This Fine Island, a postcolonial ballad by Gavin Hipkins that revisits Charles Darwin's journey to the Bay of Islands in 1835, will have its first screening in Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, an event that aims to create a space between new cinema and contemporary art. In Hipkins' adaption, Darwin's nineteenth-century travel writing in The Voyage of the Beagle becomes a vehicle for present day tourisms, travel romance, and racial othering, against the backdrop of New Zealand's lush landscape.
Hipkins' experimental narrative screens at Centre Pompidu on 21 November in People's Television, a film programme curated for Rencontres Internationales by Laura Preston and Mark Williams.
Image: Gavin Hipkins, This Fine Island , 2012 (production still), 12 mins, 16mm transferred to Digibeta
