Three New Zealanders walked into one of the wildest, wettest corners of the country, vanished from the modern world for more than three months, and came back out with one of the most talked-about adventure films of the year.
In the autumn of 2024, paddlers Ethan Roadley, Dan Sutherland and Daymon Nuhaj set off to spend 100 days off the grid in Fiordland, hunting for white water in drainages that no one had ever paddled before. They travelled entirely under their own power, sea kayaking more than 1,000 kilometres along the fiords and into the river mouths, then hiking and dragging their boats inland to reach the steep, untouched creeks that pour off the mountains.
The footage they gathered along the way became 100 Days in Fiordland, a film shot and assembled by Sutherland, a novice filmmaker. According to RNZ, the film has now won the Hiddleston/MacQueen Award for Best New Zealand Made Film at the New Zealand Mountain Film Festival, an honour that comes with $2,500 in prize money.
The goal was ambitious from the start. The trip was launched as an attempt to complete 20 first descents, or as many as the team could manage, on unexplored creeks and rivers around the Fiordland region. In the end they recorded the first known descents of four new white water runs, a tally that says less about falling short and more about just how hard the country fought back.
Fiordland is not an easy place to live, let alone paddle. The region soaks up around seven metres of rain a year, and the team planned their days around that reality. Fine weather was for exploring, fishing and gathering food, while the heavy rain was the signal to attempt river descents that only work when the creeks are running high. It is a place where the weather decides the schedule, not the people.
Staying out for 100 days meant living off what they could carry and what they could catch. The trio leaned heavily on fishing, hunting and diving to keep themselves fed, and the numbers behind the expedition read like a quartermaster’s logbook. Over the course of the trip they got through 23 kilograms of flour and 31.4 kilograms of oats, brewed their way through 520 tea bags, and took nine deer along with countless fish. The maths of a long expedition is unglamorous, but it is the difference between an adventure and a rescue.
The team based themselves out of a handful of remote camps as they worked their way through the fiords. Those included Cliff Cove in Taiari, also known as Chalky Inlet, the waters of Doubtful Sound, and Charles Sound, each one a foothold deep in country that most New Zealanders will only ever see from the deck of a tourist boat or the window of a scenic flight.
What makes the story land is that none of the three set out to be filmmakers. Sutherland picked up the camera as the trip went along, learning the craft in the field with cold hands and salt water everywhere, and the finished film carries that raw, lived-in quality. Judges at the festival clearly responded to it, handing the country’s headline prize for a locally made film to a first-time director working with footage shot between paddle strokes.
The win comes as the New Zealand Mountain Film and Book Festival gets under way for 2026. According to the festival, this year’s programme drew 266 film entries from around the world, with 63 films chosen for the final line-up, including 18 New Zealand productions. Festival director Whitney Oliver said the strength of the programme reflected a global appetite for adventure storytelling.
For anyone wanting to see the Fiordland film and the rest of the selection, the festival runs in person in Wanaka from 19 to 23 June, then moves to Queenstown on 25 and 26 June. An online festival follows for viewers in New Zealand and Australia, running from 24 June through to 31 July, which means the film will reach far more living rooms than the handful of people who could ever stand in those creeks themselves.
There is something quietly reassuring about a story like this. In a year crowded with hard news, three young New Zealanders spent a season doing nothing more complicated than paddling hard, eating what they caught, and pointing a camera at a part of the country that has barely changed in centuries. The reward was not fame or fortune but four first descents, a stack of footage, and a film good enough to beat the field. It is the kind of homegrown adventure that reminds you how much wild country still sits just beyond the road end.
Have you seen 100 Days in Fiordland or made your own trip into the deep south, and what is the most remote part of the country you have reached under your own steam? Share your stories in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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