![]() Dora is welcomed into a pleasant middle-class family, but Jack is not so lucky and forced into the abusive country home of violent, cruel adults and four of the creepiest stepsisters in film history (think of The Shining twins but there’s four of them, they’re feral, and instead of being the ghosts of murder victims, they are living, violent psychopaths). The film follows twins Jack and Dora (Alexis Arquette and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy) who are placed in an orphanage and separated when their mother has a mental health collapse and is unable to care for them. ![]() A film whose scarcity has been as much a part of the legend surrounding it as the enigmatic, lush dark fantasy world of the film itself, the recent 2K restoration of Garth Maxwell’s suburban gothic classic now playing at the Nightstream virtual film festival will hopefully see this should-be cult film classic finally make its way into the canonical ranks. Although not as well known, Stewart Main and Peter Wells’s Desperate Remedies played in the Un Certain Regard stream at Cannes that same year, and despite not receiving the same intense level of attention as Campion’s film, this beautiful, ornate drama remains not just one of the best films from New Zealand ever made, but one of the great unheralded queer classics of the 1990s.Īnd then, of course, was Jack Be Nimble. The first woman to ever win the Palme d’Or, Jane Campion’s The Piano was the talk of not just Cannes but much of the cinema-going mainstream that year, sweeping audiences away with her unforgettable, New Zealand set period drama. To put it mildly, 1993 was a hell of a year for New Zealand cinema. ![]()
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