Having already announced the Sundance-premiered Mum I’m Alien Pregnant and Annecy-premiered Kiri and Lou Go Raaa!, plus a couple more local titles as the festival opener (Paloma Schneiderman’s Big Girls Don’t Cry just announced as a winner in Biarritz), and centrepiece screening (Gavin Fitzgerald and Vea Mafile’o’s Lomu), the NZIFF has now rolled out the titles for its local strand, Māhutonga.
Fiction features named are Kieran Charnock and Jonathan Watt’s mockumentary In Search of My Moehau, Conor Bowden’s The Ungrateful Tenant, made with much of the team that brought The Weed Eaters to last year’s NZIFF, and Ryan Alexander Lloyd’s Uncle.
Docos in the mix include Gwen Isaac’s Be Merry, Pietra Brettkelly’s Crocodile (above), Gerd Pohlmann’s Last Man Standing, and Mark Papalii’s My Humble Friend, Fonotī Pati Umaga.
Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! is NZ’s first stop-motion animated feature. NZ’s first animated feature, 1986’s Footrot Flats, now remastered, also plays in the festival’s retrospective Treasures strand, along with Rob Sarkies’ 2006 Out of the Blue. Another blast from the local past, Philip Howe’s 1979 doco Nambassa Festival, plays in the Rhythms strand.
14 Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Best shorts play in competition across two screening programmes, and there’s also an outing for the nine Wave in the Ocean titles (five of which also play in the Ngā Whanaunga line-ups).
The 2026 NZIFF opens in Auckland on 29 July.
