About Douglas

Douglas Brooks is a writer, director, actor and staunch community film advocate. He wrote and directed the New Zealand Film Commission Fresh Short Kōkako, a bilingual film about a young Māori woman’s search for whānau as she hunts for traces of an extinct bird. Kōkako was selected in the Ngā Whanaunga Māori Pasifika collection at the 2023 New Zealand International Film Festival, where his directing received an honourable mention award.

With Maza White he co-directed the bilingual short Maryam, the story of an Iranian Kiwi struggling to bridge two cultures, which screened on the Rialto channel and won Best Drama at the Top Shorts Film Festival.

He was script supervisor on Gillian Ashurst’s 2021 NZFC-funded short The Meek, and assistant director of the award-winning feature Blue Moon, starring Jed Brophy and Mark Hadlow, which was shot entirely on an iPhone. He also worked in transport for Dreamworks’ Light Between Oceans and on BBC Scotland’s Reichenbach Falls and has been involved with more than 50 screen productions in nearly every role imaginable.

He is the director of the 2023 Top of the South Film Festival, a voluntary position where all proceeds go to support filmmakers in the region. In 2014 he co-founded Top of the South Filmmakers with Aaron Falvey, which provides networking, funding, and educational opportunities for filmmaking creatives in Tasman, Nelson and Marlborough. He was its vice-president from 2016-18. Douglas has also taught acting and coaches actors both on and off set.

In his acting career he is represented by Gail Cowan Management, with credits including a recurring role in Shortland Street (South Pacific Pictures), The Wilds (Amazon Prime), and Oddly Even (TVNZ). Advertising roles include those for Holden, Lightbox, and The Sweetshop.

Born in Nelson, Douglas is a descendant of Te Āti Haunui a Pāpārangi, Tūwharetoa, and Ngāti Kahungunu, with ancestry in Central Europe and the British Isles. He has a first-class honours degree in environmental science and is a secondary school teacher in Nelson. He has also been a volunteer firefighter, an ecologist for the Department of Conservation, a fisheries analyst for the Ministry of Fisheries, a coordinator for the Tasman/West Coast Sheila Winn Shakespeare Festival, and the founder and manager of a community cinema in Edinburgh.

Douglas has two children and lives with his wife Naomi Arnold outside Nelson, where they are busy weeding, trapping, and replanting several acres of land in native bush.