“A visual storytelling style that is distinctly dense and complex. Recalling the avant-garde cinema of the 1980s and the free-spiritedness of 1960s counter-culture art, Godplex looks contemporary while evoking bohemian aesthetics and a Jack Kerouac/Timothy Leary-type personality all its own.”
SIMON FOSTER, SCREENSPACE
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“A film of grit and glitter – the myth of Godplex dovetails into its backstory in the urban roots of the 00s music scene in Auckland. The New Zealand’s own indomitable beat poet Shane Hollands in the lead is genius casting and Darcy Gladwin, who began his career as a cutting-edge digital cinema practitioner has proven his mettle as a high-concept avant garde film maker. Deeply inspiring work.”
TOM REILLY, FILMMAKER
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“This film manages to be realism, surrealism, and expressionism all at the same time. More than a return to efforts with expressive camera use akin to seventies film makers who wished to capitalise on the relationship between people and camera craft – this is a return to film making that is resonant with moments of filmic excellence that have been grafted from digital footage that if it were actually film, might have stretched across the Tasman Sea; the delights of discovery justified by the protaganist’s circus parade of characters that the audience can revel in – these characters are outrageously real and often stranger than fiction.
As the protaganists‘ existential ‘hero’s journey’ is so steeped in mythologies we can’t help but identify with the film-maker, and through his sometimes self-depreciative humour, and self -reflective pathos, we are repeatedly submerged within the fourth wall, and then pulled from it again.
This film was shot over eight years in New Zealand, Australia, and briefly in India, the use of language (again stratified in echoing layers – a delight for for lovers of complexity), indulges in the parochial Kiwi and Ocker sounds we know, but the choice wording is Elizabethan in it’s profound sometimes prophetic tone. The play between casual humanity and the voices of status decorate this film like marzipans at the king’s feast.
Huge Kudos to Shane Hollands, who plays this Everyman character over nearly a decade of creating this work, and to Darcy of course for having the sturdy drive to keep the vision intact.
It’s not any other film. It’s really not.”
GENEVIEVE McLEAN
