NZ Idle

"I don't really like the term job-search. Or the term job. I'm on a life search. I want a life."  Buckford Aquarius Muldoon (pronounced Mull-June!), aka BAM, has a complex relationship with unemployment. He is too busy to get a job.

Yet he, like all of us, lives in a climate of fear, surveillance, and urgency. Benefit reforms are being hurried through parliament with little concern for sole-parents, the sick and the infirm, and other real people - let alone artists. As with polar bears on the ice caps haunting questions remain:  Where will they go? What will they do?   

*

NZ Idle is a 6 part web series set for release in November 2013. The 4-7 minute episodes will be released online weekly at www.nzidle.com (check out our teaser clip at this address).

The series is a comic take on the prevailing attitudes toward the unemployed and those of them who engage in independent creative pursuits. 'Beneficiary Bashing' and the impacts of recent benefit reforms are of course deadly serious issues. All too often, in a short cut to thinking, all beneficiaries are negatively stereotyped as lazy, unmotivated, underserving etc.   NZ Idle aims to - albeit in a relatively lighthearted fashion - deconstruct this kind of carry on by reprising the character of the kiwi battler-dag-Maui, a Good Keen Person, and recasting them as a creative type on the dole in 2013. A fairly natural fit don't you reckon?

Together we'll explore that age-old three-way: oneself, one's kindly social welfare case-manager, and that other case-manager who, due to misplaced jealousy and a thinly veiled distaste for beneficiaries, is determined to thwart one's every move towards artistic self-actualisation. In this case: BAM, Ms Jacqui Millef�e, and Mr Able Twerk.

We'll also be showcasing some of Wellington's real life 'creatives' throughout the series.

We have a great team of writers and actors involved in what we think will be an insightful, and funny, web series. Our qualified film crew will be shooting using high quality, industry standard equipment as we hope to make a sitcom that stands up against other New Zealand and New Zealand examples of this form.

We just need a little bit of funding to hire some of this equipment when we need it. We'll be putting a whole heap of our own money into this project - but we can't afford to do it alone.

Thanks so much for considering donating something to our project.