Behind the music

There must have been a zeitgeist, creatively speaking, in the world of short-film-making this winter last, that held music high as both a calling and a metaphorical Polyfilla for damaged psyches.

That, fingerless gloves, extreme close-ups of piano keys and plays of darkness and light on the visage of subjects were all clearly the go.

Both Joey Bania and Max Bellamy, two Dunedin purveyors of the genre, use those elements in short films in February on BBC Knowledge.

It is amusing to imagine them shooting dark glances at each other at screenings, such are the similarities in films they made following grants from the BBC Young Producers Award.

Both are visually stunning, and both have excellent stories to tell.

Bania, Bellamy and Rachael Patching - also from Dunedin - were among five New Zealanders awarded the $6050 grants, a coup for the city's talent.

Each was tasked with producing a short documentary on South Island people with interesting backgrounds.

Bania tackles the story of Queenstown musician Mark Wilson in Love at First Sound.

We see him obliquely in a mirror, from behind, from above, and in silhouette.

One and a-half minutes into the six-minute film, as a candle is blown out before the gazes of stained glass window-bound saints, we discover Wilson is blind.

We see his past at the Auckland School for the Blind in the 1970s.

We learn he had a fascination with astronomy, but discovered you had to be sighted to be an astronomer.

He tells us he discovered music instead.

''Playing the piano is an act of communion. Music in general is my ministry.''

The dialogue washes over the fingerless gloves, the extreme close-ups of piano hammers, brilliant use of dappled light on Wilson's face, quick-fire editing, and a David Lynchesque scene at a grand piano.

All excellent, and on ... last Sunday! Surely BBC Knowledge will show repeats.

Bellamy's The Characteristics of C-Minor tells the story of Dunedin musician Nick Knox.

Bellamy's Dunedin is wet, dark and hard to recognise - it's also well cool.

Knox's story unravels as the film flows, and we hear of emotional, physical and psychological damage, social isolation and disabling doses of medicine.

After an event left him physically broken, his friends and then his music healed the wounds.

''This [the music] is the thing I feel most passionate about in my life . . .''

The film will screen at 8.30pm on February 23, with Patching's The Dirt Doctor - about a Canterbury scientist who worked with soil and in microbiology - showing one week later.

All to be proud of.

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