Kathy Dudding

The 'stolen' insider emails that informed Nicky Hager's best-selling account of National's 2005 election campaign return in Alister Barry's (Someone Else's Country) new film - just in time to caution us against campaigning politicians in 2008. Addressing each other like schoolboy Machiavellis, party leader Don Brash and his advisors spelled out how they'd copy the big boys in Australia and the US in order to win the votes of people who'd never support the kind of policies such men are widely presumed to represent. The dividing and conquering began at Orewa.

Changes in official attitudes to mental illness are reflected in the architectural history of the New Zealand psychiatric institutions in Kathryn Dudding's delicately layered, emotionally loaded essay film. Dudding's film takes off from an unfinished photographic project undertaken with a partner who didn't stay around to see it through. Photographs of the abandoned Porirua Asylum would, emulating a Japanese tradition, evoke the poignance of impermanence and the passage of human suffering.