The five shorts in Homegrown: Works on Film were unified by a common focus on the eccentricities and creativity of New Zealand’s youth, stifled but never fully suffocated by intrusions from the Real World. Of course, Wellington’s celebrated Oscar dozer most famously showed how richly this recipe can be realised if personal touches are balanced against the limits of such a perspective and format. And if verisimilitude is the key, then Mark Albiston’s Run wins for extolling experimental shenanigans while Dad’s passed out drunk. Very funny at times, superb performances from kids and adults alike, and a nice piano score too. The other Cannes veteran, Fog, posed a depressing question: What if you grew up trawling fish at dawn in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Ngawi)? The crashing sea and the thick, blank fog speak as much as the young leads, whose defiance of authority is equally elemental. In Clean Linen, Daddy should have hidden his pornos better, because when mum finds out what the kids have been watching, the repercussions are dire. It was nice to see that for all the cultural differences, the expectations of the parents and the dynamics of the family – first generation Indian New Zealanders – paralleled their Kiwi counterparts and families the world around. For all the films, the post-production (courtesy of Park Road) was beautiful and sophisticated, but it did jar a little with the idealised view of provincial New Zealand on offer. I know there’s still plenty of VHS tapes and kitsch wallpaper out there, but haven’t we moved on from milkmen and glass bottles?

While the ecological epiphanies of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky provided the impetus for Manufactured Landscapes, his epic subject matter and breathtaking photos quickly surpassed the philosopher. Focusing on the effects that massive industries have on natural landscapes, Burtynsky was followed around China by Jennifer Baichwal and crew as he took on two transforming titans: the Three Gorges Dam and the Shanghai property boom. The scale and detail Burtynsky manages to snap may well redefine your concept of mind-boggling. He divines deep beauty even among the dusty Yangtze cities, dismantled brick-by-brick to make way for the Great Dam of China: urgent questions of enormous social and economic change have never been posed so prettily.

The kitset paradises of Lego and Ikea come a cropper in the surreal Scandinavian satire The Bothersome Man. Andreas awakens one morning to the job, woman and life he always wanted, but gradually asks himself what’s the point of this fool’s paradise if the milk and honey has no taste, and no drinks can drown the banality of perfect satisfaction when there aren’t any senses to deprive. Then Kafka passes the pen for Charlie Kaufman to have a crack, when Andreas uncovers a ray of hope, gleaming through a crack in a basement wall, to a life of possibilities beyond. The drained grey and azure palette is a perfect match for a wacky world of interior design and small talk, where the picket fences are so lovely you just want to impale yourself on them. The script is as sharp as a switchblade, the humour brutally deadpan, and the scores from Ginge and Grieg achingly beautiful.—Joe Sheppard