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At Creative Bay of Plenty, we are grateful to every artist, performer, poet, and cultural leader who helps express the world around us. They expand our connections to one another, help us grapple with problems, and often bring us a greater understanding of the humanity we share. Whether making songs, plays, sculpture, novels, or kapa haka—creative people help us celebrate sense of place and make our region rich in cultural experiences. 

We work hard to support them and promote diverse creative infrastructure like Tauranga's City Art Walk and new public art initiatives, diverse concerts and festivals throughout the year, and community arts hubs like The Incubator and Activate Vacant Spaces. Every day, our team promotes the work of musicians, writers, dancers, carvers, and story-tellers from Waihi Beach to Pukehina. The latest is Mount Maunganui-based filmmaker James Ashcroft, whose first feature film is a gripping thriller called Coming Home in the Dark. 

Based on an Owen Marshall short story, it had its premiere earlier this year at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in the United States. The reviews are still glowing and its Rotten Tomatoes score is currently a solid 88%. Soon this independent Bay of Plenty work—filmed predominantly in the Wellington region—will hit screens all across Aotearoa. For the hometown crowd, particularly those not shy of the psychological horror genre, we now invite our friends and neighbours to a special screening at Bayfair United Cinema on Saturday 14 August. The 6pm film will be followed by a question and answer session with co-writer and director James Ashcroft. It will be an opportunity to meet the filmmaker before he heads to Hollywood to embark on his first major production based on the Bigfoot horror novel Devolution. Advance tickets to the 14 August screening are now available at Bayfair United Cinema Tauranga.

"All of us at Creative Bay of Plenty are filled with pride every time a local artist advances an idea, project, or new work," says General Manager Eric Holowacz. . "And we are ever grateful to serve a remarkable community of performers, writers, choreographers, and filmmakers—artists with something important to say and new ways to help us understand the world we live in."