Aro Valley

The Aro Valley forms a small inner-city suburb of Wellington in New Zealand.

Geography

The Aro Valley runs between the hills of Brooklyn to the south and of Kelburn to the north. By some reckonings it includes the side-valley of Mitchelltown. It takes its name from the Aro stream which flowed down Epuni street, and which since 1926 has been confined to a drain. The Aro (Wai-Mapihi) stream first appeared in a plan in 1843.

The Valley comprises the bed of the Wai-Mapihi stream. Aro Street runs through the whole valley, from Willis Street in the east to Raroa Road in the west; major side-streets include Devon Street, Epuni Street, Adams Terrace and Mitchelltown's Holloway Road.

History

First developed by settler Wellingtonians as a working-class residential suburb in the late 19th century, the Aro Valley featured small, narrow sections with closely-built wooden or corrugated-iron houses. It gained a reputation for political radicalism and for shady extra-legal dealings.

Gentrification affected the Aro Valley from the 1970s, boosted by urban-renewal planning (the Comprehensive Urban Renewal Area or CURA) after the rejection of a proposal to turn the valley into a main arterial road route: it became a desirable suburb, seen as close to the centre of Wellington and boasting notable community spirit.

Sociology

The Valley also adjoins parts of Victoria University (mainly to the north), and a large number of Valley residents study there or at Massey University to the east. Despite the "yuppification" of the suburb, it keeps its reputation as a home to politico-social radicals. Politically, it has become a stronghold of the Green Party.

Prominent features

* Aro Park (site of the former Matauranga School)
* Aro Valley Community Centre (complex with public hall and pre-school)
* William Booth Memorial College (formerly a Salvation Army officer-training establishment)
* Mickey Mouse Motors (as featured in "Goodbye Pork Pie", ceased trading since 2003)
* Mitchelltown War Memorial (at the top (west end) of Aro Street)

The Aro Valley film movement

Known also as "Aro Valley Digital," this "film movement" exists more in the eyes of outsiders than in the minds of an often fiercely independent-minded group of peers making the digital feature films. The cycle began with the release of director Campbell Walker’s first feature film, "Uncomfortable Comfortable" (1999), based on earlier experimental work in improvised performance. Detailing the up-and-down relationship of a young Aro-Valley couple, Alice (Robyn Venables) and Dale (Colin Hodson), the film stood out for its extended long-take style and its rambling, open-ended narrative structure.

Following Walker's film came a range of independent features, all exhibiting a common interest in the textures of human interaction; these range vastly from the choppy and enigmatic black comedy of "Shifter" (Colin Hodson, 2000), to the stern but sometimes amused gaze of "Murmurs" (Elric Kane and Alexander Greenhough, 2004), to the devastatingly painful world of "Little Bits of Light" (Campbell Walker, 2005). The films often follow inactive protagonists — youthful, unemployed or dislikable (and sometimes all of the above) — and as a result commentators have referred to the oeuvre as a "Cinema of Lethargy". Other feature-films include "Why Can't I Stop this Uncontrollable Dancing" (Walker, 2003), ".Off." (Hodson, 2002), and "I Think I'm Going" (Greenhough, 2003), and "Kissy Kissy" (Kane/Greenhough, 2007) — some highly influenced by the work of French filmmaker Jean Eustache and especially by his 1973 film "The Mother and the Whore".

External links

* [http://www.avcc.org.nz Aro Valley Community Web]
* [http://www.arovideo.co.nz/ Aro Street Video Shop]