Our Party

Our Party is a contemporary adaptation of the celebrated classic story The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield. 

Our Party is a short film that tells the story of 18-year-old Laura as she prepares her opulent family home for a party. Sudden news of a neighbourhood tragedy confronts her with a reality from which she has been sheltered by her privileged life.

Davida McKenzie, off the back of her standout roles in the The Speedway Murders and Taika Waititi’s upcoming film Klara and the Sun, will play the lead role of Laura. Acclaimed actors and icons of New Zealand screen Alison Bruce and Michael Hurst are confirmed in the two other lead roles.

Strong visual imagery is a crucial component of this film and we are thrilled to have attracted an incredible  team, as you can see below — testament to everyone's passion for this story.

Director  Joshua Prendeville

Producer Jill Macnab & Joshua Prendeville

Line Producer Kerry Prendeville

Co-Producer Victoire Maderou

Screenplay Joshua Prendeville & Minka Bleakley

Cinematographer Bill Bycroft

Editor Chia Hsu

Composer Xavier Mañetto

Costume Designer Karen Inderbitzen-Waller & Delphine Avril Planqueel

Sound Designer Tom Scott-Toft

Joshua's latest film, a feature length documentary on the internationally renowned New Zealand writer Dame Fiona Kidman, The House Within, premiered in sold out sessions at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2024 and will be released theatrically in 2025. In 2017 he wrote and directed his first short film A Sentimental Thought which screened in the shorts corner of the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. For the next three years he lived between Italy and France developing and writing feature length films. At the beginning of 2020 he completed production on his feature film debut In Passing. He is currently adapting an award winning novel, and has a screenplay for a film set in France against the backdrop of the fashion industry which is looking for financing.

We are creating this campaign to help raise a vital portion of our production budget. The money will go towards paying shoot-related costs. Our shoot is scheduled for December this year, so that the film can be ready for top tier international film festivals mid 2025. 

Between them, the producers have had great success with Boosted campaigns this past year; Joshua, Kerry & Victoire with the sell-out NZIFF film The House Within and Jill with the groundbreaking documentary Cats in Conflict. So they are, once again, turning to the generous art loving community to help bring this next project to life.

Every donation, big or small, is hugely appreciated. We hope that this film will strike a chord with audiences around the world in a time when fearfulness and uncertainty of otherness needs to be torn down.

This short film is based on Katherine Mansfield’s celebrated short story The Garden Party written in 1922. The timeless narrative skeleton of Mansfield's story encapsulates the complexities involved in moving from a state of naivety to consciousness; a process at the core of any of life’s important transitions. What fascinates us in this story is the complicated endeavour to understand the experiences of those outside of oneself and to combat one’s own personal and societal experience. 

Simply, Our Party is a film about looking directly at a pain that one could never comprehend because one can never be within it. Laura's attempt to take on the suffering of another leads to a murky, messy appropriation; a thin representation of the real matter at hand. This is what Laura begins to realise at the end of the story. Life and the pain of others is often indescribable.    

We want to present a New Zealand story that looks directly at itself in an uncompromising way, and utilises the exciting possibilities of cinematic expression to explore these unique notions of class, society, family and human emotion that were present in our country in 1922 and are still present now, 100 years later.  

We are excited by our major departure from Mansfield’s original story — to shoot a contemporary film rather than fabricating an additional layer of distance by presenting a period piece set in 1922. We want to ground the story in 2022, a fitting 100 years after it was written, to consider that the characters and the story resonate just as strongly today.

We believe this story, using the character of Laura as its primary vehicle, piercingly examines the constructs of the way in which one learns, or is taught, to see and understand the world. Maya Angelou’s poignant line; “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better” reverberates as a fitting subtext for the journey that Laura goes on.

Our story centres on a female character who comes from a position of financial and social privilege. The story takes her into an environment that challenges these frameworks which are so ingrained into her sense of self that, when they come under question, it causes an unravelling that spills out in all directions. This central event reconfigures her sense of the cultural and societal divide which, through her upbringing, she previously perceived as  mysterious and unbridgeable, but can now transform into something tactile and relatable. 

Laura’s progression travels from naivety to disillusionment. It culminates, eventually, in a re-evaluation of self and a more grounded outlook on the world. 

As Jean Renoir so perfectly articulates in ‘The Rules of the Game’; “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons”. We have rigorously stuck to this philosophy through the development of Our Party. It’s an exploration with a gaze that tries to understand without preconception. 

These viewpoints are ones which we are eager to examine and explore, especially now, in our current societal and cultural climate.