Web series TransGenerations won Best Web Series at the Berlin Short Film Festival. The production’s core team is chock full of DEGANZ members, with Naashon Zalk as Producer and DOP, Jai Waite as Editor, and Ramon Te Wake as Executive Producer.
Since its release, the series has screened in a plethora of festivals ranging from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Korea, and now Germany.
The series platforms trans rights activists to share their stories and shine a light on trans experiences in Aotearoa. Across eight parts, trans people in their 20s to their 70s talk openly about their lives, identities, and passions, while discussing stereotypes, politics, and prejudice.
In the past few years, there has been an alarming international rise in anti-trans rhetoric, anti-trans violence and anti-trans legislation. We hope this series helps, in its own small way, to counterbalance that by showing the realities of what it means to be trans in this day and age.
https://www.deganz.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/TransGenerations-Berlin.jpg4561200admin/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/DEGANZ_logo_home.pngadmin2023-11-21 14:58:222023-11-21 14:58:22‘TransGenerations’ Wins at Berlin Short Film Festival
DEGANZ members heavily populated the selection lineup this year, with many of their projects going on to win awards. Well done to all members involved, and congratulations to the winners!
Best Music Video, NZ
Don’t Expect the World
Director & Editor: Joe Murdie
Best Performance, NZ Short Fiction
Romain Mereau – Solitaire
Writer/Director: Brian Gill
NZ Web Series
Best Trailer
Ahikāroa
Series Editor, Writer, Storyliner, & Script Editor: Onehou Strickland
https://www.deganz.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/NZWF-Winners.jpg4561200admin/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/DEGANZ_logo_home.pngadmin2023-11-17 11:31:112023-11-23 14:42:15… and We Have the (NZ Web Fest) Winners!
NZ Web Fest was created in 2015 to celebrate web series and online video content. Over the years, the festival has evolved and was accepted as a participating festival in the Web Series World Cup in 2017 and expanded to include podcasts in 2022. The festival will occur online this November.
Amelia Merton takes a seemingly casual walk in the wilderness. The innocent and carefree nature of the walk is juxtaposed with the dark secret of the protagonist’s actions, creating a dramatic and unexpected ending.
Joel is about to walk into a small graduation party he’s having with some friends when he gets the phone call telling him that his best friend, Terry, has died.
Editor: Max Helbick
* Nominated for Best Student Film, NZ Short Fiction
We’ve all been there. The nervousness, the pressure. Making. That. First. Impression. Set in a lush beautiful cafe on the perimeter of Auckland City, an awkward journalist’s first date is upended by a man spotted in the cafe window.
Writer/Director, Producer, & Editor: James Fink-Jensen
* Nominated for Best Writing, NZ Short Fiction & Best Performance, NZ Short Fiction (x2)
Freya Daly Sadgrove is an emerging New Zealand poet, riding the success of her collection Head Girl — but acutely aware that something has to come next. With her multi-poet show Show Ponies, she’s determined to jam together poetry, punk, sex, sizzle, and theatre, shaking poetry performance loose from its conventions. But not everyone is supportive of her unconventional ideas.
Drag Icon Misty Frequency’s kaupapa is to celebrate Autistic and Takatāpui excellence. They are looking to storm the stage at the Drag Wars competition with a cash prize up for grabs.
Director: Justin Scott
Editor: Brendon Chan
Assistant Editor: Laura McBeath
* Nominated for Best Directing, Short Documentary & Best Film, Short Documentary
Follow a crazy group of city-based rangatahi, they’re young, kura kaupapa raised and dangerously onto it. Their world orbits around getting cash, cutting corners, and charging their phones.
You’re invited to Misha, Rāwhiti, Poe Tiare, Alison, and Tristan’s 21sts, getting a snapshot of what it looks like to become an adult across different walks of life in Aotearoa.
Pan-Asian New Zealanders tell stories from their love lives on their own terms, from situationships and mediocre hookups to devastating breakups and complicated emotional needs.
A partly animated doco series about resilience and anxiety, Fight or Flight interviewed 12 young people about their challenges with anxiety or depression.
A look at homelessness from the inside. A colourful, diverse, harsh, and often tragic world of the people living on and around Auckland’s Karangahape Road.
Following the 2020 Covid travel restrictions, No Place Like Home follows six couples as they return to New Zealand after those years spent abroad to rebuild their lives, often from scratch. Their stories are in turn uplifting, challenging, heart-breaking, and joyful.
A docu-series that tries to figure out what’s going on with young people post-2020 f**kery. How do Aotearoa’s rangitahi feel about “these unprecedented times”? Do we fixate on the demise of civilization every night before bed? More importantly, what do we care about? Seventeen participants spread across seven small towns and one big town make up this intimate, funny, and thoughtful series.
An eight-part web series, that tells the stories of transgender Kiwis from their late 70s to early 20s, documenting the history of trans experience in New Zealand and dispelling stereotypes about who trans people are.
Drag Icon Misty Frequency’s kaupapa is to celebrate Autistic and Takatāpui excellence. They are looking to storm the stage at the Drag Wars competition with a cash prize up for grabs.
Editor: Brendon Chan
Assistant Editor: Laura McBeath
* Nominated for Best Directing, Short Documentary & Best Film, Short Documentary
https://www.deganz.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/NZ-WebFest-2023.jpg4561200admin/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/DEGANZ_logo_home.pngadmin2023-10-09 13:28:202023-10-12 10:41:36Best of the Best at NZ WebFest
Award-winning docuseries Still Here is back for season two, with multiple DEGANZ members on the team! Litia Tuiburelevu (DEGANZ) directed and co-produced the series with fellow member Josh Yong as supervising producer and executive producer. Josh also edited episode four and provided additional editing for the first three. Also on the editorial team is Frangipani Foulkes (DEGANZ) as assistant editor for all four episodes.
Still Here celebrates the Pasifika community living in inner-city Auckland despite the decades of gentrification attempting to push them out. Season two profiles millennials from the remaining Pasifika families living in Tāmaki Makaurau’s affluent suburbs of Grey Lynn, Herne Bay, Ponsonby, and Western Springs. This season expands on season one’s core themes of resilience, identity, and identification, using an intergenerational lens to tell the story.
Some stories highlighted this season include Leki Jackson-Bourke, a community centre youth leader fighting to revitalise the Niuean language and culture, and Samoa House, the first-ever fale built outside Samoa, hidden in plain sight on K’ Road. Each episode is a love letter to the community it focuses on but emphasises the issues that threaten them.
The show is an unapologetic reminder of the Pasifika community’s unique Central Auckland indignity, proudly embraced by the younger generations, and that they and their families are still here.
https://www.deganz.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Still-Here.jpg4561200admin/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/DEGANZ_logo_home.pngadmin2023-09-26 14:06:042023-09-26 14:06:04‘Still Here’ for Season Two
K’ Road Chronicles is back for a third groundbreaking season with DEGANZ member Benjamin Murray on board as assistant editor.
The web series amplifies the voices of the homeless and impoverished in Aotearoa. It all started with transgender journalist Six, who publishes a street newspaper of the same name that shares the authentic stories of people living on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. She has since taken these stories to the screen with the docu-series. She interviews ‘streeties’ and tells their stories through a uniquely empathic lens, as she was homeless herself and called K’ Road home for many years.
Since the series’ inception in 2019, when Six wanted to explore how COVID-19 impacted people living on the streets, the show has amassed great success. While season one was produced using the NZOA minority interest fund, later seasons (still made with the support of NZOA) are presented with Stuff, bringing these stories to a more mainstream and wider audience. Yet, the show does not shy away from the taboo when discussing the realities of homelessness. Six unabashedly dives into topics of drug use and abuse, poverty, sex work, inequality, and social justice.
This season, audiences meet Raymond, a former gang enforcer who turned his life around by helping others, and Danielle, who started feeding the hungry while she was homeless. The show catches up with Mickey the Rat, a former drug dealer and addict living in a cemetery. The show also highlights efforts to ease the lives of the homeless. Episode one looks at how Orange Sky, an Australian charity, provides mobile shower and laundry services to rough sleepers.
https://www.deganz.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/K-Rd-Chronicles.jpg4561200admin/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/DEGANZ_logo_home.pngadmin2023-08-29 12:29:492023-08-31 12:55:13‘K Road Chronicles’ – a Celebration of the Human Spirit
