With the 2013 Rialto Channel 48Hours having found its well-deserved champion, we take a look back at the previous winners of the prestigious filmmaking competition. But it wasn’t enough to simply list them off; we decided to brutally rank the prior champions and since he’s the best qualified (having previously done the 48Hours thing himself) Liam Maguren got the job of making new friends and enemies.
He reckoned it isn’t enough for a short on this list to be entertaining. The highest honours go to the films that managed to breathe a new life into the competition, to show what could be done in a manic weekend of movie-making and add merit to our nation’s cinematic creativity.
#10 Heinous Crime
2004 (Wellington winner) by The Circus
Before Taika Waititi was cool, he made this wacky piece of law-ripping comedy, starring himself and a few mates (one being Cliff Curtis). Heinous Crime certainly shows the typical 48Hours limitations, but Taika’s killer sense of humour easily surpasses them.
#9 F* Dance
2008 by Puppy Guts
What do you do if you’re forced to make a dance film with no dancers? Well, Puppy Guts said “F* it”, finding a clever loophole/premise that turned into an absurd and entertaining riff on conventional underdog fall-from-grace flicks.
#8 A Fairly Good Tale
2005 by Crash Zoom
Crash Zoom clearly had a lot of fun making this film, but unlike most 48Hours films that we made out of pure fun and joy, this one is actually MORE fun to watch. The premise is silly, but made with an itchy eyelid that constantly winks at the camera. A Fairly Good Tale is fairly great as a crowd-pleasing comedy.
#7 Only Son
2010 by The Downlow Concept
The powerhouse filmmaking squadron The Downlow Concept hit it big with Only Son, a very funny and expertly crafted ghost story that not only won the 48Hours competition that year, but also took away Best Screenplay and Best Short Film at the Qantas NZ Film and TV Awards. Downlow reached Bruce Lee status at that point, with some suggesting they should just back down from the competition for being too good.
#6 Lease
2007 by Lense Flare
As the only musical to ever win the 48Hours glory, Lease curve-stomped the most intimidating genre in the competition by taking on (and nailing) multiple flavours of music and contextually applying them to a simple plot about a couple of dudes looking for the ideal flatmate. The ending may be a bit timid, but only because everything else is pure genius.
#5 Brains?
2012 by Noise and Pictures
Last year’s winner flipped the script on the typical zombie horror, choosing to focus primarily on the undead who are threatened by the human menace and their attempts to “cure” them. The subtitled dinner-table dialogue is hilarious, mining its idea for every nugget of gold (the make-up was A-grade, too). Noise and Pictures came up with an original concept and executed it perfectly. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
#4 Brown Peril – The Tim Porch Story
2006 by The Downlow Concept
The Downlow Concept return to the list with their first winning entry, the story of an athlete desperately seeking to be the world’s first Tongan badminton champion. The mockumentary genre was pretty much a gift for Downlow to receive, one they unwrapped with the enthusiasm of an ADHD six-year-old during Christmas. The storytelling is dense and concise (a rarity for 48Hour films), but it’s the plethora of drop-dead hilarious gags that emphasise the ‘mock’ in this ‘mentary’. SHTLCK is a stroke of brilliance.
#3 Child Jumpers
2011 by Grand Cheval
You could picture Grand Cheval working on a 48Hours filmmaking formula, constructed from what has worked in the past and what hasn’t. What they produced in 2011 is scientific – a mockumentary tracking the fad of ‘chumping’. The filmmaking is eerily precise and the concept is one that easily manoeuvres around budget constraints, location scouting and weather demands.
#2 Charlotte
2009 by Line Men
The only animated feature to win the competition is also the shortest in length. Line Men use suggestion and misdirection to full effect, resulting in a story that is humorous, intriguing and (most shockingly) heartfelt – achieved in a mere 3 minutes. It’s storytelling at its most refined, with an animation style that blends a rushed, pencil-drawn, storyboarded look with an absorbing, transition-heavy, semi-hypnotic style.
#1 Jesse McLeod: The Journey
2004 (Auckland winner) by Classic
It’s freakish how superbly crafted The Journey is, with its narrative inside a narrative approach. Jonathan Brugh proved to be a creepily delightful host of a religious cult plot which slowly revealed itself, never choosing one particular moment to fully over-emphasize its twist. It melds quirky comedy into its horrific and disturbing premise perfectly, a feat that was accomplished in a mere weekend almost a decade ago – where shooting and editing a film was nowhere near as easy and accessible as it is today.
