The NZ Film Commission has been caught red-handed spending money, doing its job of promoting NZ films to people who might want to buy and fund NZ films.

There’s nothing like a good slamming. 

The New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) finds itself flat on the mat after a king hit from the nation’s heavyweight champions of slamming, the Taxpayers’ Union (TPU). 

As headlined by the Herald, arts, culture and heritage minister Paul Goldsmith has questions about the NZFC’s “six-figure junket to Cannes”, which was revealed via a TPU Official Information Act request. The cost “does seem excessive”, said the minister, “but I’ll have to get the details.”

“It’s not unreasonable, I would have thought, to go to international film festivals, but obviously spending needs to be appropriate,” Goldsmith said.

Based on its recurrent use in headlines, six-figure anythings are seldom appropriate. Six-figure salaries are quite bad, but six-figure junkets are the absolute worst. The implication is just lounging around right there in the word itself —  a junky waste of time where junky pigs have their junky snouts in the junky troughs. 

Based on the headline on the TPU’s press release, “Film Commission living it up in the French Riviera”, you would be forgiven for assuming the OIA revealed that the four film commission staff spent their days rolling around Château Louis XIII, smashing bottles of Dom Perignon over the heads of locals paid to serve Fiordland moose steaks while dressed as New Zealand’s picturesque landscapes, while nights were spent bowling wheels of Beaufort d’été into 20-feet-high piles of croquembouche resembling the Two Towers.

As revealed via an in-depth investigation by The Spinoff (reading the OIA response), the truth is far more boring but nonetheless shocking.

Things, as it turns out, cost money. The spending details are available for anyone to peruse – complete with individual receipts and calendar diaries – in the NZFC’s 47-page response to the TPU’s OIA request. The TPU made the request on August 6, and the NZFC responded in full on September 3.

The commission’s purpose is “to encourage and also to participate and assist in the making, promotion, distribution, and exhibition of films” as prescribed by the New Zealand Film Commission Act (1978). In the 2022/2023 financial year, the NZFC derived 22% of its $34.23m revenue from the Crown, while 69% came from Lotteries. 

The trip to Cannes, between May 11, 2024 and May 24, 2024, was for the world’s largest international film market and gathering of professionals in the film industry and cost exactly $145,354.81. 

More precisely, studio apartments were rented. Food, wine, beer and water was purchased for 270 guests over 10 days. France is not within walking distance of New Zealand and flights were required to get four staff to Cannes. Three rooms were rented at a hotel where a residence was set up for hosting and meetings over a week. Wifi was supplied. The four staff also ate food. Someone bought some muesli and, lavishly, some bog roll from the Monoprix on rue du Maréchal Foch. There were two lunches held, one for sales agents and one for financiers. More than 100 meetings, events and appointments are shown in their combined calendars. Staff met with film commissioners, film festival directors, heads of networks, producers and co-hosted networking events with Ireland, Taiwan, Singapore and India. If things cost money, you might say these things are the cost of doing business in an industry estimated to be worth $390bn by 2028.

This isn’t the first time the NZFC has been “slammed”. In July the Herald (again) reported that the commission had spent “$16,431 on CEO parties amid budget cuts”. The finer print revealed there had been four functions in total. The cost per head across those four events, including catering, staff, beverage, travel and venue hire, was $40.77. 

There is no reason why costs couldn’t and shouldn’t be reduced, especially on the first farewell for outgoing CEO Mladen Ivancic, which came in at $80 per head. Everyone in the public and many in the private sector have been going “line by line” through costs for months now as chill economic winds bite and costs escalate, but the creative and cultural sectors, which are not alone in requiring levels of public subsidy because of the size of the New Zealand market, seem to cop more heat. 

It’s almost as if some people resent the idea of people doing work on the public dime that might involve something other than being miserable in Wellington. 

When you look at the honest details of the spending supplied to the TPU, the “slam” isn’t so much that the NZFC has gone to town on the costs of doing business in the film industry but that, perhaps, they shouldn’t be there at all. That it was a bunch of luvvies larping about with Amal Clooney and probably the Illuminati, doing five-eighths of fuck all on the taxpayer dime. 

Worst of all, they did it in the sunny Riviera while the rest of us were here, our skin puckering as we sat in a wet and whiny puddle of misery, rocking in the dark, awaiting the dawn.

We don’t call prime ministerial trips with business owners a junket, we call it a trade delegation. Christopher Luxon has made a point of ramping up trips overseas after a period of border closure, describing the country as “very negative, wet, whiny and inward-looking”. Auckland mayor Wayne Brown has just announced he’s off on a trade trip to Brazil and China. That’s costing around $75,000, with one mayoral office staff member accompanying the mayor on each leg. No doubt, it will be spoken about as valuable. 

Trade experts and prime ministers have always extolled the value of being face-to-face with the people with whom you’re trying to build relationships. We don’t serve visiting leaders and diplomats a glass of water and a look around when they visit. People host business breakfasts with politicians not because anyone is especially dying for a catering company croissant or to hear about how dark it currently is, but because we’re weird social creatures who tend to do things like talk and sometimes even conduct business over food and drink.  

Perhaps when absorbing the revelation that “things cost money”, the important thing to remember is this: business people (C-list or otherwise) and politicians travelling = trade delegation and good. Film luvvies rolling around Cannes at what is both a festival and the world’s largest international film market and gathering of professionals in the film industry = junket and bad. 

Do not let words like “market” and “industry” or the basic and perfectly fine studio apartment accommodation blind you to the facts. Or the slam dunks.