GRACE - A Prayer for Peace

COMING SOON!

GRACE - A Prayer for Peace brings filmmaker Dame Gaylene Preston and artist Dame Robin White (Ngāti Awa) together in an extraordinary collaboration.

What begins as conversation evolves into a cinematic path across Aotearoa, Kiribati, and Japan, drawing rich connections between people, place, and art.

This is not a biopic, but a creative exchange: anchored in Robin White's practice and worldview, it becomes a deeply felt exploration of how we live, what we value, and what we choose to protect.

Through White's art, the voices of her collaborators across the Pacific, and Preston's astute and considered lens, the film reckons with legacies of environmental destruction, displacement, and injustice. Yet GRACE never loses sight of beauty, humour, and the enduring search for peace. Strong, tender, and quietly transformative, it offers both a warning and a space for contemplation — an invitation to see more clearly, feel more deeply, and respond with humanity.

In GRACE - A Prayer for Peace, filmmaker Dame Gaylene Preston ventures on a deeply emotional journey, illuminating and exploring the visual art of Dame Robin White (Ngāti Awa) and gradually becoming a new work of creative collaboration as they travel from Aotearoa to Kiribata and Hiroshima.

Official Selection, Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival.

Artist Robin White (Ngāti Awa) has spent more than five decades creating work which ranges from iconic New Zealand landscapes to collaborative tapa cloth. In Grace: A Prayer for Peace, Gaylene Preston traces White's evolution as an artist, and her creative response to the world around her. Grace offers a meditation on living a creative life in motion — shaped by community, faith and a deep engagement with the Pacific.

VIEW TRAILER HERE: vimeo.com/1165106098

---

SHORT BIOGRAPHIES:

Dame Robin White (Ngāti Awa) is a leading artist of Aotearoa New Zealand with over fifty years of uninterrupted practice to her name. She has exhibited in a number of public galleries in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South America. An extensive retrospective of her work "Robin White: Te Whanaketanga - Something is Happening Here" travelled throughout Aotearoa New Zealand during the filming of GRACE. Her honours and awards include becoming a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2009, receiving a University of Auckland Distinguished Alumni Award in 2012, and receiving a Laureate title at the 2017 New Zealand Art Awards. In 2022, Dame Robin was made an Arts Foundation Icon and was a recipient of the Te Tohu Aroha mō Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu Exemplary/Supreme Award at the Te Waka Toi Awards.

An adventurous, pioneering innovator, Dame Gaylene Preston has made some of the most enduring popular classics of New Zealand cinema, presenting serious subjects with humour and warmth. Her genre-bending spirit is reflected in feature films, documentaries, and television series as diverse as Mr Wrong, Home By Christmas, Perfect Strangers, and Hope and Wire – and in her Ockham-longlisted memoir, Gaylene's Take. She is the New Zealand Arts Foundation's inaugural Filmmaker Laureate, the inaugural recipient of the lifetime achievement award from Documentary Edge, a SPADA Industry Champion and a recipient of the Premium Moa award for services to cinema. A lifetime honorary member of Women In Film and Television, in 2019 she became a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

"Sometimes, when I'm making a film, I try to make the idea go away because I know it's going to be hard to find financial backing. With 'Grace' I had an added impediment, which was the head injury. So I wasn't exactly leaping to it. But it was like being on a beach, when you quite casually pick up a stone and you turn it over and it reveals treasure. You pick up another: more treasure and you find that your idea has landed in very rich territory. The more I found out about Robin's work, particularly her later work, I felt like that." - Gaylene Preston on taking on the project, The Post, 26 July 2025

"I didn't know anything about making a film. I like going to movies, that's all I knew, and it was wonderful to be welcomed into her process." – Robin White on working with Gaylene Preston, The Post, 26 July 2025.

---

Director/Producer - Gaylene Preston
Executive Producer - Catherine Madigan
Co-Producers - Danny Bultitude, Susana Lei'ataua
Associate Producers - Grant Baker, Steve Finnigan, Mike McCombie, Hilary McLeavey, Olivia McLeavey, Jennifer Sutton, Robin White
Editors - Paul Sutorius, Lala Rolls
Assistant Editor - Gabby D'Souza
Original Music composed by Jan Preston
Filmed by Gaylene Preston
Cinematography - Alun Bollinger, Stephanie Damm, Raymond Edwards, Bruce Foster, Jake Mokomoko. Robyn Probyn
Sound Designer - Melanie Graham

Produced by Gaylene Preston Productions
with support from NZ On Air/Iriirangi Te Motu

(c) 2025, Gaylene Preston Productions Ltd

---

MEDIA AND FEEDBACK:

"A portrait of one of Aotearoa's GREATEST LIVING ARTISTS by one of our GREATEST FILMMAKERS. You should EXPECT SOMETHING SPECIAL, and that's what you get."
- NZIFF Whānau Mārama.

"It's a rare thing to have two official Dames work together. Rarer still for those two Dames to be two of Aotearoa's greatest artists. Grace - A Prayer for Peace is truly something to cherish—not just a fascinating study of life and art but a beacon of steadfast hope and light in our troubled time." - Amelia Berry, Flicks

"A mesmerising, immersive, experimental masterpiece. The camera moves like a paintbrush. ... So deeply moving and glorious." - Gemma Gracewood, RNZ Culture 101

"Preston is more switched-on and engaged than ever, her voice never more vital than it is now." - Tom Augustine, Letterboxd

"An absorbing, engrossing, moving and often very funny piece of work." - Graeme Tuckett, NZ Sunday Star Times

---

0 Shares Tweet0 Pins

Permalink: https://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/19439

< Current releases