The cutting edge of counter culture
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Annie Goldson will be in town on Friday for a screening and Q&A of Red Mole: A Romance. The film explores the origins, performances, personalities and fate of the Kiwi group Red Mole, who burst onto the scene in the early 1970s.
The Wellington-based avant garde theatre troupe were known for experimental performances, combining elements of satire and cabaret. Red Mole were influential to Aotearoa and they performed a number of works over the years, up until the early 90s.
“They were always interesting and did garner quite a large and dedicated following, and have gone on to influence lots of people from Don McGlashan to contemporary theatre,” Goldson says. “I thought it was time to look back at Red Mole and I think it’s partly a social history of New Zealand because it was about culture, counter culture, political theatre and politics generally.”
At the time that the troupe were disrupting the norm, university campuses were abuzz with politics, so the documentary also serves as a peek into the social history of New Zealand. While performances were known for being provocative, unconventional and at times controversial, they included music, dance, puppetry and fire-eating. They created a manifesto with five principles including to keep the romance alive, to escape programmed behaviour by remaining erratic, to preserve the unclear and inexplicit idioms of everyday speech, to abhor the domination of any person over any other and to expand energy.
Goldson was always interested in Red Mole, crossing paths and going to New York with them in the early 1980s. She explains that they were at the cutting edge of counter-culture when the country was fairly conservative. Heading to the Big Apple was a springboard for her own career as a documentary filmmaker, something she says she’s always grateful to the city for, as it wasn’t easy for young women at the time.
“That was one of the nice things about doing the film was that I reconnected with people I knew all that time ago, so that’s been good. As well as it being a theatre history and New Zealand cultural history, there’s a very personal thread, a tragic thread that runs through the film – a contemporary storyline.”
Despite never having a lot of money and moving around a lot, the group were great archivists and loved the art of performing, which lends well to this film about them. Goldson had access to a huge collection of photographs, posters, half-finished scripts and videos to include in the documentary, which makes it a visual delight, too.
Goldson hopes the documentary will engage audiences, particularly younger generations, and provide a glimpse into New Zealand’s politically and culturally active past. Working as a professor, she receives feedback from her students of feeling envious of the counter culture, but says: “They do see it through rather rose tinted spectacles, I think, the idea of this politically engaged community that’s culturally really active, breaking all the rules.” She's also aware the film impacts different generations differently.
“For older audiences, I think a lot of people remember Red Mole – just – for younger people, they’re kind of amazed because they just had no idea this went on in New Zealand. When I’ve shown it, and I have shown it around the country, there’s always people that come along that have some story or other. People have all of these different sorts of memories, which are quite fun, and hopefully the audience down there [Queenstown] will as well.”
The screening of Red Mole: A Romance and the Q&A with Annie Goldson will be on Friday, 29 August, at 6.30pm at Arrowtown Lifestyle Village.
More information and tickets can be found on Eventfinda.
https://www.eventfinda.co.nz/2025/red-mole-romance-screening-followed-by-director-q-a/arrowtown
Annie Goldson
