Going West Film Programme - Erewhon

Shot over two years in New Zealand, Australia, and India, Erewhon is Gavin Hipkins’ first feature-length film and is an experimental adaptation of Samuel Butler’s anonymously published 1872 novel Erewhon: or, over the range.

An anagram of the word ‘nowhere’, Erewhon has been described as a utopian satire, and Butler's poetic meditations on industrial society and colonialism remain a timely reflection on contemporary society and our technological dependencies.

Calling on Butler’s strategies of inversions and reversals in the essay film genre, Erewhon charts the narrator’s journey from a Canterbury high country sheep farms to a fictional society where vegetarianism is the law and machines are banished for fear of their becoming conscious.