Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 19 February

Orphans & Kingdoms (Rotondo, 2014)

Editors note

There’ll be no sched­uled update tomor­row as I am booked in for a minor invest­ig­at­ive med­ic­al pro­ced­ure. Normal ser­vice will resume on Friday.

Also, in response to yesterday’s news­let­ter, it has been poin­ted out to me that (at least in New Zealand and Australia) Flicks is a more reli­able guide to what’s cur­rently stream­ing – and where – than JustWatch. I con­cur but find JW’s glob­al com­pre­hens­ive­ness use­ful as we have sub­scribers from all over the world here now.

Back in 2013 I was edit­or of the New Zealand screen industry magazine OnFilm. At least I was for a couple of issues.

The title had formerly been the sec­tor bible with a respec­ted his­tory going back to the start of Aotearoa’s inde­pend­ent scene in the 1970s but it had ceased pub­lic­a­tion a few years prior.

Under new own­er­ship, I was asked to revive the masthead, which I did until the cheques star­ted boun­cing and the publisher’s advert­ising Ponzi scheme saw them get the atten­tion of the Serious Fraud Office. I did good work in those two issues but none of it is online, sadly.

Before it all went kaput, though, I flew up to Auckland to vis­it the set of a small movie being shot on Waiheke Island. I don’t think it was a jun­ket, as such, as OnFilm paid my way there rather than the pro­duc­tion, but I did spend the day wan­der­ing around the wharf and the posh mod­ern­ist house that was being used as the main location.

The film was Paolo Rotondo’s Orphans & Kingdoms and it came out about three years later, by which time I was review­ing for the RNZ website:

In the same month that Kiwi behemoth Hunt for the Wilderpeople breaks box office records with a comed­ic tale of a young miscre­ant on the run from the author­it­ies and taken under the wing of an unlikely fath­er fig­ure, it seems entirely appro­pri­ate that micro-budget inde­pend­ent Orphans & Kingdoms should also arrive in theatres to present a dra­mat­ic­ally altern­at­ive per­spect­ive on a strik­ingly sim­il­ar story.

…

There’s anoth­er suc­cess­ful par­al­lel with Wilderpeople and that’s the cast­ing. Taika Waititi’s film has made Julian Dennison a star – and I hope we see plenty of him in the future – but Calae Hignett-Morgan, who plays the ter­ri­fy­ing (and ter­ri­fied) little thug Kenae, is some­thing else entirely. The smal­lest act­or in the film, he com­mands the screen whenev­er he’s on it. Like a char­ac­ter from early Scorsese, his explos­ive unpre­dict­ab­il­ity helps give the film ten­sion that I haven’t exper­i­enced from a loc­al film in years.

Kenae has skipped his last foster home and hooked up with older half-siblings Tibs (Hanelle Harris) and Jesse (Jesse-James Rehu Pickery). Together they’ve arrived on sleepy Waiheke – pos­sibly the only jur­is­dic­tion left in New Zealand where the Police take burg­lary ser­i­ously – and break in to one of the many lux­ury new-builds on the island, think­ing they might be able to lie low for a while.

The own­er, Jeremy (a ter­rific­ally semi-hinged per­form­ance from Colin Moy), is an Auckland busi­ness­man and on his return home from the last ferry he is greeted with a hockey stick to the back of the head. Taken cap­tive, it seems like Jeremy – or maybe all of them – are destined for a tra­gic end but an acci­dent sends things spiralling off in a dif­fer­ent direction.

…

Casting the film was an exhaust­ive pro­cess – I coun­ted 17 cast­ing con­sult­ants in the cred­its, more than three times the num­ber of speak­ing parts in the fin­ished film – but every step was worth­while as all the act­ors have power­ful moments and all con­trib­ute to a potent ensemble.

And although Orphans & Kingdoms star­ted as a micro-budget pic­ture, it doesn’t look any­thing like it on the screen. I know that these things are often pad­ded out by friends, fam­ily and industry gen­er­os­ity, but – with the help of Simon Raby’s sym­path­et­ic cam­er­a­work, Dick Reade’s sound design and Cushla Dillon’s choices in the edit suite – it looks and sounds a mil­lion bucks.

You can read the rest here.

Orphans & Kingdoms was Rotondo’s first – and still only – fea­ture but in 2023 he made a short film adapt­ing his own (co-written with Rob Mokaraka) stage play, Strange Resting Places, about a meet­ing in World War II between a young Māori sol­dier and an Italian desert­er. The short is called Maunga Cassino. He is now the head honcho of the Italian Film Festival in New Zealand and mak­ing a strong fist of it, too.

Where to watch Orphans & Kingdoms

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from NZ Film On Demand

Australia: Digital rent­al from Apple

Canada: Not cur­rently available

Ireland: Digital rent­al from Google

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Prime Video or Roku (free with ads)

UK: Not cur­rently available