Visibility challenging for winner of Best Film: Ngā Whanaunga Māori Pasifika Shorts

Alex Liu​ has spent every spare moment in the last five years doing what ever he could to get his short film Smog in front of an audience.

Now his “domestic drama within the facade of a dystopian thriller” has taken out the best film award in this year’s Ngā Whanaunga Māori Pasifika Shorts Competition.

“There was a lot of calling in favours and doing what I could to get things done,” Liu said.

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Smog is the story of survival amid an abusive, overbearing relationship within claustrophobic layers of thick, deadly smog that has blanketed the globe.

“That feeling of being trapped and death is just outside the door. I think the experience of lockdown has allowed people to relate even more closely,” he said.

Liu said he wrote the script to the film in 2017 before he truly understood the complications of creating his “high concept” script with a small budget. The film was funded by nearly equal thirds crowdfunding campaign, his own finances and a relatively small $10,000 film commission grant.

“I was pretty cocky and confident, not actually understanding the implications of what I’d written [being] quite a big undertaking,” Liu said.

He threw himself into every aspect of the project from stabbing bags of sand for sound effects to recording a song with a local Frank Sinatra impersonator in his home and even borrowing the set from another film on the proviso that he and his crew would dismantle it after filming.

“I went home, went to sleep and came back the next day and took an axe to it,” Liu said.

Liu, whose day job is as a visual journalist for Stuff, said the desire to deliver the film to the people who had supported him kept him going even if there were times when he was sick of the long-running project.

“Five years is a long time to be involved in a project. You can become disillusioned and frustrated with it,” he said.

The award would help give him a boost of confidence as he looked to approach funding bodies for his first feature film, a dark comedy thriller he hoped would begin filming in 2023.

The Ngā Whanaunga Māori Pasifika Shorts section of the Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival had also allowed him to stand alongside his Māori and Pasifika filmmaking contemporaries, Liu said.

“It’s so valuable to be meeting people with that Māori and Pasifika viewpoint. It’s creating such a beautiful community of people, a database of cultural talent.”

Once the festival showing was concluded he planned to release the film online and give his backers a chance to see what their contributions, efforts and favours had gone towards.

“It’s been a real labour of love, but I wouldn’t have got anywhere near finishing it without their support,“ he said.