Mike is an award-winning filmmaker, cinematographer and editor based in Christchurch, New Zealand.

 

He graduated from the University of Canterbury in 1999 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in film and has then gone on to a 23 year career, working on feature films, television series and commercials.

 

With Slavko Martinov he founded Sabineprogram in 2012 to launch their first feature film, 'Propaganda', which has been described as “1984 meets The Blair Witch Project”, “A mouthful of scary porridge”, and “Even better than Triumph of The Will” on its way to becoming a viral smash hit, topping Indiewire’s ‘top 10 films to watch out for’ at IDFA (world premiere), and winning awards including the Founders Grand Prize awarded by Michal Moore for Best Film at the Academy Award-qualifying Traverse City Film Festival in 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mike and Slavko’s films have since won critical acclaim both within New Zealand and internationally, premiering at Hot Docs, IDFA, Raindance, and Melbourne International Film Festival, exhibited at the Goethe Institute, analyzed in books by Slavoj Zizek and courses at Yale and Cambridge, as well as being nominated for People’s Choice Awards, finalists in the Golden Trailers and numerous other awards.

 

In 2017 he received the New Zealand Cinematographers Society 'Gold Award - Documentaries' for cinematography on the feature Documentary 'Pecking Order'.

 

He was editor for the documentary series 'Fight for the Wild', produced by Fisheye Films, which won Best Factual Series at the NZTV Awards in 2022 as well as Best Natural World Documentary at the Association for International Broadcasting (AIBs) awards in 2021.

 

Mike's central city edit suite caters to film and broadcast editorial as well as DaVinci Resolve colour grading including FSI DM240 monitoring and a DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel.