Culture 101

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 to start; Digger, Alejandro González Iñárritu's satirical thriller starring Tom Cruise as an oil tycoon who causes an environmental disaster and tries to spin himself as its saviour, with Rose Ahmed, Sandra Hüller and John Goodman; and The Wizard of the Kremlin, Olivier Assayas's adaptation of the satirical novel starring Paul Dano as a spin doctor recounting his role in the rise of Vladimir Putin, with Jude Law as Putin, which Michelle finds strangely wooden despite its considerable pedigree.

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 works including era-defining pieces Cold Dark Matter and War Room. Parker tells Perlina Lau about persuading the British Army, Julian Assange, the National Rifle Association and prison inmates to collaborate with her on different works, and why she has never worked in a traditional studio. The exhibition runs 10 October 2026 to 7 March 2027.

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 Conceived by writer and lecturer Catherine Chidgey, it's open to original, unpublished work of no more than 5,000 words, with a prize of $15,000 for the Open Division winner.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 disarmament to climate change to economic justice. Thorpe, a seven-time Fringe First winner who has written for the Royal Court and the Royal Exchange Manchester, got into theatre through a clerical error on a university application form at 17, applying for American Studies and ending up in an old church in Leeds instead. He also gives a pointed response to the government's proposal that arts funding gaps should be filled by private philanthropists.

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 electronics as tracing a space between the infinite and the infinitesimal, opening with sounds somewhere between a distress beacon and a Purcell aria before becoming increasingly personal. Cruikshank contributes a physical sculptural work in gun-blue steel with light projected through Braille holes, alongside a larger projected work to accompany the music. The two developed their ideas largely independently and are looking forward to what happens when the work meets for the first time on stage. Orbital performs at Rippon in Wanaka on Sunday 4 October at 2pm and 5pm.

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 friendship is put to the ultimate test, featuring the voices of H.E.R., Liza Soberano and Dave Franco; and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, direct from this year's New Zealand International Film Festival to AroVision, a French animation about the very specific challenge of going from two years old to three, and learning to be your own person in a confusing world.

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 begging his parents. Now based in Queensland, he's back as MC for this year's show, and the role evolves through the evening as Jason transforms into Leather Lungs on stage. The name came from a reviewer's offhand description and the fact that Judy Garland's nickname was Little Miss Leather Lungs.

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 a structural spine by the time he emerges on 4 October. His first publication was a 60-page single poem. The Spinoff described his work Inside the Castle as a potential landmark New Zealand poem of its era. He joins Culture 101 to talk about the economics of being a creative, a Dennis Cooper poem that woke him up at 16, and why he made $0.47 an hour on his last theatre production.

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 visited the gallery to speak with Sefton and Dina about what the show holds and what it cost to make.