La Historia
What happens on screen, and what happened behind the camera.
A twelve-year-old girl walks into a freezing lake. She doesn't come out. This is how Top of the Lake begins , with the kind of silence that only exists deep in the New Zealand backcountry. Jane Campion's Palme d'Or-winning series is the most artistically significant television ever shot in the Queenstown region. Where The Lord of the Rings showed the landscape as epic fantasy, Campion revealed its darker face: the isolation, the secrets, the quiet menace beneath the beauty.
Jane Campion's Top of the Lake is arguably the most artistically significant television ever shot in the Queenstown region. The series: starring Elisabeth Moss and Nicole Kidman across its two seasons: used the landscapes not as backdrop but as character: the brooding lake, the isolating mountains, the small-town dynamics that the geography enforces.
Moke Lake, a small alpine lake 15 minutes from Queenstown, stood in for the fictional community of Laketop (Season 1, though the series was officially set in Glenorchy). The lake is a DOC reserve with a campsite and a 2-hour walking track around its perimeter. On a still winter morning, with mist hanging over the water and the Remarkables reflected on the surface, it is exactly as it appears in the series: unsettlingly beautiful.
The Glenorchy wharf and its iconic red shed appear in multiple lake scenes. It's one of the most photographed spots in the region, and the 45-minute drive from Queenstown along Lake Wakatipu is itself worth the trip. Go at dawn to catch the same light Campion's cinematographer Adam Arkapaw captured.

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“Moody, painterly, natural light only. Arkapaw shot on ARRI Alexa with vintage Cooke lenses, favouring overcast days and low-contrast colour grading. The palette is cool blues, mist greys, and deep ...”




















