Vigil at the Film Archive

Vigil at the Film Archive

Vigil (1984) is film making at its finest and most satisfying. There are few films where the New Zealand landscape takes on the ominous and unrelenting power of the farm in Vigil.

The film tells the story of an eleven-year-old girl named Toss (Fiona Kay), who has the imagination and independence to meet the landscape head on.

“As a child growing up on a farm, you are alone for long periods of time. You invent imaginary worlds. Vigil is precisely that: the story of a solitary child who watches, fantasises and dreams. The fragments of reality she perceives are put together according to her own logic”. - Vincent Ward, director

“Vigil is the strongest, most personally inspired film to come out of New Zealand to date. In form and content, and in its detailed and immaculate concern with visual imagery, it establishes in a single blow the place of its creator, 27-year-old Vincent Ward, as a unique film talent. [...] It is young Fiona Kay who is the essential touchstone of the piece and with her Ward has discovered a near-perfect alter ego. Her Toss is imbued with restless inner intensity that is always compelling. Her elfin quality resides in the truest sense of that description, mischievously supernatural, never cute.” - Variety, 2 May 1984

Vigil screens in conjunction with The Film Archive’s mediagallery exhibition, The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao, curated by Tina Makereti. The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao is the first of a series of three exhibitions in the Magic Playgrounds: Historical Images of New Zealand Childhood series, in which Makereti will illuminate the social history of childhood in Aotearoa / New Zealand. The audiovisual exhibitions look at the ways children have been represented across our nation’s filmic history - including documentaries, television footage, home movies, feature films and rarely seen films from the early 1900s.

Vigil will screen at 7pm, Thursday through Saturday, June 6 - 8. At The Film Archive, 84 Taranaki St, Wellington. Image: Vigil (1984)

ENDS

© Scoop Media