Miramar Creative Centre’s Graduate Showcase expands cinema

Expanding Cinema: The Miramar Creative Centre Graduate Showcase is an annual invite-only event that present students of film, animation, visual effects, music, and sound seeing their efforts on the big screen in a room full of industry stalwarts.

31 March 2025

On Wednesday 19 March, The Roxy cinema in Miramar was packed with students, film, design, and music academics, tutors, friends and family, as well as industry professionals. For two and a half hours the audience was entertained by a mixed format of live-action and animated films from our MFA Film and MDT Design filmmakers.

The Live-action program showcased a documentary (Everybody Eats: The Act of Hospitality), savage noir (Juntas), family drama (My Years of Fear and Trembling), and period drama updated for the digital age with just a side of farce (If Looks Could Kill), all made by students of the Masters of Fine Arts Creative Practice (Film).

Trailers for four more films (She Is Herself, Champa, Outside The Fridge, and Ruru) got the evening off to a tantalising start.

Following a short intermission, four shorts featuring computer animation, compositing, motion capture, and a variety of traditional and experimental techniques from students of the Master of Design Technology were screened.

The Catch tells the story of a lonely fisherman learning to embrace the change of the future and focus on regeneration and restoration. Echoes of the Wild showed through the representation of ghostly shadows and a gentle giant how a young boy could learn to overcome the challenges in his personal life. Bound used stylized animation to visually represent the connection between imaginary friends in a most vital and illuminating way. And End of Summer had a young man navigating his queerness across three pivotal summers in 1990s southern China.

All four of the animated shorts were accompanied by ‘making of’ vignettes which gave behind-the-scenes glimpses into the levels of talent, technique, and work involved in the creation of the finished short films.

Wellington’s reputation as a hub for filmmaking is well known, and this example of what the students can build and share—even getting to debut their material to local industry legends—is a further feather in the cap for the city.

Raqi Syed, Director, Miramar Creative Centre, and Senior Lecturer in the School of Design Innovation said “The Miramar Creative Centre’s 2024 Expanding Cinema Showcase presented filmmakers with a unique vision of our world. Their films illustrated a grounding of place here in Wellington, imaginary worlds, and surreal spaces in between. It was really inspiring to see our screen industry turn out to support this next generation of talent”.

See all the MDT Animation and VFX films.