Look for a FFJ movie review in a few weeks, but in the meantime, here’s a quick Once in a Blue Moon blurb:

In an unpredictable chain of events, a mass flowering of the ancient New Zealand Beech forest leads to an excess of seed production. Mice and rodents take advantage of this abundance and numbers reach plague proportions. Incredible footage follows these rodents as they embark on a strange migration, attempting to swim across the expanse of New Zealand’s rivers and lakes. There they fall prey to the largest predators in the lake–monster Brown trout…

And some words from Carl McNeil, self described “fly fishing wastrel” and the filmmaker:

First and foremost, we wanted to make something beautiful and a little different. It really began over 10 years ago, my fishing mate Earl and I had often talked about making a short fly fishing film. As the years went by and we saw more and more films released, we felt that much of what we saw didn’t capture the essence of what is a very beautiful sport.

Many anglers had heard about the phenomenon of the “Mouse Year,” and I’d heard about it since I was a kid, so it seemed like the perfect reason to make our film. All that had to happen was for a mouse year to occur, and eventually it did.

All up, it took 3 years. We took time out during holidays, weekends and breaks to film. We lived in the bush, got eaten alive by bugs, boated and hiked into the remotest spots we could find, and ran out of booze, all trying to get the footage we needed.