An aesthetically wounded, socially disparate peek into a place where time stands still, Minginui casts a far darker veil over a wilderness traditionally posterized by New Zealand cinema, writes TIM WONG.


IN ITS opening exchanges with a thick-bearded, tobacco-rolling man-of-the-bush, Minginui feels a lot like a Carlos Reygadas farmstead, what with its sunbaked outcrop and 360 degrees of nothingness, inhabited by a lone rifle-bearing figure in search of dinner. Later, two horses straddle each other in heat, an image that draws further allusions to the Mexico of Japón. This, however, is where the likeness ends; any resemblance smothered by a perpetual grey fog that neither drifts nor dissipates, but stands still like time itself. Arguably, Adam Luxton and Summer Agnew's documentary is an exercise in stasis, and yet its duration erodes gradually away, as if decomposing before our very eyes.

Formerly a village built to accommodate Forestry Department workers, the abolishment of native logging practices in the 1980's saw Minginui suffer a similar fate to towns crippled by the closure of freezing meatworks. Today, it is mainly inhabited by the people of Ngati Whare (pop. 280), whose roots bind them to the land, yet isolate them from wider civilisation. Buried only God-knows where beneath New Zealand's sprawling evergreen canopy (actually, in the heart of the North Island's Whirinaki Forest), the settlement is accessed via a single, solitary road in and out of the wilderness cocooning it. Today, satellite dishes protrude from the sides of dilapidated housing held together by half-woven streets and environmental overgrowth, patrolled by jobless residents in beat-up cars whose fuzzy TV reception and Christina Aguilera pop songs signify the only other remnants of a post-colonial society.

Meanwhile, Luxton and Agnew have fashioned a formless document of a community stuck in pause, book-ended by brief historic exposition but otherwise bereft of narration or judgement. Hauntingly composed in 16mm, the result is a deathly barrage of audio and visual decay, where New Zealand's much-celebrated landscape is no longer the endangered species of a Doris Lusk painting, or even the spiritual behemoth of a Colin McCahon, but an unbridled mother of nature that seems to be swallowing Minginui whole. Despite contentment among certain residents – some of whom revel in the tribal purity of seclusion, others who champion the low rent (privately owned by Ngati Whare, the village would be condemned under regional/governmental jurisdiction) – Minginui reads like a chapter from The Last Picture Show. However steadfast in cultural solidarity, the scars of abandonment remain: that overhanging fog really just a pent-up rain cloud of desertion and loss.

The revelation of the film itself is in its eerie antithesis to the Heartland thrills of Kaikohe Demolition, or the Shania Twain-owned acres of paradise gouged straight out of Lord of the Rings. Via its non-panoramic exposé of New Zealand's darker side, a tragi-beauty dialectic is at the forefront of its disquieting-yet-stoic backwardness. As an uneasy piece of filmmaking, it's also a partial, if not gradual step forward towards a more progressive, less conservative national cinema.