Sir Roger Hall remains Aotearoa New Zealand’s most popular playwright. Since 1976 his plays have often been box office gold. 

Now 85, and continuing to write plays through retirement, he recently told The Post he’d be happiest to die in front of the keyboard. He talks about his latest play - about an investment art club - to Culture 101.

This week King Loser, an independent Aotearoa New Zealand documentary won the Taite Music Prize for music journalism. Directors Cushla Dillon and Andrew Moore’s real life tragicomic chronicle of King Loser, a beloved cult rock and roll band trying to make a comeback, is a thing of excellence. 

But where do you go to see it? Netflix, Neon, Disney? Think again. TVNZ Plus? Not even.

The good news is King Loser does have one streaming provider following its small cinema premiere at last year’s International Film Festival. Arovision is a local independent streaming platform borne from a legendary video and DVD service. Incredibly, it’s still running after 35 years and the Aro Video Store is one of only seven DVD and video stores RNZ can determine remaining nationally.

It’s the 10th season of Loading Docs - an initiative to showcase Aotearoa’s documentary  filmmakers. For a decade, it’s helped mentor emerging talent who’ve gone on to pursue successful careers in the screen industry.

It’s rare for an Aotearoa New Zealand writer to appear at book festivals about a novel, months out from its release. But then the sequel to a book as beloved and devastating as 2019’s Auē by Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu) is no small event.  

As Auckland Writers Festival has aptly put it, Westport based Becky Manawatu’s debut novel took both the public and literary world by storm. The winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, it’s a book of poetic beauty charged by Aotearoa’s coastal landscape, but  unrelenting in dealing with the trauma and visible damage to whanau of domestic violence and gang culture.  

Sequel Kataraina will be published again by Makaro Press on 1 September, and it centres its narrative around a central but quieter character in Auē, Aunty Kat.

Arts news for Sunday 21 April 2024

Pōneke based poet and journalist Abdul Samad Haidari became a refugee at the age of 10. For Haidari poetry has been a way to cope with the trauma and to turn it into empowerment. His second book of poetry The Unsent Condolences was launched recently at Unity Books in Pōneke Wellington.

Intimacy coordination is a relatively new concept both in Aotearoa and across the world. Borne from the #MeToo movement, it’s a way to keep actors and crew safe on film and television sets and in theatre productions.

It’s known as ‘mural town’, it's Aotearoa New Zealand’s avocado capital and this week it’s the focus of Culture 101’s regional wrap.

The Aotearoa Art Fair is the apex of the art market food chain. This weekend on the Tāmaki Makaurau waterfront, the public, 32 dealers and many curators from around Aotearoa come happily together at the fair for both the market and a champagne-charged party.

Oscar-nominated US filmmaker Ava Duvernay’s new thought-provoking film Origin is based on the New York Times bestselling book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.