ScreenTalk: Alister Barry
19 Feb 2016
Alister Barry: Making political films from Mururoa 1973 to Hot Air
Alister Barry is the filmmaker behind a series of provocative and politically charged documentaries, most of them self-funded. His first documentary Mururoa 1973 tackled nuclear testing, and saw him on a boat headed into the middle of a bomb test zone. Over the next four decades Barry has continued to make significant political documentaries including Someone Else’s Country, The Hollow Men, Wildcat and Hot Air.
In this ScreenTalk, Barry talks about:
- Filming French commandos boarding his protest boat while making Mururoa 1973
- Finding a clever way to hide his footage from the French
- Getting ‘establishment’ funding for documentary A Nuclear Free Pacific/ Niuklia Fri Pasifik
- Getting Pacific leaders on board for the film
- Why anger with the Rogernomics-era Labour Government led to the making of Someone Else’s Country
- Wanting to create a big impact with the documentary version of Nicky Hager bestseller The Hollow Men
- Exploring climate change - "the biggest issue of our time" - in Hot Air
This video is available on YouTube to embed and distribute via this Creative Commons licence.
NZ On Screen: Camera and Editing – Andrew Whiteside