Bruce Foster’s debut film is a layered portrait of a New Zealand icon.

Best known as a celebrated photographer, Bruce Foster steps into new creative territory with Spontaneous Combustion: Songs for Barry Brickell, showing in a special screen at Central Stories.

At first glance, Bruce Foster’s name might ring familiar to those in New Zealand’s art circles a distinguished photographer with a Master’s from Elam, a celebrated exhibitor, and principal photographer for some of the country’s most beautiful and storied books. 

But with the premiere of his first feature film Spontaneous Combustion: Songs for Barry Brickell at the 2024 DocEdge Festival, we meet a Bruce Foster stepping fully into a new frame: that of filmmaker, storyteller, and memory keeper.

Foster’s artistic career has always been cinematic in its approach, with a keen eye for narrative, place, and history. 

His still images have long told layered stories from riverbanks and remote coastlines to the lives of stockmen and city dwellers. But Spontaneous Combustion is something deeper and more intimate. It’s a deeply personal, poetic meditation on the life, work, and philosophy of the late Barry Brickell potter, train builder, thinker, and New Zealand icon.

Foster isn’t new to documentary. Earlier projects, including Open Road and Sleeping Giants, hint at his evolving relationship with the moving image. But this film feels like the culmination of decades of looking, listening, and quietly observing.

Drawing on years of personal footage, interviews, and archival photographs, Spontaneous Combustion brings together a chorus of voices to honour Barry’s legacy, from his ceramics at Driving Creek to his fierce love of geology, literature, and hand-built aesthetics.

At the heart of the film is a concert. A 2023 tribute led by musician Robert Oliver and taonga pūoro artist Mahina-Ina Kingi-Kaui. Featuring works by Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead and Douglas Lilburn, the soundtrack adds a rich emotional layer to the storytelling, mirroring Barry’s values through sound.

Poet and curator Gregory O’Brien, a long-time friend of Barry’s, weaves his voice through the film as narrator and guide. His relationship with the Brickell family brings both warmth and depth to the storytelling.

Also present is the wider creative whānau that gathered around Driving Creek. Their presence in image, story, and sound helps capture the full spirit of Barry’s world.

This isn’t a conventional life story. It’s a sensory journey through memory, music, and landscape a film as layered as the glazes on Barry’s pottery. And for Foster, it marks more than a shift to film. It’s a distillation of decades spent witnessing and honouring the textures of Aotearoa.

Learn more: Central Cinema presents: Spontaneous Combustion