Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon (Trailer) (2014)

1 min 52 sec (excerpt)Single channel / Digital Video / Colour / Sound

Shot over two years in New Zealand, Australia, and India, Erewhon is Gavin Hipkins’ first feature-length film and is an experimental adaptation of Samuel Butler’s anonymously published 1872 novel Erewhon: or, over the range. An anagram of the word ‘nowhere’, Erewhon has been described as a utopian satire, and Butler's poetic meditations on industrial society and colonialism remain a timely reflection on contemporary society and our technological dependencies. Calling on Butler’s strategies of inversions and reversals in the essay film genre, Erewhon charts the narrator’s journey from a Canterbury high country sheep farms to a fictional society where vegetarianism is the law and machines are banished for fear of their becoming conscious.

Other works by Gavin Hipkins

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