Boy

Taika Waititi's blockbuster second movie centres on an imaginative 11-year-old East Coast boy (James Rolleston) trying to make sense of his world — and the return of his just-out-of-jail dad (Waititi). Intended as a "painful comedy of growing up", Boy mixes poignancy with Waititi's trademark whimsy and visual inventiveness. The film was shot in the Bay of Plenty area where he partly grew up. A winner at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival, Boy soon became the most successful Kiwi film on its home soil (at least until the arrival of Waititi's 2016 hit Hunt for the Wilderpeople). James Rolleston writes about acting in Boy here.