Vincent Burke

Vincent Burke is the man in charge of filmmaking company Top Shelf Productions. His resume as a producer includes a run of documentaries, including Cinema of Unease, Velvet Dreams, Frontier of Dreams, and I Want to Die at Home.

Burke was born in Waimate near Timaru, but grew up largely in Hamilton and Tokoroa.  At Victoria University he studied music - he has played percussion in many Irish groups - and discovered a passion for research and arts management. After arranging tours of theatre groups and bands for universities and working as an arts administrator, he joined the New Zealand Film Commission. There Burke worked as a policy advisor.

The job ignited a desire to work in film. "It seemed to me that of all the areas of artistic endeavour, film was the one that involved the most elements. It seemed to be the most challenging."

In 1988 Burke set up his own company Top Shelf Productions, learning on the job by working as a grip and helping carry lights.

The company began with the short film Gordon Bennett, a shaggy dog tale featuring a priceless performance by a gormless Andy Anderson. Their next production provided a better indicator of where the company would head.

I Want to Die at Home (1990) is the first of many Top Shelf documentaries directed by Monique Oomen. It tells the story of the people who cared for a woman as she succumbed to liver cancer - and her decision to spend her final days at home. I Want to Die at Home won a jury award at a Montreal Womens Festival in 1991.

Around the same time, the British Film Institute celebrated a century of cinema by launching a series of 18 documentaries, in which selected filmmakers took a personal look at their nation's cinema history to date. The New Zealand leg of that journey went to directors Sam Neill and Judy Rymer, and Vincent Burke's Top Shelf productions.

New York Times critic Janet Maslin praised Cinema of Unease as the highlight of The Century of Cinema series. The documentary won invitation to the Cannes Film Festival and an award for Best Documentary at the 1996 NZ Film Awards.

Short films aside, Burke's sole stab at fictional drama to date followed soon after: interracial love story Flight of the Albatross, a tale of adventure and spiritual redemption between a troubled Māori and a German teenager. The film was scripted by Warriors scriptwriter Riwia Brown, from a book by American Deborah Savage. Shot on Great Barrier Island, Albatross was a co-production between companies in Germany, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

Albatross was released unsuccessfully in New Zealand as a feature film, though in many overseas territories it was a television series. Reviews ranged across the spectrum, and the film won the prize for Best Children's Feature Film at the 1993 Berlin Children's Film Festival.

Top Shelf's documentaries have crossed the gamut - from programmes on theologian Lloyd Geering (The Last Heretic) and velvet painting (Sima Urale's Velvet Dreams) to rock band Th' Dudes, and social changes for New Zealand women (The Nineties).

Burke has balanced more ambitious programmes, such as nineties immigration series An Immigrant Nation, with popular staples like long-running consumer programme Target and Danny Mulheron-hosted car series AA Torque Show. The company's list of award-winners is equally varied. Weight loss show Downsize Me won three international awards, while 1993 documentary Wahine: The Untold Story, presented by Brian Edwards, scored a Silver Medal at the 1993 New York Festivals Film and Television Awards.

In 2004 Top Shelf joined with producer Ray Waru at Te Reo Television to make the documentary series Frontier of Dreams, under the combined banner of Whakapapa Productions. Ranking alongside Kenneth Cumberland's Landmarks as one of the New Zealand's largest scale documentary productions to date, the thirteen-part series used recreations of key events to examine the country's history, stretching from New Zealand's geological formation to the new Millennium. 

Frontier of Dreams won awards in 2006 at the Houston International Film Festival, and the US International Film and Video Festival. 

Top Shelf also makes promotional, training and industrial films, and has worked on a number of international co-productions.

Vincent Burke is a past elected head of both SPADA (the Screen Production and Development Association of New Zealand) and the NZ Film and Video Training Board.