Jess Feast

Jess Feast is an award-winning filmmaker, best known for her 2013 green-fingered nun documentary Gardening with Soul and Cowboys & Communists, a portrait of Berlin after the Wall came down.

Feast studied and worked in theatre before researching her first documentary in the late 1990s. Soon after the turn of the millenium, she was a director on two three-part shows about teenage music contest the Smokefree Rockquest, which won both NZ Screen and Qantas Media Awards for Best Children’s Programme.

While living and working in Berlin, Feast came across the subject for her hour-long documentary, Cowboys & Communists. Centred around a bar and nightclub called White Trash Fast Food, where Feast worked for 18 months, the film explores life in post-wall East Berlin — a place where libertines and die-hard communists co-existed, not always harmoniously.

Made on a shoestring, the film premiered at the 2007 New Zealand International Film Festival, before winning the Golden Key award for best documentary by a young filmmaker at Germany’s Kassel Video and Documentary Film Festival. Festival judges found the film "entertaining, thrilling, and of great lightness without ever slipping into the banal". Cowboys & Communists later screened on the Arte TV network in Germany and France.

On returning to New Zealand, Feast worked as a development executive for Wellington production house The Gibson Group. She went on to direct segments for award-winning arts shows The Living Room, and The Gravy — plus 2002's Gather Round, a one-hour documentary chronicling Te Radar's time at South Island music festival The Gathering.

Having encountered Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement for this Living Room report, Feast went on to direct Flight of the Conchords – a Texan Odyssey, a documentary about the comedy duo’s early attempts to break into the American market. Keen to show "the view from the wings", in late 2008 she travelled to China with the Royal New Zealand Ballet to make Black on Red. It screened in TVNZ’s Artsville slot. Feast has also worked on a number of projects exploring climate change, including an Oxfam project which involved a visit to Papua New Guinea's Cartaret Islands.

The 2013 round of New Zealand film festivals saw the debut of Feast's feature-length documentary Gardening with Soul. Feast spent a year following the life and work of 90-year-old nun Sister Loyola Galvin, a woman committing to nurturing all living things, especially those which "don't get a good start". The result was named Best Documentary at New Zealand's Moa Film Awards.

In 2020 Feast was nominated for an NZ Television Award for Best Director for Shot Bro. The documentary follows actor Rob Mokaraka as he travels around Aotearoa, bringing aroha to communities by retelling the story of his attempted suicide during a face-off with police. In the same period Feast was working on a documentary series exploring Māori experience of the Criminal Justice System.

Since 2009, Feast has worked with her partner Robert Appierdo at Wellington company Storybox. As head of the documentary and factual content development team, she both develops and directs content. 

Profile updated on 28 July 2021 

Sources include
Storybox website. Accessed 28 July 2021
Joe Sheppard, 'Jess Feast on Cowboys and Communists' (Interview - broken link) Lumière website. Loaded 7 August 2007. Accessed 8 February 2008
'Jess Feast' NZ International Film Festival website (Broken link). Accessed 26 July 2013
'Documentary & Factual series' Gibson Group website. Accessed 28 July 2021