This Fine Island revisits Charles Darwin's journey to the Bay of Islands in New Zealand in 1835. In this poetic adaption, Darwin's nineteenth-century travel writing in The Voyage of the Beagle becomes a vehicle for present day tourisms, travel romance, and racial othering, against the backdrop of New Zealand's lush landscape.
Shot in 16mm colour negative film, the aesthetic of This Fine Island calls on the look of key postwar nation-building New Zealand films including John O'Shea's landmark bicultural romance Broken Barrier (1952) that engaged pictorial traditions of New Zealand's native landscape representation.