Screened as part of NZIFF 2006

Event 16 2006

Directed by Derek Pearson

72 minutes DigiBeta

Director, Screenplay, Editor

Producers

Derek Pearson
,
Catherine Fitzgerald

Photography

Stephen Press

Props Maker, Set Dresser

Neil Testa

With

Peter Rutherford
,
Jocelyn Christian
,
Ezra Keddell
,
Julian White
,
John Porter
,
Brett Ormsby
,
James Stewart
,
Andrea Chapman

Elsewhere

Derek Pearson’s labour of love is Wellington’s first independent, digital-effects heavy sci-fi feature film. Matt is a young inventor who realises he has engineered access into the past and future. When he walks through the walls into colonial Wellington, he hasn’t bargained for anyone coming back the other way. Enter a Victorian era serial killer with a price on his head – pursued by two clearly nefarious government agents. Will Matt’s increasingly disenchanted girlfriend Paige be the 16th Event in the killer’s logbook? Pearson’s time-tripping characters run around Wellington as you have never seen it – 1893 and 2038 look extraordinary here, but so does 2006. City landmarks are reproduced and reconfigured; flat, sterile and slightly menacing: it’s a world at once instantly recognisable and surreal. Of the 15 digital features submitted by New Zealand filmmakers this year, this was the stand-out: the product of concerted industry and ingenuity, Event 16 plays like an indie film that doesn’t know it’s not a blockbuster. — John Matthewson