24/1/2012

That evening, Lesley, Effie (a friend of Lesley’s) and I went to the cinema in Northlands Mall to see the film “When A City Falls”. It’s a feature documentary made by Gerard Smyth about the Christchurch earthquakes. It’s a very good film, well made and very moving. It starts off with how Christchurch was before the quakes, shows the earthquakes themselves, the devastation afterwards, how people were effected by it, personal stories but it also shows the people’s strong community spirit and how they helped each other out. It compares the effects of the quakes here to places like San Francisco, Portland – Oregon and New Orleans and how the people there coped with disasters. There were tears running down my cheeks during the film.

The film is dedicated to Rhys Brookbanks who was the researcher on the documentary after the first earthquake in September 2010. He had finished his work on the documentary and he was on his sixth day of work at  Canterbury Television when he lost his life during the February quake. The CTV building collapsed and one hundred and fifteen people died, Rhys being one of them.

It really is a great film and as far as I know, it’s been released in Australia, the US and the UK. I don’t think it’s been released in Europe. I was hoping that it would be because I think it would be a great education for people over here to see what the people in Christchurch have been going through. If you’re interested in buying the DVD, it’s available for sale through Frank Film Ltd, (directly through Gerard Smyth) for 35 NZD, which includes shipping to Europe. It’s well worth the money and I would highly recommend that you see it.