Influential film maker Costa Botes remembered for helping to shape Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation

Former Massey University Media Studies lecturer Costa Botes sadly passed away on 21 November after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Mr Botes was influential in the film industry and helped shape and guide many of Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University’s emerging filmmakers during his tenure from 2015 to 2023.

Creative Communications Professor Elspeth Tilley, explains how fortunate staff and students were to have Mr Botes at Massey for nearly a decade.

"He was a game-changing writer, director, editor and producer who deeply understood the dynamics of creative communication for social justice and shared that knowledge both through his teaching and his mentoring,” Professor Tilley says.

Former colleagues of Mr Botes paid tribute to him saying they will remember him as an inspiring teacher who kept students honest, and inculcated in them an exquisite mode of powerfully candid emotional storytelling and visual mastery. He modelled incredible courage and resilience as he openly spoke about and battled illness in the final years of his life.

A life in film

In ‘An Evening with Costa Botes,’ an online talk he gave for the School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication in 2022, Mr Botes shared both his unique and endearing sense of humour, and his powerful personal story and how it influenced his filmmaking.

Born to Greek parents on the Turkish island of Imbros, near Gallipoli, but raised in Aotearoa, he said that he had “always felt like someone out of place, out of time and never really been particularly comfortable in my skin.” He found solace, though, in movies, watching films from all over the world in Kilbirnie’s ‘The Kinema’ or Newtown’s ‘The Ascot’ from the age of five.

One film, he says, “truly blew my mind”: Richard Fleischer’s 1966 science fiction classic Fantastic Voyage.

“It was a door opening into something utterly fantastic, and I was hooked, truly hooked, and then I started to go to the movies any chance I got,” Mr Botes said during the online talk.

As soon as he could get a basic camera, he taught himself photography and started building connections with other creative kids and adults, making his first films in middle school then proceeding to film school in Christchurch.

His first professional film industry job as third-assistant-director on a Christmas film involved keeping the extras playing penguins and elves hydrated by taking cold water around in the hot studio, but it was a first-hand chance to see how a film set worked (and, at times, did not work).

A little disillusioned, Mr Botes stepped away into a job packing and shipping in an import business, which he said, “made me very humble but it gave me a small income and meant that I could pursue my filmmaking in my own time.” He made three films during that time. “I didn’t give up, I just put my head down and kept going.”

Then he was offered a job on the children’s TV series Worzel Gummidge where he met Peter Jackson, who had been called in to do a special effect.

“Someone had met him at a party … and Peter had let it be known that he could do little explosions. They needed a little explosion, so they got Peter in, and I got to meet him on set, and we became fast friends after that,” Mr Botes said.

A prolific career followed, with Mr Botes’ work, both solo and collaborative, featuring in festivals worldwide and winning multiple awards. He wrote and directed for both film (short and feature length) and television but is best known for his deeply moving documentaries, including Angie, Candyman, Team Tibet, Struggle No More, Act of Kindness, The Last Dogs of Winter, and When the Cows Come Home, and the cult classic mockumentary, Forgotten Silver, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Jackson.

Pulling together some of the threads from his own life experiences to inform his creative work, Mr Botes’ documentaries explored important stories of migrant and refugee experiences, healing from trauma, and outsider wisdom.

His awards included the jury prize at the Clermont-Ferrand short film festival for Stalin’s Sickle, Best Director prize at the New Zealand Film and Television Awards 1996 and Special Critics' Prize at Venice the same year for Forgotten Silver, Best Documentary at the 2010 Qantas Film and Television Awards for Lost in Wonderland, about lawyer Rob Moodie and nine international best in festival awards for The World in Your Window, directed by Zöe McIntosh and co-written and executive produced by Mr Botes.

Mr Botes’ work with Zöe was just one example of his generous mentorship of emerging talent. He worked with Zöe on multiple films, with The World in Your Window going on to be a 2019 Academy Awards contender. Mr Botes’ is also known for his five years’ work filming three full-length behind-the-scenes documentaries for The Lord of the Rings.