A little boy with a big imagination

Press, 17 October 1987, Page 19

A little boy with a big imagination

Young Wellington schoolboy Stacey Adams is the star of “Stalin’s Sickle,” a short New Zealand film screening tomorrow (Sunday) night (9.30 on One). . r It is a comedy about a little boy with a big imagination who takes on the world’s greatest dictator.

The year is 1962. New Zealand is emerging from the austerity of the fifties into a hew age. Daniel is a nine-year-old Catholic boy, an only child given to colourful imaginings. He discovers that an old man (Jim Macfarlane) who passes the plate in church bears

a striking resemblance to the great Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin. Daniel starts to believe the old man really is Stalin, come to take over New Zealand. He takes it upon himself to give Stalin a fright and Send him on his way. He hits on a method of doing so after finding where the old man lives and spying on him. I Stalin is banished, but events take a strange twist, leaving Daniel with an even worse threat to deal with. “Stalin’s Sickle” was filmed in August last year at historic Erskine College in Island Bay, Wellington.

Major scenes were filmed in the Erskine Chapel, regarded by many" as the most beautiful example of French Gothic architecture outside France. “Stalin’s Sickle” has screened at the Auckland and Wellington. Film Festivals, the Melbourne Film Festival, the Oberhausen Film Festival in West Germany and : the Ahn Arbor Film Festival in Michigan (where it was selected to be part of a touring package of short films). It is based bn Michael Morrisey’s original story, which' was first published in the Halloween issue of the “New Zealand Listener” in 1981.