Patu Ihu

Built in the 40s to accommodate Forestry Department workers, the small town of Minginui in the North Island's Whirinaki Forest lost its sawmill in the 80s as the logging of native forests was brought to a halt and ownership of forestry moved to the private sector. In 1990 the government gifted the land and buildings to Ngati Whare. Now 280 people inhabit the run-down village, living off the land and their benefit payments. Adam Luxton and Summer Agnew's remarkable and disquietingly aestheticised documentary portrait of the town is the antithesis of Florian Habicht's Kaikohe Demolition, interacting only fleetingly with the inhabitants. When there's social activity - a powhiri, the haka before a rugby match, or just kids clambering on and off a roof - these filmmakers evince something like historical distance, framing ritual and play in the eternal overarching melancholy of mist and forest. Theirs is an eerily beautiful picture of torpor, isolation and decay - and of Maori culture.

Dean returns to his small town home where he finds the tight-knit community is still against him. When his live-wire older brother Jon ignites local tensions the brothers retreat into the wilderness with their hunting gear. As an old animosity resurfaces they begin to suspect that Deer is not the only prey being hunted. The higher they climb into mountainous terrain the closer they get to the truth that separates them.

Aboard the state-of-the-art research vessel Tangaroa, coral scientist Di Tracey surveys the Chatham Rise seabed to document the impact of deep ocean trawl fishing. Wandering through Christchurch’s eerie post-quake CBD, Bruce Russell, a sound artist and founding member of seminal noise band The Dead C, philosophises on urbanisation and regeneration through improvised soundscapes and his own highly evolved thought patterns. And navigating a fraught interior landscape, poet and actor David Hornblow uses Regression Hypnotherapy to traverse his past experiences with addiction. For Luxton and Agnew, their unique subjects’ journeys into the unknown have galvanised their own approach to the aesthetic of this adventurous film, earthy in tone and form and sublimely realised as a visual poem.