Watch Orphans & Kingdoms For Free
Orphans & Kingdoms
In writer/director Paolo Rotondo’s debut feature, three teenagers on the run break into a deluxe Waiheke Island home and find themselves caught in a tense psychodrama with the conflicted owner.
Release : | 2014 |
Rating : | 6.7 |
Studio : | |
Crew : | Director, Producer, |
Cast : | Colin Moy Hanelle Harris Fraser Brown |
Genre : | Drama Thriller |
Watch Trailer
Cast List
Related Movies
Reviews
Best movie ever!
Absolutely Fantastic
A different way of telling a story
Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
Low budget and local all too often translate to what's basically a TV movie bunged up on the big screen. In his feature debut, writer/director Paolo Rotondo deftly avoids all the usual clichés and pitfalls, cleverly keeping the action largely confined to a home under siege, and delivering that rarest of micro-budget gems – a real honest-to-the-moniker movie.Hanelle Harris, Jesse-James Rehu Pickery, and Calae Hignett-Morgan are never less than convincing as the tearaway teens, escaping the Auckland mainland to hang out, shoplift and purse-snatch on Waiheke Island, before breaking in to an upmarket house to raid the drinks cabinet and graffiti the walls. The young acting trio bring a real sense of loving, if broken, family, and a palpable air of menace to the owner of the upmarket beachfront home they invade.The politics of privilege and race, have and have-nots, may be contentious, but this is a New Zealand film with a wider underlying message about whanau that's heartfelt and, ultimately, hits home. As the troubled delinquents tell their equally troubled captive: "You're our family. We're wards of the state - we're everyone's kids." As the home owner turned hostage, Colin Moy quietly radiates the sense of a man broken by his spiritual burden. Tough, tense, realistic and rough, deliberately paced, and never shirking moments of silence, violence and, ultimately, reconciliation, Orphans and Kingdoms is a tightly scripted, sincerely acted, ably-directed/shot/soundtracked and edited example of a little film with a big heart, crafted with a care and commendable commitment that belies its humble budget and technical constraints.