My Year with Helen 2017    star_border 4.8
With unique access to high-ranking candidate Helen Clark, filmmaker Gaylene Preston casts a wry eye on proceedings as the United Nations chooses a new Secretary General.

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Perfect Strangers 2003    star_border 4.2
When Melanie goes home from the pub with a handsome stranger, she’s captivated by his charm and attentiveness. He sails her away to his ‘castle’- a rundown shack on a deserted island. But when seduction becomes deception and passion becomes possession, Melanie realizes that she has been kidnapped. Torn between fear and desire, Melanie must escape – but her ardent admirer has other plans.

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War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us 1996    star_border 3.5
Seven New Zealand women speak about their lives during World War II: some lost husbands, some got married, some went into service themselves. The director lets the women tell their stories simply, alternating between them talking and archival footage of the war years.

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Kai Pūrākau – The Storyteller 1987
Gaylene Preston's documentary on writer Keri Hulme — filmed two years after Hulme shot to global fame thanks to her Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People — is both a poetic travelogue of Ōkārito (the township she lived in for 40 years), and a sampler-box of musings on Hulme's writing process, whitebait fishing, the supernatural, and the 1200 pages of notes for her next novel, the elusive Bait. Leon Narbey's camerawork is aptly alert to the magical qualities of the coast, from the resident kōtuku to the surf and birdsong peppering Hulme’s crib.

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How I Threw Art Out The Window Release date not available
In this experimental short from filmmaker Gaylene Preston, a no-nonsense hitchhiker is subjected to the ramblings of a deeply philosophical driver. Impressively, Peter Cathro delivers the long, stream of consciousness ramble in a single take — while actor Shirley Grace manages to keep a straight face throughout. The driver's musings on art, society and creative expression cannot be quashed (even by a kiss), and it becomes too much to bear for the hitchhiker, who just wants to get to Taihape. Filmed in a lo-fi style, this screened at The Women’s Gallery in Wellington as part of 1981 exhibition Sexxuality.

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