Three Days in February is truly an art gallery exhibition and a paean to honour the nature of the Splore festivals.
Director: Serena Giovanna Stevenson Doc Edge Festival 2025
The Splore Festival started in New Years Eve 1998 as the three-day hippie extravaganza of music, dance, theatre and most importantly a spiritual channel to love and natural beauty.
Hosted at the Tapapakanga Regional Park at Orere Point, the firth of Thames being one of many areas of New Zealand natural coastline beauty.
Being a Boomer, I attended the inaugural Sweetwaters Festival at Ngāruawāhia in the summer of 1980.
Of course, the media hype wanted to compare it to Woodstock, man! In a sense, all subsequent music festivals around the world owe their ancestry to that one cultural event.
A few good Sweetwater years but diminishing returns as boorish drunken male violence infested the site.
The 1981 festival had Ram Dass, and a Pentecostal marquee with the origins of Rock’n’roll singing in tongues. Tim Shadbolt set a world record for continuous oration (and is a true, concrete-mixer towing, Kiwi legend).
John Mayall was there. So was the legendary Be-Bop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie, whose management couldn’t allow him to play as he hadn’t been paid.
It is ironic that the highly successful Splore Festivals were launched around the same time Sweetwaters was having its final dead cat bounce in 1999.
I was there as on on-call medic. In between treating fainting young people, a caught bits of Donovan (Mellow Yellow) and Elvis Costello. Plenty of people but a financial disaster.
Director Stevenson attended her first show in 2004 and started filming bits in 2008.
Around that time, it became a two-yearly event but reverted to annually in 2018.
The cinefilm captured by Stevenson and her team of shooters covers seven festivals.
Our Red Raven team covered the 2024 festival and a review can be found here.
Three Days in February is essentially a panegyric with little words, a lot of theme music, and all action set to super slow motion.
We start with overhead drone shots of the vast beautiful beach head and the rolling waves, the campsite and the setting of native trees and scrub.
Come down to the ground and the camera eye wanders. It is a tapestry of tracking shots with minimal motion.
Detail is caught with the clarity of the David Attenborough cinematographer team.
A non-linear documentary which went on to become a high-grossing cinematic release. The title comes from the American Indian Hopi tribe language.
Many overhead slow-motion shots of vast landscapes and clouds. But it speeds up as the camera comes down to the ground and the humans behave like ants on the roads and large shopping malls. Buildings constructed at speed in stop-motion. The soundtrack is by Philip Glass.
The super-slow motion makes each image resemble a painting or a photo. With micro-movement.
The design is to convey the environment of Splore, of which the music is one element of the tapestry.
Human interaction. The play of babies and children. Couples sharing intimacy in the context of a crowd. The application of make-up and cosmetics to create a super-persona.
People dancing to music or just to life. To the over-riding Qi energy field.
Truth is real/ That which is not real does not exist/ In and out roundabout/ Dance to the days when fear it is gone. (Change is Now from the Notorious Byrd Brothers).
Soundtrack to Three Days include Nikita Tu-Bryant, Ed Zucollo, Dylan C, Mike Hodgson, the Arcus String Quartet from the APO.
Director Stevenson had to endure a traumatic event just as major shooting started. She lost her peripheral vision and was diagnosed with NAION by an ophthalmologist.
Non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy. Limited vision and legally blind. There is eyesight and there is vision, as she has pointed out in interview.
One minor quibble with the documentary is maybe to mix up the pace. All in slow motion does stretch out the patience towards the closing sequences.
Speed sequences of mass dancing may have been jarring in an interesting way.
Three Days in February does attempt to show that what is not real does not exist.
Ticket details HERE.
Rev. Orange Peel
