International Stars Return Home For Film Release

For Immediate Release - 3rd November 2008

International Stars Return Home To Celebrate NZ Film Release

Hollywood star Melanie Lynskey and director Anthony McCarten will return to Taranaki for the New Zealand premiere of their film SHOW OF HANDS.

SHOW OF HANDS is an off-beat love story centered on a car yard in an everyday suburb, where an endurance competition with a difference is being staged.

SHOW OF HANDS will have its New Zealand premiere on NOVEMBER 4th at the TSB Showplace Theatre, New Plymouth. This is highly appropriate as the film was made in Taranaki, the hometown to both the lead actress Melanie Lynskey and the director Anthony McCarten.

Two and a Half Men star Melanie Lynskey is based in Los Angeles and has been working most recently on a Steven Soderbergh feature film. However her ties to this local project will see her back in New Zealand. Household name Melanie Lynskey plays Jess, a solo mother and a park warden, who is at first only interested in winning the car to help her disabled child. She’s nice as pie but feels she isn’t going to go very far. Not, at least, until her motives for winning unexpectedly change.

Anthony McCarten, playwright of New Zealand’s most commercially successful play of all time, Ladies Night, adapted the screenplay for SHOW OF HANDS from his novel by the same name. Now based in the United Kingdom, Anthony McCarten will return to see his story come to life on the big screen.

SHOW OF HANDS is based on a true story about a 1980’s world record-winning competition which took place in Lower Hutt. This contest attracted personalities from every walk of life, who for one reason or another - avarice, poverty, anger, revenge, despair, loyalty, love - see their salvation in winning the glistening car.

Melanie Lynskey and Anthony McCarten will be joined on the red carpet by fellow co-star and Outrageous Fortune personality Craig Hall.

New Zealand audiences can see SHOW OF HANDS in cinemas nationwide from NOVEMBER 13th.

ENDS

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