Festival film a throwback to the dark era

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

There might be one or two scarier movies at the Auckland International Film Festival, but The Waiting Place can probably boast more creeps per buck. That's Kiwi dollars, too.

But only about $60,000 of them were spent on the psychological thriller shot on digital video, largely at the abandoned Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital near Wanganui.

The film's makers say their location agreement forbids them from naming the former asylum with the forbidding reputation. But the thanks in the credits to residents of nearby Bulls tends to give it away.

The movie follows the tale of two escaped prisoners, Belmont and Ramsey, who hike cross-country to rendezvous with Belmont's wife at the empty institution. She's delayed, and tensions between the pair start to escalate.

The feature was shot over four weeks a year ago, and the film festival is being used as its launching pad with the hope a distributor may pick it up for wider exhibition.

It may be very much the third of the trio of New Zealand features (after Rain and Snakeskin) at the festival, but it's the only one of many local digital features submitted to programmers that was selected for viewing.

As the festival's own notes on the film say: "The festival was inundated with New Zealand digital features this year. Most enthusiastically exploit the new technology to essentially frivolous ends with wildly hit-and-miss results."

However, The Waiting Place, says producer Robert Rowe, was made with the experience and knowledge of the basics that he, its Chilean-born director Cristobal Araus Lobos and actor/co-writer Dane Giraud had gained on earlier short films together.

Still, making the jump from short to feature required a leap of faith says Araus Lobos.

"The main worry was, did we have enough substance to keep an audience seated for that long. It was like a 28-page script but we knew once we got down there that we were going to find a lot of new things."

Rowe says that after getting rejections from funding bodies such as Creative New Zealand they sought and found private funding for the feature. That worked to their advantage, giving them creative freedom.

The cheaper, easier-to-edit digital video also suited the movie, says the producer.

"It's a claustrophobic piece of film and digital worked well with that, we found. 'Digital video' is not the dirty word it used to be."

The Waiting Place could be seen as fitting some sort of of Kiwi-Gothic tradition.

"Yeah, definitely," laughs Araus Lobos "I have all this angst."

"I think it goes back to the early 80s stuff that was coming out of this country," says Rowe. "I love those films.

"They go on about dark films in this country but there have been a lot more lighter films coming out in recent years. It's about time we had a throwback to the dark era."

And that "secret" location certainly helped the tension and mood.

"It got very scary around the place," says Rowe. "Certain ghostly things starting happening, voices around the buildings which I personally heard - and I am very sceptical about that sort of thing."

Adds Araus Lobos, who says he'll be in the audience for all three festival screenings: "I know I am going to get the odd old patient coming up to us going ... y'know."

Er, hey, that was my old room?

"Yeah."

* The Waiting Place screens tomorrow at 8.30 pm; Saturday, July 14 at 1 pm; and Monday, July 16 at 4.15 pm.