Raining at Sundance

Christina Jeff’s evocative feature Rain screens at the Sundance Film Festival with Merata Mita’s portrait of painter Ralph Hotere, Hotere, and short bursts of edge cinema in Adam Steven’s Beautiful, Tainui Stephen’s The Hill, and Sima Urale’s Still Life: “The acting in Rain is superb, and the child actors (Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki as Janey and Aaron Murphy as Jim) are beyond comparison. Not your usual adultery/coming of age film, Rain’s  portrayal of the dark and complex interaction between mother and daughter, as well as its virtuoso command of mood, tension, and surprise, and its powerfully artistic sense of visual image, puts it in a class of its own”.