Channelling Baby

Danielle Cormack is an amazing Bunnie. She not only faces the challenge of portraying a sightless character convincingly, but she also has to sustain intense emotion for an extended period of time. She goes from carefree hippie to protective mother with seeming ease.

– Wrter Bret Ryan Rudnick, on Xena fan site Whoosh, September 2000

...this will be a blast.

– Bunnie (Danielle Cormack) arrives at the protest, in the film's opening scene

Channelling Baby's release in 1999 rounded out a decade in which a group of women writer/directors entered the Kiwi filmmaking fray with fresh, frequently dark portraits of dysfunctional relationships...

– Writer Ian Pryor, in his backgrounder about the film

Are you frightened?

– Cassandra (Amber Sainsbury) to Bunnie (Danielle Cormack), as they wait for Geoff's arrival

Like that vision at Fatima, I saw the sun dance. It was the last thing I ever saw.

– Bunnie (Danielle Cormack)

a solid debut for Christine Parker and a film of which all involved can be proud.

– Sunday Star-Times reviewer Michael Lamb in a four star review, 21 November 1999

[The film has a] New Zealand look as opposed to Haight Ashbury or Carnaby Street, London. It needed to be a little bit grimy, a little bit flatter, with a certain urban chic.

– Costume designer Kirsty Cameron

I was concerned at the start because I didn't think they could get the light powerful enough to make me look like a 20-year-old. They used this collagen-based stuff designed by a guy who does make-up for Cher and Michelle Pfieffer . . . It fills up all the blood vessels under the skin and brings them to the surface. But it’s like the muscle liniment, Deep Heat. You put that on your face for the first time and phowwoo, it’s like someone’s inflating your head. It doesn't take the wrinkles away it just inflates your head to fill them.

– Kevin Smith on ageing 20 years in the film

Christine Parker's Channelling Baby is the kind of film we don't make enough of in New Zealand — not just weird, but deliberately weird, flamboyantly weird, a confluence of magic realism, new age spiritualism and heart-on-sleeve emotion . . . The best thing that Channelling Baby does is to get at the notion of love as a carefully-constructed fantasy, something built on illusion and chance, ineffable, almost supernatural.

– Reviewer Philip Matthews in The Listener, 27 November 1999

In addition to the mystery elements, it was very touching and also had a good deal of spiky humour. It was unusual and it was quirky. I’m very attracted to those things.

– Producer Caterina De Nave on what attracted her to the project

A lot of other countries had their own experiences of that war,but this is ours. . . . As a nation, we are only just beginning to confront our emotions relating to that period and about other historical issues. One of the themes of the film is about uncovering the truth of the past in order to move forward in the present.

– Writer/director Christine Parker on how the film touches on the Vietnam War

The initial concept for Channelling Baby was based on the idea that people have their own unique version of events. And that we need to agree on what the truth is to make it truth. The story is intended to allow people to make an emotional connection with that idea.

– Writer/director Christine Parker on ho