By Kim Chisnall
An Auckland-born filmmaker has found success from an unlikely source – a US department store.
Andrew Hunt won the Bloomingdale's B-Flix short film competition, and now he is writing his first feature film.
The credits on Hunt's CV don't read like Peter Jackson's or Steven Spielberg's - from playing professional basketball to rehabilitating blind people in Lebanon, to distributing medical supplies in Iraq.
Now, film director.
"It takes a while to figure out who you are, let alone how the world works," says Hunt.
Originally from Auckland, he now lives in New York. The city's famous department store Bloomingdale's picked him, and his movie The Love Game, as the winner of its short film competition.
The Kiwi was definitely the underdog of the competition - after all, one of the other finalists was Robert Redford's daughter, Amy.
"It was a really inspiring situation because all of those directors had won some amazing awards, and so you felt like you had to really raise your game, in a sense," says Hunt. "It was a little bit intimidating at first, I think."
The Love Game won it, but it was another of his short films, the accidental activist, that saw Bloomingdale's invite him to enter.
He is now thinking bigger, and working on his first full-length feature film, to be set in the Middle East.
"Sadly, because of 9/11 people are now looking at the Arab world and saying, 'Who are these people?'" he says. "There are some great misconceptions I think about the Arab world."
How that goes down in Bloomingdale's USA will be interesting, but Hunt is desperate to make a film closer to home. He says he is a Kiwi by birth and at heart, and that's both the long and the short of it.
3 News
source: newshub archive
