Academic’s film receiving praise at Sundance Film Festival
Academic’s film receiving praise at Sundance Film Festival
A short film by a University of Auckland academic has already being picked as a must-see film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Dr Jake Mahaffy’s film, A.D. 1363, The End of Chivalry was selected as one of 60 short films from over 8,000 international entries and is one of only three New Zealand films or co-productions to premiere at Sundance in 2015.\
This is Jake’s sixth film
at Sundance since his feature-length film War
screened there in 2004. A.D. 1363 is described in
the Sundance guide as a ‘little-known historical
catastrophe (which) leads to the definitive end of the
heroic era of chivalry’.
Jake, a senior lecturer in the
department of Media, Film and TV, says the film was inspired
by his interest in medieval history.
“I enjoy medieval
history. And I think around the time I shot the film in 2007
I was hearing the word 'quagmire' on the radio in the US all
the time. So I put the two together. A knight in a
swamp.”
Now the film website www.indiewire.com, has named it as one
of the five Must-See Shorts at the 2015 Sundance Film
Festival.
The review says: “New Zealand-based American
filmmaker Jake Mahaffy clearly had fun creating this
two-and-a-half minute adventure story about a knight in
shining armour. While a great many of this year's Sundance
shorts have bloated running times, A.D. 1363 doesn't
outstay its welcome. It's a textbook example of how to do a
concise short – and get laughs.”
The recommendation
is another boost for the film that was lucky to be completed
at all.
Jake says he shot the film along an old country road near Norton, Massachusetts in April 2007 on the same day he shot another short called Inertia.
“An old friend, Jeff Sias, and his neighbour, Carl West, a blacksmith who forged his own suit of working plate armour, came down and we spent the afternoon on it. We shot on some random rolls of black and white 16mm stock with an Arri SB camera I'd bought for the Wheaton College film programme I was running back then.
“I told myself it was just a camera test. Every shot was done in a single take.”
But problems in post-production saw the film left incomplete.
“I let the footage sit around- never thinking I'd be able to actually finish the film.”
But when he immigrated to New Zealand two years ago he realised that with some post-production support from the New Zealand Film Commission and Park Road, a post-production unit in Wellington, he could afford to get the visuals completed.
Jake’s not going to attend Sundance this year as he’s editing his latest feature film project, Free In Deed, a feature film based on actual events of a pentecostal minister's attempts to heal an autistic boy. He hopes to have it completed this May.
The 2015 Sundance Film Festival runs from 22 January to 1 February in Park City, Utah. It was founded by Robert Redford in 1981 to foster independence, risk-taking, and new voices in American film.