The Friends of Aratoi are hosting a special fundraiser screening of Grace: A Prayer for Peace.
With a complimentary glass of wine and refreshments.
Dame Gaylene Preston and Dame Robin White will be in attendance and will hold a Q&A after the screening.
4pm, Sunday 26 October at the Regent Theatre
$45 per ticket
Directed by Dame Gaylene Preston, the documentary chronicles over five decades of Dame Robin White's career. The film follows her across Aotearoa (New Zealand), Japan, and the Pacific island of Kiribati, where she lived in the 1980s and 90s.
'A portrait of one of Aotearoa’s greatest living artists by one of our greatest documentary filmmakers. You should expect something special, and that’s what you get. Dame Robin White may well be one of New Zealand’s most significant living artists, but Dame Gaylene Preston resists that kind of overbearing narrative in her new film. The nearest she comes might be a scene when the seventy-something artist considers one of her iconic 1970s paintings, the kind that sell well as framed prints in public gallery gift shops. “This is me as a young painter trying to figure out how to paint,” she muses. Surrounding that moment are scenes shot in recent years in Aotearoa, Japan and Kiribati, where White lived for many years. We see her as she is now, working at the height of her artistic powers, still energetically moving her practice forward, often with artistic collaborators from other cultures and artistic traditions. We gain an insight into her Bahá'í faith-driven belief in peace and shared humanity. This is a masterclass in less-is-more story telling'. - Chris Brown
At the heart of Grace is Dame Robin White—a celebrated artist of pakeha and Māori (Ngāti Awa) descent—who finds herself at a vexed moment in human history. In the movie Robin stands ankle- deep in the lagoon at Tarawa, mindful not only of the beautiful seaward expanse but also of the omnipresent, endlessly troubling world of geopolitics, nuclear arms, global warming and the encroaching Climate Emergency. Grace sets out to answer the question of how an artist might respond to all of this. Described as ‘a prayer for peace’, the film stands as an act of resistance rather than quietism, imbued as it is with inventiveness, joy, good humour and energy'. - Greg O'Brien