Culture 101

Our Ocean of Islands has just opened at the New Zealand Maritime Museum and is unlike most exhibitions in that it is contributor-led rather than curator-led: each of the 24 participating island nations was invited to decide for itself what it wanted to share, guided only by a broad focus on the inseparability of peoples, environments and indigenous knowledge. All 17 Pacific nations with diaspora communities in Aotearoa are represented, alongside Tangata Whenua and nations as far as Taiwan. Barbara Makuati-Afitu and Kolokesa Uafa Mahina-Tuai, founders of Pacific consultancy Lagi-Maama, join Culture 101 to talk about what it means to give communities the power to tell their own stories.

Therese Eberhard is an American-born scenic artist, props and set painter who came to New Zealand to work on King Kong and never left. She has worked on Avatar, The Hobbit, Rings of Power, What We Do in the Shadows and more, and spent the past decade accumulating interviews and photographs from more than 50 contributors for The Reel Deal, a scrapbook-style love letter to the below-the-line film crew. A leukemia diagnosis that kept her off set for an extended period gave her the time and focus to finally finish it. She joins Culture 101 to talk about why it took a security guard to give her her favourite interview in the book.

Dan Slevin reviews three new releases: One Night Only, a comedy set in a United States where pre-marital sex has been legally outlawed by biometric implant, except for one night a year when unmarried adults can let off steam - starring Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner; & Sons, in which Bill Nighy plays a reclusive novelist making one last attempt to reconcile with his two estranged adult sons and have them accept their teenage stepbrother, also starring Imelda Staunton, Johnny Flynn, George Mackay and Noah Jupe; and De Gaulle: Tilting Iron, the first of a two-part epic biography of the French statesman, following his wartime leadership of the resistance in exile, starring Simon Abkarian and Simon Russell Beale.

Resilience psychologist Dr Lucy Hone has spent 15 years researching how people navigate loss. Her TEDx talk, The Three Secrets of Resilient People, has been viewed more than nine million times and translated into 23 languages. Her new book, How Will I Ever Get Through This, grew out of readers of her earlier work Resilient Grieving asking whether the same tools applied to losses that don't involve a funeral - job loss, divorce, an empty nest, a diagnosis. She calls these living losses and the things that cause them, in her family's private shorthand, BFTs. She joins Culture 101 ahead of her appearance at WORD Christchurch on 6 September.

Nairn Street Cottage has stood since around 1858 and has been a house museum since 1980, with each room dressed to reflect a different decade of the Wallace family's occupation. A new exhibition, Unsettling Nairn Street, has placed seven contemporary artists in those rooms to respond to the layers of history embedded in the building and the whenua it stands on. Writer and co-curator Emma Ng joins Culture 101 to talk about beeswax installations in the hallway, bronze crackers in the 1970s kitchen, and what you hear playing through the phonograph in the front parlor. The exhibition runs until 31 October, entry free.

An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen's play about a medical officer who discovers contaminated water at a local spa and finds himself crushed by the forces protecting economic interests, has been adapted by Aaron Richardson of Fly Leaf Theatre Company and set in a small Canterbury town. Fraser Hoffman, who plays Dr Thomas Stockmann, says he's found examples of this exact situation playing out in New Zealand at a high-profile level, and that the Canterbury setting puts water, farming and the country's clean green image at the centre in a way that feels uncomfortably close. The show runs at Q Theatre Loft 12 to 22 August.

Hospital of Emotions is an immersive exhibition that has taken over an abandoned four-storey hospital in downtown Los Angeles, with 70 artists transforming 80 rooms around eight departments of human emotion. Visitors check in like patients, receive a wristband and work their way through rooms for fear, anger, hope, love, sadness, gratitude and resilience. The building was found largely intact, nurses' lockers still full of personal belongings. Standout rooms include a twister floor, an anger installation with a hospital bed and empty chair, and a resilience room filled with more than 3,000 handmade ceramic eggs, created by an artist who had to build resilience around being forced to eat eggs as a child. Co-founder and lead producer Oshri Elmorich joins Culture 101.

Lindah Lepou is a multi-disciplinary artist raised in Porirua and Samoa who coined the term Pacific Couture. Her new exhibition Mata'aitu, now at Pataka Art+Museum until 8 November, traces the history of human zoos from the 1890s to the present, exploring how the voyeuristic gaze of the 19th-century zoo has evolved through film and into the digital age. On a research trip to Germany, she found a list of Samoan names taken to Europe for display and recognised one as her ancestor, a ten-year-old boy called Tolio, taken without his parents. She joins Culture 101 to discuss the exhibition and the concept of the digital zoo she now inhabits herself.

Kate Rodger reviews two new blockbusters: Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's epic starring Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and Zendaya, following Odysseus on his perilous journey home after the Trojan War; and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and starring Tom Holland and Zendaya, currently the highest-grossing film of 2026 with $1.1 billion at the box office worldwide.

Glide Time opened at Circa Theatre on 11 August 1976 with a waitlist of more than 1,000 people, and audiences laughed before a line was even spoken, recognising their own offices on stage. Sir Roger Hall wrote it in a Connecticut library while attending a playwriting workshop where Meryl Streep was one of the actors, after deciding he could do better than the plays he was watching. Five decades and more than 40 plays later, Hall sits at home on Auckland's North Shore and admits the muse has largely left, but is still curious whether a new generation will find Glide Time funny or merely strange as it prepares to take the stage again in September.

The Auckland Mushroom Festival runs from 12 to 15 August on Karangahape Road, with more than 20 restaurants offering fungi-inspired dishes, art installations including mushroom sculptures and a sound installation, a speaker series on psychedelics and foraging, and a Saturday costume parade through the new CRL station before it officially opens. Fungi enthusiast, author and festival co-ordinator Liv Sisson joins Culture 101 to explain why New Zealand has an estimated 20,000 fungi species, 90 percent of them found nowhere else on earth, and to make the case for a Fungi of the Year award.

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his picks for August. He recommends Settling on Three, calling it an authentic and distinctly Kiwi rom com that rises above its familiar premise through sharp writing and real chemistry between its leads. He's more cautious about Monsters of God on HBO Max, the new documentary from the Tiger King creator about exotic reptile smuggling, which he finds fascinating but less electrifying than its predecessors. And he's enthusiastic about The Shard on Disney+, a collaboration between American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis and Ryan Murphy set among Los Angeles teenagers in the 1980s.

Time Shivers is a trio of friends, Lachie Oliver-Kirby, Oscar Fitzgerald and Aidan O'Malley, who started making each other laugh privately and eventually decided other people might want to watch. Their new show On Purpose, opening at Basement Theatre this week, is an absurdist sketch comedy about three wanderers stuck in purgatory, trying and failing to write a sketch show, and promising audiences they will reveal the meaning of life in Act Three. Lachie and Oscar join Culture 101 to discuss the show and the creative tension that comes from working with your best friends.

Writer, creator and actor Hannah Marshall has two shows releasing this week on Three: Ms X, a crime comedy about a mother whose revenge plot takes a homicidal turn, starring Melissa George and co-written with her director husband Dave, which has already sold to Disney+ in the UK, Peacock in the US and Binge in Australia; and Settling, a rom com she wrote and stars in alongside Pax Assadi about two friends who follow through on a teenage pact to marry each other. The two shows have been in production simultaneously for years. She joins Culture 101 to explain how that happened, and why becoming a mother was the seed of both.

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: H is for Hawk, Phillippa Lowthorpe's biographical drama based on Helen MacDonald's memoir, starring Claire Foy as a grieving woman who channels her loss into training a goshawk, with Brendan Gleeson as her father; Kiri and Lou Go Raah!, Harry Sinclair's feature-length origin story of Aotearoa's most famous dinosaurs, starring Liv Tennent and Jemaine Clement; and 72 Hours, in which Kevin Hart's 40-year-old marketing executive gatecrashes a Gen Z bachelor party after being added to the wrong group chat.

At The Wake is a play by Victor Rodger, imagining what might have happened if his Scottish grandmother and Samoan father had met at a funeral. Susan Brady plays Joan, the grandmother, who is foul-mouthed, hard-drinking and says exactly what she thinks. It's Brady's return to the stage after a long gap, and she describes the South Island as hungry for theatre in a way that doesn't always get enough. At The Wake is at The Court Theatre until 15 August.

Music thanatology is a practice that uses live harp music and voice to help manage pain, restlessness and anxiety in patients approaching the end of life. Tony Pederson is one of a very small number of practitioners worldwide, and he paces the music in real time to match a patient's breathing, adjusting moment by moment as those rhythms change. He came to it while working in an Alzheimer's unit, watched two musicians play harp for a dying patient, went to check on her afterwards, and found all the tension had gone from her body. He chased them down the hallway and asked what they'd done. He joins Culture 101 with his harp and plays a live demonstration.

The 48 Hours Film Competition is on this weekend, with teams racing to deliver a short film by 7pm today. Chris Callus and Adam Reynolds of Positive Barry won last year's competition with Grounded, an animated film about a ladybug with anxiety and the spider trying to help it fly, made as a buddy film with the required elements of something miniature, an accident and a slow movement. Chris did all the animation while Adam did the editing and sound, finishing with roughly an hour to spare. The film is now showing at festivals and has screened at Tribeca and Annecy.

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his monthly picks. He calls Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Happiness, the new Larry David sketch series on HBO Max, a disappointing misfire despite a cast that includes Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Hader and Barack Obama in an intro sequence. He recommends Elle, the Legally Blonde prequel on Amazon Prime, for fans of the original. And he gives a strong early endorsement to Westies on Neon, an 80s mob thriller with J.K. Simmons as an Irish-American gang leader holding territory against the Italian mob in Hell's Kitchen, describing it as confident, brutal and very good.

Warwick Freeman came to jewelry through a school friend who claimed he knew how to make it, an overland trip from Europe to Australia, and a 40 percent import tax that meant there was very little competition when he joined Fingers gallery in Auckland in 1978. His solo exhibition Hook Hand Heart Star has toured from Die Neue Sammlung in Munich to Objectspace in Auckland, and opens at The Dowse in Lower Hutt on 25 July. He joins Culture 101 to discuss a career that has resisted chronology, and why his earliest work holds up beside the newest.

Aronui Indigenous Arts Festival Artistic Director Cian Elyse White says this year's fleet of 550 is the largest they've ever flown. The show runs from 9 to 11 July, starting at 8pm each night over the lake, accompanied by a soundscape composed to resonate physically through the crowd before they even see the drones. Last year 36,000 people attended across the three nights. She joins Culture 101 to explain how you go from script to sky, and why the show aims to make you feel it before you hear it.

Andrew Hinton's 2014 documentary Tashi and the Monk followed a Buddhist monk running a refuge for abandoned children in the remote foothills of the Indian Himalayas. The film won 27 awards, ended up on HBO after a chance encounter in a festival shuttle bus, and raised enough money to fund two new buildings at the community. Twelve years later, Hinton has returned. Tashi is now a teenager and a big sister to a young boy named Karma. He joins Culture 101 to discuss Loving Karma, what he found when he went back, and the monk's definition of love, which he has since tried to apply to his own parenting: patience plus attention.

Sam Brooks curates Firing the Cannon, a Basement Theatre series of free play readings drawing on New Zealand's theatrical history. This year's season leaned into a queer theme almost by accident: Robert Lord's Joyful and Triumphant, Renée's Setting the Table, and Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu's The Black, a play about depression that takes the form of a stalking horse. Brooks talks about why reviving work that doesn't get performed often matters, and what it's like watching actors bring entirely new interpretations to text that's never been heard out loud before.

Fiona McDonald, of Headless Chickens and Strawpeople fame, started Singalong with Fiona McDonald after being inspired by a ukulele group session. She booked a venue for 200 people not knowing if anyone would show up; seventy did, and by the end of the first night she says she was addicted. Armed with a ukulele and a screen of lyrics, she leads rooms full of strangers through songs chosen for their singalong power rather than personal taste. Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart doesn't make the cut, but Tom Jones's Delilah does. She joins Culture 101 for Fast Favourites.

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his monthly TV and streaming recommendations, covering Cape Fear on Apple TV, an updated take on the Scorsese thriller with Xavier Bardem and Amy Adams; Dear England on TVNZ+, a football drama about Gareth Southgate starring Joseph Fiennes; and a verdict on Mindy Kaling's new sitcom Not Suitable for Work on Disney+.

Hana Buchanan has just published her debut collection Kupu Whenua, a bilingual Maori and New Zealand English work structured like a pepeha, with mountain, waterways, waka, birds and stars forming its chapters. Descended from Te Ati Awa and connected to the Te Aro Pa area, Buchanan wrote most of the collection on foot, walking Wellington's streets and listening for the ancestral memories she believes are stored in place. She is also a kaikaranga and a kaitito waiata. She joins Culture 101 and shares a reading.

Ross McGarva learned his craft as a young art department hand on The Lord of the Rings, where he absorbed Peter Jackson's obsession with detail. His latest project is Moss & Freud, in cinemas now, a biographical drama about the friendship between supermodel Kate Moss and painter Lucian Freud. McGarva served as production designer, recreating Freud's paint-splattered Holland Park studio by plastering walls to build up texture, then flicking paint to match the decades of accumulated colour.

Dan Bain first read Let the Right One In in 2019 and put it down thinking it was impossible to stage. He's now directing it at The Court Theatre in Christchurch. The Swedish vampire story follows a bullied teenager and his strange new neighbour, adapted by Jack Thorne, who also wrote Adolescence. The set has no right angles, forces perspective, is covered in mirrors, and took three model builds to figure out. Bain joins Culture 101 to explain how you stage a horror without the audience laughing at the wrong moments.

Every King's Birthday weekend, Gore hosts the Gold Guitar Awards, celebrating the best of live country music in New Zealand and launching careers including Patsy Riggir, Kaylee Bell and Jenny Mitchell. Mike Puru, born and raised in Gore and MC of the event for around ten years, joins Culture 101 live from the thick of it.

Illustrator Scarlett Robinson-Kean and dancer Sefa Tunupopo are two of the 16 early-career artists selected for this year's Arts Foundation Springboard, each receiving $15,000 and a mentorship. Scarlett, whose graphic novel To Seed, To Sprout, To Seed won a bronze at last year's Best Design Awards, says in illustration the doors don't just stay closed, they often don't exist. Sefa, who leads Wellington street dance collective Shifting Center, says the award landed at the right time, and talks about why he and his community decided to build their own infrastructure rather than wait for space to open up. Both join Culture 101 to discuss what comes next.

Michelle Langstone reviews three films from this year's French Film Festival: A Dash of Love, a charming road trip about two friends with physical disabilities searching for intimacy, aided by a reluctant ex-con turned driver; Case 137, a gripping thriller about a police investigator probing alleged brutality during the 2018 Yellow Jacket protests in Paris, winner of best actress at the Césars; and Guru, a taut psychological thriller about a charismatic life coach whose wellness empire conceals something darker.

Named after John Clarke's Fred Dagg, the Fred Award recognises the New Zealand Comedy Festival's best show. David Correos took home the 2026 award, and the iconic Golden Gumboot, for his show Touching My Active Mind. He joins Culture 101 fresh from the win.

Denzel Panama has been given a Pasifika conducting internship by Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand, working alongside the directors of the National Youth Choir, the Academy Choir and Voices New Zealand, of which he is already a member. From Niue, he currently directs senior school choirs at St Kentigern and St Cuthbert's colleges. He joins Culture 101 to talk about the physical art of conducting, why a tense conductor makes a tense choir, and why he thinks singing together is one of the best antidotes to loneliness going.

Jennie Skulander has spent more than two decades as the lead vocalist of Devilskin, one of New Zealand's most successful metal acts, but she has never had a singing lesson. Come Together, a supergroup of New Zealand rock musicians, is performing Born to Run in full at Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland this week, and Jennie is on lead vocals. She joins Culture 101 to talk about stepping into someone else's songs, the osteoarthritis diagnosis that's forcing her to do things differently, and why she still gets nervous every single time she walks on stage.

Joel Vinsen took out this year's Billy T Award for best newcomer in Aotearoa comedy with his show Renaissance Man, joining a list of previous winners including Rose Matafeo, Paul Ego and Dai Henwood. He joins Culture 101 live for Fast Favourites, sharing picks including a YouTube deep dive into Harmony Korine's late show appearances, a Korean book of short stories, and why Swordsman Chinese in the Lim Chhour food court on K Road is strategically located right outside City Fitness.

Te Ara Minhinnick is a Maori artist from Waiuku, descended from Ngati Te Ata, whose practice begins with gathering uku, sand and soil from the waterways of her rohe and asking what histories those materials carry. She's one of eight emerging artists, curators and writers selected for Learning from Venice, a programme funded by Naveya & Sloane giving Aotearoa creatives the chance to experience the Biennale firsthand. She joins Culture 101 fresh from packing her bags, on going overseas to see art for only the second time in her life.

Jenny Scown spent years as a magazine photographer in Auckland before moving back to the Waikato to have "country kids". She built a purpose-built gallery on the family farm outside Tamahere, near Hamilton, with views across to the Waikato River and Sanctuary Mountain, eight minutes from Cambridge. Perlina paid a visit to find out how you build a destination gallery in the middle of a paddock, and what nineteen years of backing emerging artists alongside established ones looks like.

Artsenta, the Otepoti Dunedin creative space supporting people experiencing mental health and addiction challenges, turns 40 on 17 June. To mark the occasion, it's hosting a symposium on creativity and wellbeing in October and is seeking expressions of interest for presentations. The EOI deadline is 31 May. Director Paul McLellan-Smith joins Culture 101 to talk about four decades of work.

Amanda Nguyen was sexually assaulted while at Harvard, then discovered her rape kit would be destroyed in six months unless she filed for an extension. Blinded by rage, she emailed everyone she knew and built a team that passed the Sexual Assault Survivors' Bill of Rights through the US Congress unanimously, signed into law by Barack Obama. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, named Time Woman of the Year in 2022, and last April became the first Vietnamese American woman in space. When she landed, a survivor texted to point out the date: April 14, the same day her rape kit had been scheduled for destruction eleven years earlier. She joins Culture 101 to discuss her memoir Saving Five.

The call came in on a Wellington number. Self-taught Auckland artist Duncan Pepe Long knew he should probably call back. He was asked to sit down, told he'd won Aotearoa's most prestigious portraiture award, and then had to go and stand in front of 25 students and pretend nothing had happened. His winning portrait is of Solomon Tamehana, a close friend of nearly 30 years, painted with a ring light, a side eye and a background of what Duncan describes as gay bears.

Ana Scotney is currently starring in Playfight at Silo Theatre. Written by British playwright Julia Grogan in the aftermath of the Grace Millane trial, follows three teenage girls navigating sex, shame and identity, and is the first time the Edinburgh Festival hit has been staged outside the UK. Ana joins Culture 101 for Fast Favourites, sharing the local films she thinks everyone should see right now, a discovery at the Samoa House Library, her favour K Road pasta, and what she learned about trusting your instincts from her filmmaking mentors, Dame Gaylene Preston and Dame Jane Campion.

After appearing in RNZ's story on rural cinemas, Tamasin Prince joins Culture 101 to talk about what's driving booming audiences in small-town New Zealand.

The Venice Biennale jury resigned two weeks ago after announcing they wouldn't award prizes to countries whose governments have been charged with crimes against humanity by the ICC. The biennale has since moved to an anonymous public vote, with winners to be announced in November instead of this month. Russia is participating for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine, prompting protests from Pussy Riot and a threat from the European Commission to pull €2 million in funding. Perlina unpicks the politics with art critic and curator Deena Jezdic, who has been in Venice, and with Sarah Hudson of the Mataaho Collective, who won the Golden Lion in 2024 and is watching events unfold from Aotearoa.

Actor and comedian Karen O'Leary joins Culture 101 ahead of her appearance at Poneke House Party, in Wellington.

New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist Richard Lewer has won Australia's most prestigious portrait prize, the Archibald, for his life-sized painting of fellow artist Iluwanti Ken, painted on country in 46-degree heat in the APY Lands.

Dame Gaylene Preston failed her art school degree. The F appeared in the paper the morning results were published. What followed was a move to Cambridge with her husband, a job as assistant librarian at a 900-bed psychiatric hospital, and the discovery that film could give institutionalised patients a voice and a way to prepare for the terrifying prospect of being released into a world that wasn't ready for them. She joins Culture 101 for Fast Favourites, and to talk about Grace: A Prayer for Peace, her new film about artist Dame Robin White, available on RNZ Video.. A visual poem rather than a conventional documentary, it follows White's 50-year practice across New Zealand, Japan and al-Mahdi, and has become the first New Zealand film selected for the Hiroshima Film Festival.

Tamar Torrence is three years into a PhD in neuroaesthetics at the University of Auckland, studying what happens neurologically when people have peak experiences with art.

Perlina wanders through the Hamilton Gardens with director Lucy Ryan where she explains that the gardens' founder, Peter Sergel, designed all 30 gardens before a single one was built.

Kate Rodger joins Culture 101 with reviews of The Weed Eaters and Devil Wears Prada 2.

Nigel McCulloch grew up in Rotorua with a garage full of VHS tapes, courtesy of his father's video delivery business. He never connected that upbringing to his career until recently.