18th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival
4 March 2023
Post-screening conversation with Christopher Ulutupu after the world premiere of The Pleasures of Unbelonging (Christopher Ulutupu, 2023)
“A woman and children walk through a landscape wearing large velvet robes. Birds call, a river runs, and the sound of a bell radiates through deserted streets.
The Pleasures of Unbelonging, filmed in Hanmer Spring, a resort town in the Canterbury region of New Zealand’s South Island, unfolds through a series of dreamlike tableaux poised at the fringes of mystery and disquiet. With reference to James Baldwin’s Stranger in a Village, and leaning gently into the heady noir of Vertigo and Twin Peaks, Christopher Ulutupu’s new work stages a drama of encounter with the white gaze.” BFMAF