumptuous visuals and golden-weather home truths; Illustrious Energy, for its lyrical storytelling and period authenticity; Whale Rider for making iconic culture cinematic, not self-conscious ...

But in the end these five made the cut because they're quintessentially New Zealand yet extraordinarily universal and were made with a finesse and a fervour that do the industry proud.