Culture

Last Paradise
Director: Clive Neeson
NZ IFF, Rialto
Friday August 6 , 6.15 pm
Saturday August 7, 5.30 pm

Last Paradise is a film with perhaps the longest gestation period in New Zealand cinema: filmmaker Clive Neeson spent forty years recording images of New Zealand’s outdoors and lost paradises from across the world. Neeson’s palate is broad – the action includes surf, snow-boarding, wind-surfing, kite-surfing, and skiing – and his tools range from the improvised hand-wound cameras of his youth, through 16mm to digital HD.
The Neeson journey started with a childhood in east Africa with his wildlife cinematographer parents. This unique upbringing indelibly inscribed Neeson with a love of both adventure and the moving image. In the early sixties Neeson and his family moved to Raglan in New Zealand. What followed was the stereotypical New Zealand childhood of the times, where “inside was silent and rule-bound but in the outdoors there was the freedom to take risks” – a style of upbringing Neeson fears is becoming lost. Neeson and his brothers and friends started to improvise their own fun and improvised the filming of their adventure, adapting technology in the number-8 wire method, documenting their activities and laying down an archive that was to be re-born at Park Road Post in Wellington, and which would be the genesis of Last Paradise.
I catch up with the filmmaker on the phone from Taranaki – his house is 50 metres from the beach and Neeson has just come in from the surf. Last Paradise is just about to be launched on the International Film Festival Screen (Dunedin, August 6 and 7, Rialto – though alas not on the Regent big screen). The film has already screened with success at festivals in the USA, garnering awards at the Ex-Dance festival and receiving a standing ovation and a repeat screening at Santa Barbara.
Incredibly this is Neeson’s first film, albeit one he has been working toward since the age of 15 – he has been waiting for the world to “come of age” and be ready for his film. And it is a film of huge ambition and scope. Neeson is not shy of describing the film as a “re-definition of documentary,” creating a whole new genre using the vehicle of the adrenaline filmmaking of action sports to address the great issues being faced by the world, environmentally, sociologically, and scientifically. Did I mention the scope of his ambition?
While he was working as an electronics consultant at Park Road, Neeson showed some of the footage to an editor who recognised the potential of this incredible archive and persuaded Neeson to start re-mastering the original footage. Neeson eventually established an archive of almost 20 hours of cinematic gold. He talks about the “synergy of co-incidence” that got the project up and running – that he happened to be a at Park Road, that he happened to show the footage to the right person, and that the technology is now in place to do justice to the archive footage.
The action footage is cut with interviews of the great innovators of the era: A. J. Hackett features alongside others who have become leaders in their fields. These characters embody the greater themes Neeson wants to express: that their relationship with the wilderness is now reflected in their current attitudes to the environment. The warning is implicit: that if we continue in the downward spiral of isolating children from the wilderness, there will be a consequence in future attitudes to the environment.
All of this results in a cinema experience which steps far outside the archetypical New Zealand experience of the so-called ‘cinema of unease’. Neeson explains: “I was motivated to make a film that embodied the true beauty and positiveness of New Zealand and New Zealanders. The New Zealand generally portrayed in film is not the New Zealand I know.” As the film debuts on the festival circuit Neeson is hoping it will be picked up for wider distribution and that the audience is ready to embrace a film that “celebrates the unique nature of Kiwi culture.”
Don’t miss your chance to catch this unique slice of New Zealand. Neeson will be there to present his film on August 6 and 7 at the Rialto.