Tairāwhiti duo behind After the Party and Escaping Utopia sweep NZTV Awards
Forget Wellywood, Tairāwhiti might be the new hotbed of the film and TV industry after two residents cleaned up at the New Zealand TV Awards.
Creator, writer and executive producer Dianne Taylor’s critically acclaimed drama series After the Party took home a record haul in Auckland last Friday, with nine wins including Best Drama and Best Script.
Documentary producer/director Natalie Malcon won Best Factual Series for Escaping Utopia, which tells the true stories of people attempting to break free from the Christian community of Gloriavale.
Escaping Utopia also won Best Editing and Best Original Score for its soundtrack written by Reb Fountain and Andrew Keoghan, making it the second most awarded programme on the night.
Both Taylor and Malcon were honoured to be recognised by the TV industry for projects they had put their heart and soul into.
After The Party was a project that started many years ago when Robyn Malcolm and Dianne Taylor brainstormed story ideas.
In the drama, Malcolm plays Penny whose world implodes when she accuses her husband of a sex crime against her teenage daughter’s friend, and nobody believes her.
The six-part series, produced by Lingo Pictures and Luminous Beast, claimed nine awards at this year’s ceremony, including NZ On Air Best Drama, Best Script: Drama, Best Editing: Drama and Comedy, and Best Actor and Actress wins for Peter Mullan and Robyn Malcolm.
Taylor has called Tairāwhiti home for three and a half years and finally got the last of her belongings out of storage in Auckland, transporting them last weekend.
She loves the community and the peace and quiet which allows her to write. The beach is another source of inspiration and the keen bodyboarder is part of a group that surfs every Friday - no matter the weather.
“We’re called wahine o te moana and there’s about 20 of us,” Taylor said.
Malcon, who has been living in Tairāwhiti for six years, said she and her husband wanted to give their kids a “small town beach, surf lifestyle”.
They had holidayed in the East Coast for many years before making the move south from Grey Lynn in Auckland.
Both creatives are thriving in the region and have found the people welcoming.
“This is a perfect place to live as a creative because what do you need, really? You need somewhere quiet to work, a good bunch of people around you and a beautiful beach to walk on,” Taylor said.
Malcon has also worked with Robyn Malcolm in the past on a documentary called Me & Anxiety that screened on TVNZ.
She happened to be with the actress when they found out both projects had been given the green light and would be funded.
Their projects were funded by the NZ Film Commission and New Zealand on Air, helped by a $50 million injection in 2022 under the Labour Government to boost the local film and TV industry which had suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Called the Premium Contingency Fund, it greenlit 16 productions.
After the Party was created after Malcolm missed out on a role in Taylor’s feature film Beyond the Known World despite a fantastic audition.
“We were both really disappointed about that, so we decided to write something especially for Robyn, that couldn’t be cast younger,” Taylor said.
“It was always completely non-negotiable that anyone other than Robyn was going to play Penny. So we sat together for months but with big gaps in between and we devised it from day one together, which is very unusual.”
“We had a very clear idea from the start about the fact she [the character Penny] wouldn’t necessarily be likeable.”
They are still analysing what made the drama so successful and hope to replicate it in their next project together.
After the Party has just been released in the UK and is already getting rave reviews from writers for outlets like The Guardian and The Telegraph.
The Gloriavale documentary project came about because of Malcon’s work on another documentary in 2021 called Heaven & Hell - The Centrepoint Story.
“While making that and interviewing former children from Centrepoint, I realised how deep and ongoing the trauma was and started thinking about the fact there was another cult still going that had started before Centrepoint,” Malcon said.
“The motivation for a lot of the former children of Centrepoint to speak out was to try to help the people at Gloriavale.”
Taylor’s next major project is another partnership with Malcolm and she said it could take an equally long time as After the Party which began as a seed of idea in 2017 and wasn’t made until 2023.
“These things take time – ideas need to percolate, we’ll be sitting down in the new year to workshop some ideas,” she said.
She would love to make a series that could be filmed on location in Tairāwhiti.
This year Taylor received New Zealand on Air funding for a year to enable her to write new material.