Team Northland Win Big At 48 Hour Film Competition

A team of Whangārei filmmakers have scooped major awards at this year’s national 48-hour filmmaking competition.

Team Northland - comprised of ten local filmmakers and actors - was led by director Giles McNeill, a Maungakaramea resident and professional film maker. The team was in the ‘Across Aotearoa’ division for films made outside New Zealand’s three main centres.

The team won best performer (for actors Esmée Myers, Robbie van Gruenen and Noah Hewlett-Coffey), best script (Giles McNeill and Michael Botur) and McNeill was a finalist for Best Director.

The Vista Foundation 48Hours is NZ's largest guerrilla filmmaking competition, and this year the competition was fierce, with 542 teams totalling around 4000 filmmakers competing.

This year, the group was given the task of creating an entire short film from scratch, including writing, shooting and editing, beginning at 7pm on Friday August 15 and finishing at 7pm on Sunday August 15.

Competition is fierce, and each year nearly 100 films will find themselves disqualified.

Every team was given a last-minute set of instructions. For Team Northland, the requirements - announced only at the beginning of the weekend - were that their film needed to be a holiday movie, and had to involve an accident, something precious, a miniature, and a slow motion moment.

McNeill began the script after midnight on the Friday, creating a five-minute story about three siblings who play a game of Monopoly at a family reunion to commemorate their deceased father, but find that the Monopoly cards have some surprising and heartwarming instructions which take their relationship in a new direction.

“Personally, it’s amazing to be recognized in the 48Hours competition again after some years of not competing,” McNeill said. “After doing really well in 2012 and 2014, I’ve had some big changes in my life, including having kids, moving back to Northland and losing my mum. In that time I haven’t really managed to continue the career I felt like I’d started, so it’s wonderful to have a film in the regional finals of the 48Hours and to win some awards and feel like there’s a chance to get back on track with making films.”

“Pretty last minute, we managed to find some amazingly talented local film makers right here in the Whangarei area, which was really encouraging. Luckily, there were a few really experienced crew members who had just moved to the area and we put them together with some young up and coming film makers and actors and everyone really stepped up to make this lovely little film.”

The film was shot at the coastal home of director of photography Diego Cortinas, behind the Tawapou Nursery near Matapouri. Crew members included Heather Easterbrook, Grayson Sutherland, William Shaw, Tobias Grove and David Peterson.

McNeill holds four of the coveted ‘Apee’ statues, the 48Hours equivalent of the Oscars' little golden man, for winning the Wellington regional competition twice (2012 and 2014), winning runner up in the grand national finals with the 2014 film, ‘Rubble’, and for taking the top national prize in 2012 with the film, ‘Brains’. Since moving back to his home region of Northland, McNeill has worked on the likes of the award-winning Bellbird(2019), which was filmed in Maungakaramea in 2018.

In 2026, McNeill will film a Northland horror story by Whangārei author Michael Botur.

‘Family Christmas Monopoly’ will be made available to view online once it’s no longer in competition.

The top films from the four regional finals automatically earn places in the National Finals Other teams will find out if they’ve made it to the National Finals, or have been nominated for awards on October 5.

This year’s National Finals are to be held in Wellington’s Embassy Theatre on October 25, with the national winner taking away $40,000 in prize money and other valuable prizes sponsored by the likes of Sir Peter Jackson.

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