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| Woodenhead | |||
Could this be New Zealand? Gert, “an innocent dump hand”, is ordered by the dump owner (an imperious Warwick Broadhead) to deliver his beautiful mute daughter, Princess Plum, to her wedding. Like a jaded, over-age Hansel and Gretel, the two trek through forest and glen coping with numerous bizarre characters who cross their path. Could this be a fairy tale then? Florian Habicht describes his gregariously eccentric feature as a “celebration of the sad, strange and beautiful, and a cross-pollination of Kiwi and Germanic culture, echoing my experience as an immigrant to Aotearoa”. What’s distinctive about Habicht’s hybrid is the way he’s turned the ungainliness of transplantation into a personal style. When we’re told, for example, that Gert believes he’s the luckiest man under the sun, it’s the sheer improbability of the notion that is striking, not any insight into the significance of the slender, solemn lummox before us. The mythic force of fairy-tale may be cut up and mocked, but it still kicks around in Habicht’s picturesque frames. Disjunction is accentuated by his method of first creating his final soundtrack and then directing the film to play against it, in synch and out. Kiwi-accented refugees from a kitsch European carnival world stutter, sing and lollop their way around a New Zealand landscape of almost ethereal, black and white beauty. There are moments Fellini might have envied when Habicht’s carnival beings and his landscape coalesce in ‘sad, strange and beautiful’ florescence. – Bill Gosden, New Zealand International Film Festival 2003 |
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| New Zealand 2003 | |||
Director/Producer/Screenplay: Florian Habicht With: Nicholas Butler (Gert), Teresa Peters (Plum), Tony Bishop (Goerdel), Warwick Broadhead (Hugo), David Hornblow (tramp), Matthew Sunderland (strong man) Voices: Steve Abel (Gert), Mardi Potter (Plum), Lutz Halbhubner (Goerdel) 90 mins, DV (16:9) M sex scenes Pukekohe Film Society |
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