Movies about New Zealand

In the Antarctic, after an expedition with Dr. Davis McClaren, the sled dog trainer Jerry Shepherd has to leave the polar base with his colleagues due to the proximity of a heavy snow storm. He ties his dogs to be rescued after, but the mission is called-off and the dogs are left alone at their own fortune. For six months, Jerry tries to find a sponsor for a rescue mission.

Ricky is a defiant young city kid who finds himself on the run with his cantankerous foster uncle in the wild New Zealand bush. A national manhunt ensues, and the two are forced to put aside their differences and work together to survive.

Vampire housemates try to cope with the complexities of modern life and show a newly turned hipster some of the perks of being undead.

When a San Francisco exec wins a New Zealand inn, she ditches city life to remodel and flip the rustic property with help from a handsome contractor.

The life story of New Zealander Burt Munro, who spent years building a 1920 Indian motorcycle -- a bike which helped him set the land-speed world record at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats in 1967.

In a building site in present-day Tehran, Lateef, a 17-year-old Kurdish worker is irresistibly drawn to Rahmat, a young Afghan worker. When Lateef is given heavier tasks to compensate for new Afghan worker Rahmat, he resents his displacement and treats Rahmat cruelly. After one of his pranks, however, Lateef discovers Rahmat's secret--he is a girl named Baran. Latif's heart softens towards Baran and he shows his new affection for her by doing what he can to ease the hardships she suffers at work. revelation of Rahmat's secret changes both their lives.Baran is a 2001 Iranian film directed by Majid Majidi, based on an original script by Majid Majidi. The movie is set during recent times in which there are a large number of Afghan refugees living on the outskirts of Tehran. Almost a silent movie, Baran won a number of awards both nationally and internationally for the director and writer Majid Majidi.

Based on the autobiographical work of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, this production depicts the author at various stage of her life. Afflicted with mental and emotional issues, Frame grows up in an impoverished family and experiences numerous tragedies while still in her youth, including the deaths of two of her siblings. Portrayed as an adult by Kerry Fox, Frame finds acclaim for her writing while still in a mental institution, and her success helps her move on with her life.

The true story of Madalyn Murray O'Hair -- iconoclast, opportunist, and outspoken atheist -- from her controversial rise to her untimely demise.

Nige runs over and accidentally kills a Scandinavian soccer star in an unfortunate incident involving a hot meat pie, a ginger cat and a policeman. He chucks the body in a nearby road works hole and runs to his best mate of fifteen years, Deano. But Deano's not the guy you should turn to in a crisis...

A forest ranger is haunted by the disappearance of his four-year-old daughter, and the subsequent breakup of his marriage. He discovers his ex-wife Ana is pregnant to the policeman in charge of his missing daughter's case.

It's 1984, and Michael Jackson is king - even in Waihau Bay, New Zealand. Here we meet Boy, an 11-year-old who lives on a farm with his gran, a goat, and his younger brother, Rocky (who thinks he has magic powers). Shortly after Gran leaves for a week, Boy's father, Alamein, appears out of the blue. Having imagined a heroic version of his father during his absence, Boy comes face to face with the real version-an incompetent hoodlum who has returned to find a bag of money he buried years before. This is where the goat enters.

Two teenage boys unwittingly summon an ancient evil entity known as The Blind One by delving into black magic while trying to escape their mundane lives.

The Almighty Johnsons is a New Zealand fantasy comedy/drama television series, which was created by James Griffin and Rachel Lang and is produced by South Pacific Pictures. It began airing its first series of ten episodes in New Zealand on 7 February 2011.

Diagnosed with an incurable illness, Charles, a rugby tycoon who has made a fortune in New Zealand prints an ad in his hometown looking for his sister that he's not seen in fifty years. A notary clerk, believing that Charles has a terminal illness responds to Charles' search for heirs claiming to be his sister. Charles finds that he was misdiagnosed and returns to France to meet his long lost sister.

John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam pay tribute to their late Monty Python colleague Graham Chapman in this hilarious, 3-D animated adaptation of Chapman's brazenly fictionalized life story. (TIFF)

Two young couples head into the New Guinea wilderness in an effort to find Michael Rockefeller, the heir to the Rockefeller fortune who disappeared in 1961.

Hongi, a Maori chieftain’s teenage son, must avenge his father’s murder in order to bring peace and honour to the souls of his loved ones after his tribe is slaughtered through an act of treachery. Vastly outnumbered by a band of villains led by Wirepa, Hongi’s only hope is to pass through the feared and forbidden “Dead Lands” and forge an uneasy alliance with a mysterious warrior, a ruthless fighter who has ruled the area for years.

Elza lives in a small town in the Republic of Kalmykia on the Caspian Sea. Another year comes to an end, it’s cold and the steppe is covered in a thin layer of snow. When her husband, who makes a living from illegal fishing, asks her one night what she did during the day, she lies. She wasn’t at her mother’s, but at the bus stop. She thought of leaving – to find out what it might be to escape the infinite expanse of her dreary small world. But she didn’t dare; instead she stays and withdraws into herself, unconcerned by who might see. One day, her husband doesn’t return from a dangerous boat trip. It is said that a fisherman only returns if he has a woman waiting for him and that seagulls are the souls of the missing. At the start of a somewhat unplanned pregnancy, widowed and alone, Elza wanders ever further through the city, plotting a path between tradition and the contemporary until she’s no longer on familiar ground.

Two teenagers, Mary (Hayley Mills) and Robert (Keith Hamshere) are lead by Professor Paganel (Maurice Chevalier) on a search expedition for the children's shipwrecked sea captain father. This Disney film was based upon Jules Verne's 1868 adventure novel Captain Grant's Children.

Little Secret is a film with three interlocked stories all connected by a single secret that converge to reveal the tragic yet beautiful lives of three families and how hope, dreams and destiny can unite people from very different parts of the world.

After dying before his time, an aspiring comic gets a second shot at life... by being reincarnated as a wealthy but un-likable businessman.

Gus is a fat cartoonist that recently won a battle against cancer, which explains his baldness. But he is also lonely. Therefore, his caring sister tries to set him up with suitable woman. But to do so, she must turn him into an irresistible man. When he falls in love with Emily, Gus takes the identity of a mysterious biker from New Zealand.

One-time Maori speed-chess champ, Genesis Potini, lives with a bi-polar disorder and must overcome prejudice and violence in the battle to save his struggling chess club, his family and ultimately, himself.

Two people meet again after more than 50 years. They were lovers once, but their lives took different turns: she married his best friend. Fifty years later, they meet again and passion flares up. But is it possible to pick up the thread of a life that unraveled fifty years ago? The story of a wonderful last love affair, which is relived with the intensity of a first.

Ivan is the fierce patriarch of a family of Croatian refugees in Auckland. Nina is his daughter, ready to live on her own, despite his angry objections. Eddie is the Maori she takes as her lover. Nina works at a restaurant where Eddie cooks. For a price, she agrees to marry a Chinese, another restaurant employee, so that he (and his Chinese wife) can establish permanent residency. The money gives her the independence she needs to leave her parents' house and move in with Eddie. Complications arise when Eddie realizes the depth of her father's fury and the strength of Nina's family ties.

This is the story of daredevil stuntman Randy Cambell and his quest to follow in his late father's footsteps and become New Zealand's greatest daredevil stuntman by performing the ultimate daredevil stunt: jumping across Cook Strait in a rocket car!

The life story of Colin McKenzie, a forgotten pioneer of international cinema who was born in rural New Zealand in 1888.

The dramatic story of US marines in training, in combat and in love during World War II. The story centres on a major who guides the raw recruits from their training to combat. Based on the novel by Leon Uris.

On the east coast of New Zealand, the Whangara people believe their presence there dates back a thousand years or more to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death when his canoe capsized by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From then on, Whangara chiefs, always the first-born, always male, have been considered Paikea's direct descendants. Pai, an 11-year-old girl in a patriarchal New Zealand tribe, believes she is destined to be the new chief. But her grandfather Koro is bound by tradition to pick a male leader. Pai loves Koro more than anyone in the world, but she must fight him and a thousand years of tradition to fulfill her destiny.

In a lake high in the mountains of New Zealand hunter Gibbie Gibson discovers a plane wreck from WW2. When he tells it around, a gang of crooks follows and threatens him and his daughter, because they know there are 50 million dollars in the wreck. Helicopter pilot Barney helps Gibbie against them, risking his life thereby.

The story of Ollie and Zoe, a newly engaged couple who agree to try out an open relationship.

An unconventional love story between an antisocial teenager, a Scotsman and a five-year-old girl.

This remake of 1981’s Goodbye Pork Pie tracks the escapades of a trio of accidental outlaws as they travel the length of New Zealand protesting conformity and chasing lost love, with a posse of cops and a media frenzy in pursuit.

When a terrified family flees a desolate southern New Zealand farmhouse, two cynical scientists and a young psychic are sent to investigate their claims of a haunting. There they encounter a powerful spirit that will protect the house's secrets at all costs.

Paul (Macfadyen), a prize-winning war journalist, returns to his remote New Zealand hometown due to the death of his father, battle-scarred and world-weary. For the discontented sixteen-year-old Celia (Barclay) he opens up a world she has only dreamed of. She actively pursues a friendship with him, fascinated by his cynicism and experience of the world beyond her small-town existence. But many, including the members of both their families (Otto, Moy), frown upon the friendship and when Celia goes missing, Paul becomes the increasingly loathed and persecuted prime suspect in her disappearance. As the violent and urgent truth gradually emerges, Paul is forced to confront the family tragedy and betrayal that he ran from as a youth, and to face the grievous consequences of silence and secrecy that has surrounded his entire adult life.

A genetic engineering experiment gone horribly awry turns a large flock of docile sheep into unrelenting killing machines in this rural horror comedy directed by Jonathan King and featuring special effects designed by Weta Workshop.

An intimate story set during the 1860s in which a young Irish woman Sarah and her family find themselves on both sides of the turbulent wars between British and Maori during the British colonization of New Zealand.

Teenage twins battle dark forces hidden beneath Auckland's volcanoes.

The vampire myth is given a stylish 1960s treatment, where a human cop partners with a vampire cop to stop a vamp bent on creating a war between the two "separate but equal" races.

When Melanie goes home from the pub with a handsome stranger, she’s captivated by his charm and attentiveness. He sails her away to his ‘castle’- a rundown shack on a deserted island. But when seduction becomes deception and passion becomes possession, Melanie realizes that she has been kidnapped. Torn between fear and desire, Melanie must escape – but her ardent admirer has other plans.

Set in the Channel Islands on the eve of D Day, two Kiwi commandos, sent to destroy German gun emplacements to distract Hitler's forces away from Normandy, discover a Nazi occult plot to unleash demonic forces to win the war.

Wealthy and precocious teenager Juliet transfers from England to New Zealand with her family, and soon befriends the quiet, brooding Pauline through their shared love of fantasy and literature. When their parents begin to suspect that their increasingly intense and obsessive bond is becoming unhealthy, the girls hatch a dark plan for those who threaten to keep them apart.

A 3D feature film about Sir Edmund Hillary's monumental and historical ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953 - an event that stunned the world and defined a nation.

Love Birds is a hilarious charming romantic comedy that tells the story of a regular Kiwi bloke who finds himself on a quest to find true love – all with the help of a native New Zealand Shelduck. Comedian Rhys Darby (Flight of the Conchords, The Boat That Rocked) plays Doug – a road working employee and massive fan of the legendary band Queen, along with Golden-Globe Award winning actress Sally Hawkins (Made In Dagenham) who plays Holly the sassy animal specialist.

In the 14th century a village seeking escape from the Black Death are guided by a boy's vision to tunnel into an abandoned mine and emerge into 20th century New Zealand.

An ex-Boer war guerrilla in New Zealand is sent out to bring back a Maori accused of killing a British soldier. Gradually they grow to know and respect one another but a posse, led by the British Commanding officer is close behind and his sole intention is to see the Maori hang. Written by Filmfinders 1903. A guerilla fighter from the South African Boer war called Arjan (Winstone) takes on a manhunt for Maori seaman Kereama (Morrison), who is accused of murdering a British soldier. What follows is a cat and mouse pursuit through the varied landscape of NZ with both hunter and huntee testing their bushcraft and wits against that of the other. Written by Anonymous

American tattoo artist Jake Sawyer wanders the world, exploring and exploiting ethnic themes in his tattoo designs. At a tattoo expo in Singapore, he gets his first glimpse at the exotic world of traditional Samoan tattoo (tatau), and, in a thoughtless act, unwittingly unleashes a powerful angry spirit. In his devastating journey into Pacific mysticism, Jake must find a way to save his new love, Sina and recover his own soul.

A small-town criminal finds an ancient Chinese time-travel device that can help him pull off a heist and start a new life-but he may not survive the consequences of tampering with time. The Castle meets Looper, Mega Time Squad is a study in high-meets-low, combining elements of the sci-fi, the crime thriller and the comedy to make a comedy heist film with a time-traveling twist.

A dysfunctional gang of criminals takes a middle class Maori family hostage and discovers too late that they are cannibals.

Ordinary people find extraordinary courage in the face of madness. On 13–14 November 1990 that madness came to Aramoana, a small New Zealand seaside town, in the form of a lone gunman with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle. As he stalked his victims the terrified and confused residents were trapped for 24 hours while a handful of under-resourced and under-armed local policemen risked their lives trying to find him and save the survivors. Based on true events.