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Preview by Simon Zhou

Like rural farmers in arid climates brooding for the coming monsoon, for resident cinephiles, the 2010 New Zealand International Film Festival could not arrive any sooner.  An eclectic collection of local and international films await, divided into ten categories. 

Big Nights & Special Presentations

The Opening Night film is I Am Love (dir. Luca Guadagnino), a ‘lush, operatic Italian drama about a clannish family of wealthy Milanese industrialists’ (Wendy Ide, The Times).  Adorned with sumptuous visuals and featuring the chameleonic Tilda Swinton, it is a operatic melodrama that pays tribute to the 1950s weepies of Douglas Sirk and Luchino Visconti.

Other highlights are revered Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, a wistfully romantic contemplation on love and life with Juliette Binoche (Best Actress Cannes 2010) in the lead, and A Prophet (Jacques Audiard), a gripping psychological drama about a petty criminal sent to prison who becomes tied to the mafia that as a thrilling character portrait of the loss of morality rivals The Godfather.  

Portrait of the Artist/Music and Dance

Music and Dance gives us films that inquire and celebrate the process and performance of these two art forms.  Of note is La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (dir. Fredrick Wiseman) which examines the contradiction between the clumsy effort of rehearsal and the flawless perfection of the final article, and When You’re Strange (dir. Tom diCillo), a haunting and impressionistic exaltation to The Doors frontman Jim Morrison.

The Portrait of the Artist section shifts its focus specifically to those responsible for the creation art, from renowned figures like the prodigiously talented Jean-Michel Basquait in The Radiant Child (dir. Tamra Davis) or the unapologetically abrasive Joan Rivers in A Piece of Work (dir. Ricki Ster, Annie Sundberg); to those lesser known, revealing hidden lives that have devoted to the pursuit of art, as in eighty-five year old Svetlana Grier in The Woman with the 5 Elephants.

Auckland Erupts

Simone Horrocks makes her directorial debut with After the Waterfall, starring Anthony Starr as a profligate father, Outrageous Fortune alum Robyn Malcolm appears in The Hopes & Dreams of Gazza Snell (dir. Brendon Donovan) a dramedy set in Howick about a Kiwi dad who refuses to grow up.

The other three films in this section are Russian Snark, screenwriter turned director Stephen Sinclair’s (Braindead, Lord of the Rings trilogy) flight of fancy about two Russian refugees trying to close the culture gap in New Zealand, Tom Reilly’s documetary Gordonia with its metaphor of second-hand cars for second-hand lives, and The Insatiable Moon (dir. Rosemary Riddell), starring the resplendent Sarah Wiseman.

Worlds of Difference

This section of the festival is full of notable films by both established auteurs that will be familiar to New Zealand International Film Festival audiences and directors making their first appearances at the NZIFF. 

Selections that make the heart beat a little faster are Berlin Golden Bear Winner Honey (dir. Semih Kaplanoglu), a quiet contemplation of life in the Turkish mountains from the point of view of a child, and Lee Chang-Dong’s Poetry (Winner Best Screenplay Cannes 2010), a compassionate examination of the marginalization of an elderly Korean woman and her relationship with her unsympathetic grandson. 

Roman Polanski (director of The Pianist) presents his new effort, The Ghost Writer, and for pop-culture weirdness, check out I Love You Phillip Morris, a comedy which features explicit sex between Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor.

New Directions

An impressive clutch of films that have won prizes at major international film festivals including Lebanon (dir. Sameul Maoz), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Winter’s Bone (dir. Debra Granik), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and I Killed My Mother, directed by twenty one year old prodigy Xavier Dolan whose second film caused an uproar at Cannes this year.

Also in this section are three ‘Homegrown’ short film programs, showcasing New Zealand directors.

Framing Reality

Exploring subjects familiar, political, intimate and tragic. 

Collapse (dir. Chris Smith) is the story of doom theorist Michael Ruppert, a man who predicted the economic meltdown with incredible specificity, and foresees ‘the end of police forces, road systems, air-traffic control, and capitalism – all within the next 20 to 50 years’ (Joshua Rothkopt, Time Out NY). 

Elsewhere in this section, issues of cultural identity (Secrets of the Tribe, dir. Jose Padilha), rugby as feminist reform (Salam Rugby, dir. Faramaz Beheshti), the historicity of holocaust footage (A Film Unfinished, dir. Yael Hersonski) and lifetimes of love (His & Hers, dir. Ken Wardrop).

In Praise of Slow Cinema/Animation/Incredibly Strange Films

The passing of time and the closing of distance take centre place in Marcelo Gomes and Karim Ainouz tender I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You in a film that will either move or bore you to tears; In the Attic: Who Has a Birthday Today (dir. Jiri Barta) is a hand animated love letter to old toys; Wound (dir. David Blythe), Splice (dir. Vincenzo Natali) and Dream Home (dir. Pang Ho-Cheung) all feature the human anatomy being defiled in the most violently gruesome of ways.

These three sections represent exactly what the festival is about: providing opportunities for films to be screened that might not otherwise have an avenue, no matter how esoteric or obscure, and the privilege for audiences to see them from The Human Centipede to dogs named Tulip. 

See you at the movies.