Culture 101

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his picks for October. He recommends Happiness Season Two on Three and ThreeNow, the local musical comedy about an ex-Broadway director forced to return to Tauranga, which won him over completely in its first season and hasn't dropped the ball in its second. He's enthusiastic about Kill Jackie on Neon, a stylised Catherine Zeta-Jones action thriller with comic...

Magenta Creative Space is Nelson's only fully resourced creative studio, giving people the chance to try their hand at a range of artforms. Strategic director Rose McGrannagan joins Culture 101 to talk about what the space offers, why it's been struggling to stay open, and the fundraising effort underway to carry it through the year.

Rua is the debut novel of Candice Tutauha, who completed a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland and has spent close to a decade developing the story. It follows a young Maori woman in a tight-knit small town who dreams of becoming a writer and moving to New York City, navigating gang tensions, domestic violence and the weight of community expectation. When a soldier's diary fro...

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: Big Girls Don't Cry, Paloma Schneiderman's Sundance Audience Award-winning debut feature and New Zealand International Film Festival Best Film winner, starring newcomer Eny Palmer as a teenager navigating an Omaha summer in 2006, which Michelle describes as acutely observed and immersive in the way it captures that teenage feeling of waiting for life...

Cornelia Parker is one of Britain's most celebrated contemporary artists, known for large-scale installations that begin with acts of destruction. Her 2022 retrospective at Tate Britain cemented her status. She's now in Wellington for the opening of her first solo public gallery exhibition in New Zealand, at the newly earthquake-strengthened City Gallery Wellington, bringing together more than 50...

The Sargeson Prize is New Zealand's richest short story competition, named after Frank Sargeson and sponsored by the University of Waikato. Conceived by writer and lecturer Catherine Chidgey, it's open to original, unpublished work of no more than 5,000 words, with a prize of $15,000 for the Open Division winner. The award evening took place last night. Perlina Lau speaks with this year's winner.

Manchester writer and theatre maker Chris Thorpe spent the week in Aotearoa running an intensive workshop, Conversations for Impossible Times, organised by Playmarket and the British Council. The workshop brought together 16 practitioners including Pip Hall, Sam Brooks, Ni Dekkers-Reihana and Alice Canton to explore how theatre can engage with subjects that feel overwhelming, from nuclear disarmam...

At The World's Edge is a non-profit chamber music festival running 3 to 16 October across the Queenstown Lakes, founded by violinists Benjamin Baker and Justine Cormack. This year's programme includes Orbital, a new commission pairing Victoria University composer Michael Norris with Arrowtown-based artist and designer Ed Cruikshank. Norris describes the 15-minute piece for string trio and live ele...

Dan Slevin reviews three family animation releases: Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, a Halloween special from Aardman in which Shaun accidentally mixes a pumpkin growth serum with the farmer's hair tonic, with predictably chaotic results; Forgotten Island, an animation inspired by Philippine mythology following two best friends who discover a portal to a magical island where their frien...

Jason Chasland, known as cabaret performer Leather Lungs, was discovered at WOW in 2004 when Dame Susie Moncrieff came into his Wellington performing arts school while he was rehearsing Rocky Horror in shiny heels and liked what she saw. He grew up on a farm in Wairarapa where his father was a farmer, a bodybuilder and a wood chopper, and started in community theatre in Carterton aged seven after...

Actor and filmmaker Romy Hooper won the global CinemaStreet Women's Short Screenplay Competition with her script The Gap, becoming the first New Zealander to take the award from 125 entrants. She's now crowd-funding to produce the film in New York.

Josiah Morgan is a Christchurch-based poet, theatre practitioner and editor heading to Dunedin this week as Young Writer in Residence at the Robert Lord Writers Cottage, as part of the New Zealand Young Writers Festival. He is working on a poem of around 100 pages in which a person attempts to surgically transform their body into that of a moa, and expects to have the first quarter of a draft and...

Sefton Rani lived in Piha and lost his home and studio in Cyclone Gabrielle. His first institutional solo exhibition, Clear My Throat, is now showing at Pah Homestead in Tamaki Makaurau until 15 November. The show uses industrial and hard materials across large sculptures and installations, and curator Dina Jezdic has placed it in dialogue with the colonial history of the homestead itself. Perlina...

Cabaret turns 60 this year and is closing out Auckland Theatre Company's season at the ASB Waterfront Theatre, running 22 September to 25 October. Nomi Cohen plays Sally Bowles, the role made famous by Liza Minnelli in the 1972 film. Cohen has a Bachelor of Performing Arts in Musical Theatre, trained at the Actor's Programme. She joins Culture 101 to talk about inhabiting a character so embedded i...

Kate Rodger joins Culture 101 with the latest from the big screen.

Kate Rodger joins Culture 101 with the latest from the big screen.

Peter Salmon directed all six episodes of After the Party and came out the other side burnt out, so his next move was a comedy. Good Bones is a horror-comedy on ThreeNow and Neon starring Josh Thomson as a procrastinating husband whose marriage hinges on his ability to renovate a murder house. Salmon describes finding tone as the hardest and most instinctive part of directing, something he often d...

In(Visible) Stories is a new online archive tracking the history and current movements of Pan-Asian film, television and screen creators in Aotearoa, created by Dr Sarina Pearson and Dr Shuchi Kothari through their Asian New Zealanders on Screen Research Project, funded by the Royal Society Marsden Fund. The project maps work written, directed and produced by the Pan-Asian community, filling a gap...

Reo Journeys: Te Pou Herenga Tai is a new five-part RNZ podcast debuting this afternoon, following documentary makers Eugene Bingham and Adam Dudding as they cycle the 90km Twin Coast Cycle Trail in Northland, with sound recordist and composer James Dansey recording the land, the people and the korero along the way. Dansey came to the project through te reo Maori class with Eugene and Adam, and de...

Production designer Ashley Turner and costume, hair and makeup designer Lissy Turner are the pair who built the world of Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, the local body-horror comedy now in cinemas. They set the film in what they described internally as aspirational Invercargill, a deliberately familiar semi-rural New Zealand brick-and-tile apartment that makes the alien elements land harder when they arr...

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: The Rivals of Azmiah King, Andrew Patterson's film with Matthew McConaughey as a beekeeper and bluegrass musician reconnecting with his former foster daughter while fending off threats to his honey business; The Weight, in which Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe star in a Great Depression survival story about smuggling gold through a hundred miles of wild...

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: The Rivals of Azmiah King, Andrew Patterson's film with Matthew McConaughey as a beekeeper and bluegrass musician reconnecting with his former foster daughter while fending off threats to his honey business; The Weight, in which Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe star in a Great Depression survival story about smuggling gold through a hundred miles of wild...

Auckland's City Rail Link opens today, and two of the artists whose work now fills the new underground stations joined Perlina for a guided walk-through. At Karanga-a-hape Station, Reuben Kirkwood designed a vaulted ceiling made from metal sections inspired by the pupurangi, a large snail that lives in the trees, alongside carved kauri lunar discs and a sun-and-moon installation tracking the tides...

Jess Reiner Reed is the senior project director for Wolverine at Insomniac Games, the studio best known for its Spider-Man series. She's visiting New Zealand for the game's release and joins Culture 101 to talk about what you have to get right when you take on a character that exists across decades of comics, films and cartoons, how her team landed on a specific vision rather than trying to please...

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his picks for September. He recommends Good Bones on Three, Josh Thompson's new mystery dramedy about a procrastinating home renovator who discovers a body behind a wall, calling it frighteningly good; A Killer Story on HBO Max, a three-part true crime about a true-crime-obsessed couple who spend years emailing a sceptical New York Times journalist with eviden...