The latest arts news from around the motu.

83-year-old poet and songwriter Tucker Zimmerman has had something of a cultural Forrest Gump of a career, and 2024 has found him gaining new-found fame.

Acclaimed album Dance of Love, out on 4AD records, is the result of a collaboration with fans who tracked him down in Belgium to record: folk-rockers of the moment Big Thief. 

It’s Tucker Zimmerman’s 15th album, in a recording career that stretches back to a 1968 debut produced in London with producer Tony Visconti - while another fan, David Bowie, waited in the corridor outside.

Culture 101 speaks to the artist from Berlin about his first solo show in New Zealand and is innovative approach to art.

Our Regional Wrap takes us to somewhere named after the Christmas city itself.

Since winning the coveted Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Anora has spent the past six months taking the movie world by storm. It finally arrives in New Zealand cinemas on Boxing Day.  

Anora stars Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Scream) as the titular character, a sex worker from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

It’s a 2024 thriller concerned with race, podcast-making and the criminal justice system high on a fair few 2024 best-of lists.

17 Years Later is Melbourne-based bestselling New Zealand writer JP Pomare’s seventh novel in as many years.

 In the book, it’s been 17 years since the violent stabbings of the British immigrant Primrose family while they slept, in Cambridge in the Waikato. And 17 years since the swift charge with the murders of the family's young live-in Māori chef Bill Kareama.

She joins Culture 101 to talk about her time in the South of France for the 2024 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, her new novel and her highlights of 2024.

The Pōhutukawa - our Christmas tree - once bountifully fringed the West Coast north of Taranaki, and the East Coast north of Tairāwhiti Gisborne. While now found even further south, these trees with their stunning gold tipped crimson blooms remain synonymous with summer on the Northern East Coast.  They are there, at the end of the garden, before the vivid blues of sea and sky in East Coast, a new body of paintings from one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most beloved painters, Karl Maughan. East Coast is at Gow Langsford Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland until 24 December

Renowned Māori actor and filmmaker Cliff Curtis has been honoured with the prestigious International Federation of Film Producers Associations Award at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

The event, held on Australia's Gold Coast, celebrated Curtis's outstanding contributions to the film industry.

A decades-long career has included iconic roles in Once Were Warriors, Training Day, Whale Rider, and more recently, the Avatar sequels directed by James Cameron.

Dean Roberts, aka The Moth, was an experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist who lived in Auckland, New York, Bologna and Berlin. A student of the sound artist Phil Dadson, he went on to lecture at Elam School of Fine Arts and Berlin’s dbs music school. He was also a total crack-up and spinner of excellent yarns.

In August, he died in his sleep in Lisbon, Portugal at the age of 49.