Flicks.co.nz is proud and extremely excited to announce the full line-up for the New Zealand International Film Festival 2010. Peruse the full list below (divided into the sections of the Film Festival booklet)... visit www.nzff.co.nz for the city schedules. The fest opens in Auckland July 8 before travelling throughout the country.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for Flicks.co.nz's Trailer Special.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for Flicks.co.nz's Trailer Special.
I Am Love
Italy | 2009 | Drama
"An epic Italian drama set at the turn of the millennium in Milan. Stars Tilda Swinton as a Russian Immigrant who falls in love with someone she shouldn't ... A chance meeting with her son’s best friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), sets her on a collision course with propriety" -San Francisco Film Festival
Predicament
New Zealand | 2010 | Thriller, Comedy
A crime comedy set in 1930s New Zealand in which a naive teenager conspires with two misfits to photograph and blackmail wealthy, adulterous couples. Predicament stars Jemaine Clement as the creepy Spook, The Lovely Bones' Rose McIver as the lusted-after Maybelle and musician Tim Finn.
Certified Copy
France, Italy | 2010 | Drama
Juliette Binoche took the Best Actress Award for her role in this tantalising film. "An intriguing, not-quite love story featuring French superstar Juliette Binoche, English opera singer William Shimell and the spectacular Tuscan countryside." - salon.com
Animal Kingdom
Australia | 2009 | Drama | Grand Jury Prize (World Cinema Drama), Sundance Film Festival 2010
"Australian director David Michod makes an exciting and assured feature debut with Animal Kingdom, a wrenching Melbourne-set gangster saga about a teenager coming of age in a crime family… " -Screendaily
Exit Through the Gift Shop
UK | 2010 | Documentary
Bills itself as "a Banksy film" and "the world’s first street art disaster movie." If it is indeed directed by the artist who goes by the name of Banksy… the mystery man who printed Lady Diana £10 notes, painted nine graffiti images on the Israeli West Bank barrier wall, and placed an inflatable effigy of a Guantánamo prisoner in Disneyland. -Film Comment
Gainsbourg
France | 2010 | Documentary
"Best known for "Je t’aime… moi non plus," his racy duet with then-lover Jane Birkin, singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg packed a lot of life into 62 years. Artist–turned-filmmaker Joann Sfar takes a greatest-hits approach to Gainsbourg’s life, concentrating on his early years as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied France, his transition from painter to jazz musician to pop superstar, his storied romances with the likes of Birkin and Brigitte Bardot..." - San Francisco International Film Festival
The Housemaid
Korea | 2010 | Thriller
A housemaid is caught up in the deadly games of her wealthy employers in this stellar, voluptuous remake of a Korean classic, fresh from competition in Cannes. "Slick, polished and sexy, Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid is the sort of film simply not made in Hollywood any more." - Twitch.
The Illusionist
UK, France | 2010 | Animation
"Five years in the making, master animator Sylvain Chomet’s follow-up to The Triplets of Belleville deploys superb hand-drawn imagery to bring to life an unproduced screenplay the late Jacques Tati finished in 1959… An aging French magician who is a dead ringer for Tati uses sleight-of-hand to give a clueless Scottish girl a poetic assist toward adulthood." -Screendaily
Oceans
France, Spain, Switzerland | 2009 | Documentary
A miraculously photographed showcase of some of the seven seas' least seen and most incredible specimens, Oceans is an immersive cinema experience to be relished while you have the chance on the giant cinema screen. -NZFF
Once Upon a Time in the West
Italy | 1968 | Western
"Sergio Leone's defining, revisionist epic Western returns with this restoration by Paramount of the American version, rendered largely unintelligible on its release by twenty minutes of cuts. It gets its shape back, too, with a return to the original Techniscope negative, which gave wide-screen films greater depth of field and undistorted close-ups." -London Film Festival
A Prophet
France, Italy | 2009 | Drama | Grand Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival 2009; Best Film Not in the English Language, BAFTA Awards 2010; Winner of 9 Cesar Awards, 2010
"When it comes to hard-bitten crime cinema, Jacques Audiard has few equals in Europe, and his violent, gripping prison drama A Prophet shows him extending his range with unimpeachable command. The film works both as hard-edged, painstakingly detailed social realism and as a compelling genre entertainment..." -Screendaily.
Under the Southern Cross
USA, New Zealand | 1929 | Drama
"Musicians Warren Maxwell, Maaka McGregor and Himona Grace were commissioned by The New Zealand Film Archive to devise a new soundtrack and bring fresh perspective to this ‘Maori folk drama’ made by Hollywood’s Universal Studios in 1928." -NZFF
Sherlock Jr
USA | 1924 | Comedy
For the third successive year the Festival’s long-standing, popular and much-cherished collaboration with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra is dedicated to the eternal comic wonder of the great silent clowns. This year they celebrate the most sublimely funny of them all, Buster Keaton, in two films of intoxicating inventiveness and lunatic technical virtuosity.
After the Waterfall
New Zealand | 2010 | Drama
"This close dramatic study of a bereaved father’s devastation and recuperation marks a boldly individual directorial debut for Simone Horrocks and a thorough triumph for actor Antony Starr (Outrageous Fortune)." – Bill Gosden, NZFF
Gordonia
New Zealand | 2010
Filmmaker Tom Reilly discovered the ‘secret Westie kingdom of Gordonia’. In the middle of the Waitakere rainforest, he found acres of wrecked cars and a population of refugees from the dismantled health system living in ramshackle dwellings. Gordon, it turned out, had had people living on his land for 50 years. -NZFF.
The Hopes and Dreams of Gazza Snell
New Zealand | 2010 | Drama
"Auckland’s Howick gets its close-up in this local comedy-drama and actor William McGuinness (Look Both Ways) nails the can-do, get-ahead, ever-loving barbecue dad (who dreams of making motorsport heroes out of his kart-racing teenage sons). Also stars Robyn Malcolm." - Bill Gosden, NZFF
Russian Snark
New Zealand | 2010 | Comedy, Drama
Screenwriter Stephen Sinclair turns writer/director with this bittersweet comedy about two refugee artists from Russia getting to grips with life in the South Pacific. The unworldly Misha and his vivacious wife Nadia leave their homeland in search of peace of mind and aesthetic freedom, landing like hopeful aliens in contemporary Auckland. -NZFF.
The Insatiable Moon
New Zealand | 2010 | Drama
Local drama about a chance encounter between Sara Wiseman’s social worker and charismatic, barefooted self-proclaimed Second Son of God Arthur (Rawiri Paratene), which entwines with the fate of lodgers in a Ponsonby boarding house fighting an underhand campaign to throw them out. -NZFF.
A Screaming Man
Chad, France, Belgium | 2009 | Drama | Jury Prize, Cannes
Direct from Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize, comes a film about Adam, a former swimming champion who takes great pride in his work as a pool attendant at a luxury hotel. He is devastated to learn that he has been replaced by his only son, but when local authorities begin to pressure him to enlist his son into the army to fight an insurgency, Adam is placed in a difficult and complex situation. -NZFF.
Kawasaki's Rose
Czech Republic | 2009 | Drama
Twenty years after the Velvet Revolution not a month passes without new reports of people whose fates were manipulated decades earlier by the notorious STB. A philandering young sound engineer's involvement in such a TV documentary about his father-in-law is our entry point into a secret family history loaded with what look like out-and-out betrayals. -NZFF.
Puzzle
Argentina, France | 2010 | Drama
"A sweet little Argentine film, describing the self-liberation of an exploited housewife thanks to her passion for jigsaw puzzles. Maria del Carmen (Onetto) is so ensnared in domestic routine and so taken for granted at home that she has to make her own cake for her 50th birthday." - Hollywood Reporter
The Misfortunates
Belgium, The Netherlands | 2009 | Comedy, Drama
"Four grown men living at home with their mother makes for rich writing fodder. In this rousing Belgian comedy, filmmaker Felix Van Groeningen charts the chaotic growth of a 13-year-old boy who escapes the family chaos and transcends it with a determined writing career." - Hollywood Reporter
The Wind Journeys
Columbia | 2010 | Drama, Music
Ignacio is an elderly musician, traveling through the villages and over the mountains of northern Colombia playing his accordion, which according to superstition once belonged to the devil. When his wife passes away, Ignacio takes a final trip to return the accordion to its rightful owner, kept company by a young teenage fan." -San Francisco International Film Festival
The Night of Counting the Years
Egypt | 1969 | Drama
"An indisputable masterwork, Al-Momia is set in 1881 in the land of the Horbat, a tribe long isolated from the rest of Egypt. Their leader has just died, and his two sons and heirs now learn the source of the tribe’s sustenance: a hidden cache of sarcophagi filled with gold, jewelry, and other treasures that are sold to black marketeers..." - Film Comment
Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story
Egypt | 2009 | Drama
Adopting the story-within-a-story framing device of Arabian Nights, Nasrallah recasts the tale's Scheherazade as Hebba Younis, a contemporary, fiercely independent talk-show host. Married to Karim Hassan, a needy and opportunistic newspaper editor for a government-owned daily, Hebba is asked to forfeit the success of her career for the professional ambitions of her husband." -Toronto International Film Festival
Around a Small Mountain
France, Italy | 2009 | Biopic, Drama
"All the world's a stage for the characters in Around a Small Mountain, which, at 85 minutes, is French director Jacques Rivette's shortest work in 28 years… Jane Birkin co-stars as a woman tortured by past events who needs to be released." - Variety
The Concert
France, Italy, Romania, Belgium, Russia | 2009 | Comedy, Music
"A band of out-of-work Moscow musicians travels to Paris posing as the celebrated Bolshoi Orchestra in this lavish, shamelessly popular comedy-drama. Broad national character jokes abound, showing scant regard for the PC and jostling with clowning of a more poignant nature. Old dreams are rekindled, secrets uncovered and Tchaikovsky steals the show." - Bill Gosden, NZFF
Lourdes
Austria, Germany, France | 2009 | Drama
Critics’ Prize, Venice Film Festival 2009
Critics’ Prize, Venice Film Festival 2009
"Over 1 million "pilgrims" visit Lourdes each year, seeking comfort for physical or mental ailments. This focuses on a pretty, likeable woman confined to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis. She is part of a group of pilgrims with various levels of disabilities, dependent on volunteer caretakers to feed and clothe them" -Hollywood Reporter
Farewell
France | 2009 | Thriller
Actor-directors Emir Kusturica and Guillaume Canet co-star in this Cold War thriller about a key event in the downfall of the Soviet Union. "It's juicy, fascinating stuff, well orchestrated by Carion and finely acted – especially by Kusturica, who moves through the plot's maze like a big, agile bear and speaks Russian with a certain accent that in no way detracts from his credibility – Variety
I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
France | 2009 | Drama
"Based on a real-life incident in which an adolescent boy attempted to murder his birth mother. Born out of wedlock to a happy-go-lucky, hopelessly irresponsible teenage mother, he is given up for adoption as a toddler with his even younger brother (from a different father). But from very early age Thomas becomes obsessed with his own origins" -Screendaily
Mammuth
France| 2010 | Drama
"Laid off from the slaughterhouse at 60, Serge Pilardos (Gérard Depardieu) discovers that to pick up his pension he needs to furnish evidence that he’s been paying taxes. His wife bids him mount his 70s Mammut motorcycle, hit the road and track down the myriad former employers who never had the big sucker on their books in the first place." -NZFF.
White Material
France | 2009 | Drama
"Director Claire Denis returns to Africa with this dark story of a Frenchwoman’s refusal to give up her coffee plantation – and uproot her family – in an unnamed country on the brink of civil war." -San Francisco International Film Festival
Love in a Puff
Hong Kong | 2010 | Drama, Romance
"An achingly romantic comic two-hander crackling with pithy dialogue and witty observations on contemporary dating. Set in a Hong Kong we rarely see: a fiercely modern cosmopolis." -Screendaily
Senso
Italy | 1954 | Drama, Romance
"Luchino Visconti’s 1954 film about the affair between an Italian countess (Alida Valli) with partisan sympathies and an Austrian officer from the occupying army (Farley Granger), set during Garibaldi’s war of independence in the 1860s, is one of the most extraordinary historical films ever made." - Cinémathèque Ontario.
Hahaha
Korea | 2010 | Drama | Un Certain Regard Prize, Cannes Film Festival 2010
This brand new film from Festival regular Hong Sang-soo took the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in May. "As tangy and refreshing as sangria… Basking in the sunny, relaxed mood of its cleverly punning title – which means ‘Summer, Summer, Summer’ in Korean – Hahaha is a midsummer night (and day) sex comedy that sees director Hong Sang-soo at his most good-humored and tolerant" - Screendaily
Like You Know It All
South Korea | 2010 | Drama
"Art-house director Ku Kyung-Nam is doing jury service at a small festival when he runs into his long-lost buddy Bu, now happily married and living locally. Ku visits his friend’s home for dinner and gets very drunk on soju. Next day he’s surprised to get a message from Bu telling him to get lost; apparently he behaved badly towards Bu’s wife." -Vancouver International Film Festival
Poetry
Korea | 2010 | Drama | Best Screenplay, Cannes Film Festival 2010
This glowing, unsentimental tribute to the sanity and grace of an elderly woman (the wonderful Yun Jung-hee) tested by the viciousness of her wild grandson was clearly the most universally loved film at Cannes this year. -NZFF..
A Somewhat Gentle Man
Norway | 2009 | Comedy, Drama
Dry Nordic humour is at its most diabolically deadpan in this cool comedy thriller that pitches an ex-con aiming to lead a quiet, simple life into a deadbeat world determined to thwart his every effort. -NZFF
The Time That Remains
Palestine, France | 2009 | Drama
"Suleiman adapted the screenplay for The Time That Remains from diaries his father wrote as he was dying in their native Nazareth, a mostly Arab city in Israel. This impressive film is, however, as much about the director (who, as always, plays himself, this time in the last third of the movie) as it is about his father." -Screendaily
Agora
Spain | 2009 | Drama, Adventure, Romance
"Period drama about Hypatia, the first female mathematician and philosopher known to history. Hypatia is played by Rachel Weisz, the 4th- to 5th-century Alexandrian astronomer, philosopher and mathematician, who was brutally killed by an angry Christian mob." – The Guardian
The Ghost Writer
France, Germany, UK | 2009 | Drama, Mystery, Thriller | Best Director, Berlin Film Festival 2010
"Why did Tony Blair, in his ten years as Prime Minister, do exactly what the White House wanted on so many occasions? That’s the juicy question buried in the depths of Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, an extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller – the best thing Polanski has done since the seventies" - New Yorker
How I Ended This Summer
Russia | 2010 | Drama
"It’s a cliché to say that the landscape is the star of the film, but it’s undeniably true of How I Ended This Summer, a Russian drama set in one of the bleakest, most windswept terrains imaginable – Chukotka in the Arctic Circle… The setting is an Arctic island in summer where two men operate a run-down weather station." -Screendaily
The Strange Case of Angelica
Portugal, Spain, France, Brazil | 2010 | Drama
"Isaac is a photographer and young romantic who one rainy night is summoned to an estate to immortalize a beautiful bride who has suddenly, enigmatically, died. While taking the woman’s picture, something happens – magical, mystical, miraculous – that sends Isaac soaring into the heavens and into deepest despair: he falls in love with the dead woman." - NY Times
To Die Like a Man
Portugal, France | 2009 | Biopic, Drama
"Set in Lisbon's flourishing drag-queen demimonde during the late 1980s, João Pedro Rodrigues' latest foray into the gay body politic is a look at Tonia, an aging pre-op transsexual under pressure from her much younger junkie boyfriend to make her sexual transformation into something permanent." - Vancouver International Film Festival
Honey
Turkey, Germany | 2010 | Drama | Golden Bear (Best Film), Berlinale 2010
"A quietly hypnotic tale of a six-year-old boy’s response to a momentous event involving his beekeeping father. By ‘beekeeping’, don’t think of earthbound hives; this man risks his life by climbing tall trees to scoop out the golden succulence…" -Financial Times
Cell 211
Spain, France | 2009 | Action, Drama
"Daniel Monzón's Cell 211 is a gripping, suspenseful thriller, as well as a political commentary on the situation in Spanish jails today. While the film hits several notes popular to the prison film genre, it also questions the extent to which the violence characteristically bred within these facilities is due to the "untameable" disposition of the prisoner." - Toronto International Film Festival
Melody for a Street Organ
Ukraine | 2010 | Drama
Like Dickensian orphans or children in a fairytale, a motherless brother and sister arrive in Kiev and traipse through festive Christmas streets looking for their respective fathers. Stolid, good-hearted, mutually devoted, never cute or imploring, the two children are fiercely touching figures. -NZFF.
Beeswax
USA | 2010 | Comedy, Drama
"Following on from his warmly received previous features, Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005), Andrew Bujalski is proving to be an endearing voice of modern American independent film. With the fine, deceptively casual performances and a heightened naturalism that are characteristic of his work, Beeswax is a charismatic and refreshingly uncontrived film." - London Film Festival
Cyrus
USA | 2010 | Comedy, Drama
"A divorced schlub (John C. Reilly) thinks his luck finally has changed when he hits it off with a beautiful woman (Marisa Tomei), until he meets her very adult, very attached son (Jonah Hill) in this Sundance hit from cult favorites the Duplass brothers (The Puffy Chair, Baghead)." - San Francisco International Film Festival
I Love You Phillip Morris
USA | 2009 | Comedy, Drama
It may sound like stunt casting, but Jim Carrey as flamboyant real-life con artist Steven Russell and Ewan McGregor as the quiet, camp boyfriend for whom he’d do pretty much anything, are one of the year’s funniest, most strangely romantic couples. Written and directed by the pair who wrote Bad Santa. -NZFF.
The Killer Inside Me
USA | 2010 | Thriller, Western
A stylish 50s backwoods noir is interlaced with grisly realism by mainstream cinema’s most restless genre-hopper and provocateur, British director Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs, 24 Hour Party People). Stars Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson. -NZFF.
Please Give
USA | 2010 | Comedy, Drama
"Life is good for Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt). After decades of marriage, they have settled into a comfortable rapport, and success in their estate-sale antique furniture business has allowed them to finance an expansion of their Greenwich Village apartment. They purchase the (occupied) unit next door, and begin the wait for its elderly tenant to pass on so they can proceed with their construction plans." -Tribeca Film Festival
Trash Humpers
USA, UK | 2010 | Horror
"It is perhaps redundant to call Trash Humpers a provocation. For starters, the title is meant literally. Chronicles the exploits of several grotesque elderly cretins… Shot on aggressively lo-fi video, complete with vintage-analog glitches and distortions," - Cinema Scope
25 Carat
Spain | 2008 | Thriller
"Shot on the streets of Barcelona… the debut feature by Patxi Amezcua pushes deep into a harsh environment of thieves, hustlers and hitmen, combining action with strong, engaging characters to keep viewers at the edge of their seats." - Toronto International Film Festival
Ajami
Israel, Germany | 2009 | Drama | Camera d’Or (Special Mention), Cannes Film Festival 2009
"The Israeli movie Ajami, one of the five Oscar nominees for best foreign-language film, takes its name from a rough neighborhood in Jaffa, a mostly Arab city just south of Tel Aviv… Crime is endemic, bonds of family and friendship can be both sustaining and fatal, and the urge to escape is no match for the gravitational pull of the place itself…" – NY Times.
Alamar
Mexico | 2009 | Drama | Tiger Award, International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010
"One of the undersold qualities of cinema is its ability to let the audience live somewhere else for a while. When that other place is a Mexican coral reef, the effect is all the more intense. This delightful, graceful Mexican drama-documentary tells the story of a five-year-old boy whose father takes him on a journey to his roots." - Screendaily
Between Two Worlds
Sri Lanka, France | 2009 | Drama
"Part vision quest, part historical allegory, Vimukthi Jayasundara's lush and beguiling head-scratcher unfolds like the mutable folktale told between two fishermen in one of the film's asides." - San Francisco Bay Guardian
The Double Hour
Italy | 2009 | Drama, Mystery, Thriller | Best Actress, Venice Film Festival 2009
"From the production team behind Il Divo, this is a frankly astonishing debut feature that manages to inhabit the crime thriller genre while remaining fresh and distinctive. An ex-cop meets, through a speed-dating evening, a beautiful woman who works as a maid in a motel; and they embark on a faltering romance. Yet almost as soon as their relationship commences, crime and violence intervene." - London Film Festival
Extraordinary Stories
Argentina | 2010 | Drama
A riveting, endlessly inventive plunge down the rabbit hole of cinematic narrative, this Argentinean epic is a shaggy dog tale, equal parts modernist yarn and noirish mystery. "Extraordinary is by no means an immodest moniker for this incredibly audacious first dramatic feature by Argentine director Mariano Llinás" - LA Weekly
Four Lions
UK | 2010 | Comedy, Drama
Boundary-pushing British comedian Chris Morris has mounted many memorable media hoaxes in his quest to expose and explode public gullibility. Here he sets out to shatter the fear-mongering mythology of the lethally focused jihadist: he’s made a taboo busting comedy about four terrorists who are complete dorks. – Bill Gosden, NZFF
Father of My Children
France | 2009 | Drama
It’s a rare reviewer anywhere who has not been caught up by this persuasively acted portrait of a charismatic, workaholic, art-house movie producer, and the tragic consequences of his business failure for his wife and children. – Bill Gosden, NZFF
Lebanon
Israel, Germany, France | 2010 | Drama, War | Golden Lion (Best Film), Venice Film Festival 2009
"An Israeli tank crew hits the ground hard during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon in this claustrophobic, visceral look at the Middle East conflict. Follows four luckless young men as they roll through a Lebanese town to separate civilians from the PLO, with predictably chaotic results"- San Francisco International Film Festival
I Killed My Mother
Canada | 2010 | Biopic, Drama
"To say that 16-year-old Hubert (Dolan) and his mother Chantale (Anne Dorval) have a love-hate relationship is a gross understatement. Hubert is a petulant, floppy-haired adolescent who has grown to hate every single aspect of his mother’s life from the messy way she eats to the horrible fashion faux pas that constitute her wardrobe. He isn’t shy about telling her." -Screendaily
Revolución
Mexico | 2010 | Drama
"A magnificent crash course in the who's who of contemporary Mexican directors Revolución celebrates the centenary of the Mexican revolution in 10 short tales… Each episode was produced by a different film company with separate crews, offering viewers a panorama not only on directorial styles but on the range of production approaches in new Mexican cinema." - Hollywood Reporter
Teenage Paparazzo
USA | 2009 | Documentary
"The curiosity attracted by a Teenage Paparazzo as driven as any adult snapper yields a tricky director-subject relationship, celebrities discussing celebrity, and sophisticated musings on the ever-escalating American obsession with fame in Adrian Grenier's excellent feature." - Variety
The Tree
France, Australia | 2010 | Drama
Selected to close this year’s Cannes Film Festival, French director Julie Bertuccelli’s second feature is a drama of loss and rebirth shaped by emotion, intuition and the elemental forces at work in its ravishing Queensland landscape. Stars Martin Csokas and Charlotte Gainsbourg. -NZFF.
Undertow
Peru, Columbia, France, Germany | 2009 | Drama | Audience Award (World Cinema), Sundance Film Festival 2010
Favoured with the Audience Award at Sundance in January, this sun-drenched fable tells of Miguel, a macho small-town fisherman intent on sustaining the attentions of his adoring, increasingly bewildered wife and the handsome, bohemian outsider who becomes his lover." - Hollywood Reporter
Wah Do Dem
USA | 2009 | Adventure, Drama
Unfolding to a backbeat of chilled Jamaican pop, this is a comedic account of everything that goes wrong (and a few things that go miraculously right) for a Brooklyn indie-rock hipster alone in the Caribbean. -NZFF.
Winter's Bone
USA | 2009 | Drama | Grand Jury Prize (Drama), Sundance Film Festival 2010
Winner of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize. "Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly’s crystal meth–cooking father has gone missing, with a court date looming. If he jumps bail, then Ree, her mentally ill mother and two younger siblings will lose their home, something she is not about to let happen." - San Francisco International Film Festival
Women without Men
Germany, Austria, France | 2009 | Drama | Best Director, Venice Film Festival 2009
"An interpretation of Shahrunsh Parsipar's novel of the same name, banned in Iran since its publication in 1989… portraying the lives of four women in 1953, the year when Iran's elected Prime Minister was removed in a coup d'etat backed by Britain and the US, in order to re-instate the Shah and avoid nationalising the country's oil resources." -London Film Festival
I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You
Brazil | 2009 | Drama
José (unseen, but voiced with seductive musicality by Irandhir Santos) is a geologist analysing tectonics for a canal project that will eventually displace thousands of the inhabitants scattered through the inhospitable terrain. His eye for remarkable geological formations gives way increasingly to wounding apprehension of anything in the landscape that speaks to his loneliness. -NZFF.
Ne Change Rien
France | 2009 | Documentary, Music
The Portuguese director Pedro Costa has filmed his friend, the French actress and singer Jeanne Balibar, hard at work, painstakingly, repeatedly rehearsing and recording a handful of torch songs, and withstanding some severe tutelage in the performance of an Offenbach piece. -NZFF.
Police, Adjective
Romania | 2010 | Drama | Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and Critics’ Prize, Cannes Film Festival 2009
"While Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective is probably the smartest film of the year, its smartness never draws attention to itself. Maybe a little bit smarter than its protagonist, Cristi, an undercover cop who spends a lot of Police, Adjective on the beat in Vasilu, Romania, walking and watching – seeking out the truth but filtering it through his own perceptions." - Vancouver International Film Festival
The Portuguese Nun
Portugal, France | 2010 | Drama
"A French actress of Portuguese descent, disillusioned by her inability to find lasting love, arrives in Lisbon to play the part of a nun in a film. A series of chance encounters ensues, framed by the city’s sensual beauty and its melancholy fado music, exquisitely rendered here by Portugal’s two leading exponents of the art, Camané and Aldina Duarte." - Sight & Sound
Sweetgrass
USA | 2010 | Documentary
Shot over three seasons by Harvard anthropologists Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, this film captures a team of 21st-century cowboys, the last in a long and often romanticised American tradition, as they make their annual journey, herding thousands of sheep across Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, to summer on the high grasslands of the national park. -NZFF.
Babies
France | 2010 | Documentary
With wit, tenderness and a keen eye for the fledgling signs of intelligence and sociability, director Thomas Balmès documents the first year in the lives of four infants from different parts of the world. -NZFF.
Inside Job
USA | 2010 | Documentary
Direct from Cannes, this formidably clear-sighted documentary written and directed by Charles Ferguson (No End in Sight) identifies the architects of the global economic crisis without mercy. -NZFF.
Asylum Pieces
New Zealand | 2010 | Documentary
Changes in official attitudes to mental illness are reflected in the architectural history of the New Zealand psychiatric institutions in Kathryn Dudding’s delicately layered, emotionally loaded essay film. -NZFF.
Collapse
USA | 2009 | Documentary
"For 82 riveting minutes, Michael Ruppert, a former Los Angeles cop who became a rogue investigative reporter and author, sits in what looks like a brick bunker and talks about where he thinks the United States is now headed. It's not a pretty picture, but it is not a naive one either. The grippingly articulate Ruppert is like Noam Chomsky as a wry pundit of doom." - EW
Draquila, Italy Trembles
Italy | 2010 | Documentary
This year's Cannes Festival was officially boycotted by Italy for showing this spectacular indictment of the Berlusconi government’s self-serving response to the Aquila earthquake in April last year. Italy’s Michael Moore, filmmaker Sabina Guzzanti has long since been banned from Italian TV, but Italians flock to her movies. -NZFF.
Cooking History
Slovakia, Czech Republic, Austria | 2009 | Documentary
This documentary-hybrid observes 20th-century European history from the field kitchen, casting new culinary perspectives on warfare. Articulate witnesses recall their experiences and share secret homeland recipes that boost troops’ morale and kept minds focused in European conflicts. -NZFF
A Film Unfinished
Israel | 2009 | Documentary
"In May 1942, a Nazi crew began shooting footage in Warsaw's Jewish ghetto intended for use in an eventual propaganda film. Although such a picture was never finished, bits of this material have found their way into countless documentaries and comprise essential visual documentation of the doomed district." -Variety
The Free China Junk
New Zealand, USA | 2010 | Documentary
"New Zealand filmmaker Robin Greenberg uncovers the remarkable adventure of five young fishermen who set off from Taiwan in 1955 intending to cross the Pacific in an old junk. The plan: to sail to San Francisco, then haul the boat across the US to take part in a trans-Atlantic yacht race. None of them had any prior experience of junks or the open sea." -NZFF.
His & Hers
Ireland | 2009 | Documentary
Interviewing 70 women from the Irish Midlands in their own homes, His & Hers is a cradle-to-grave look at women, from a red-haired baby in a cot to a 90-year-old lady staring out of the window of a nursing home." - Screendaily
GasLand
USA| 2010 | Documentary
When New York theatre director Josh Fox received a cash offer for the gas rights on his Pennsylvania acreage, he decided to check out the experiences of people elsewhere who’d accepted. The more stories he heard, the more he needed to pick up a camera and make this deeply alarming film. -NZFF.
I Wish I knew
China | 2010 | Documentary
The new film from Jia Zhang-ke, the pre-eminent Chinese filmmaker of his generation, is a richly detailed, largely admiring portrait of the history, architecture and cinematic heritage of Shanghai. -NZFF
Last Paradise
New Zealand | 2010 | Documentary
"A zealous, ingenious cinematographer from an early age, Clive Neeson delivers a glorious greatest hits compilation from a lifetime-so-far of filming adventure sports in the great outdoors. Neeson’s parents were wild-life photographers on safari in East Africa. When they moved to New Zealand in the 60s the Neeson boys discovered an even better wilderness: one they could actually play in. -NZFF
Marwencol
New Zealand | 2010 | Documentary | Best Documentary, SXSW Film 2010
"Somewhere between Belgium and the back of one man's mind exists a surreal WWII outpost called Marwencol, populated by 12-inch G.I. Joes and other playscale military figures (as well as a few loose Barbie dolls). They're intriguing images, stripped of the irony or kitsch that typically accompany such art projects, but not without humor..." -Variety
Love, Lust & Lies
Australia | 2010 | Documentary
"The fifth film in the award winning documentary series about the lives, hopes and dreams of three lively, working class Adelaide girls since they were 14 in 1976. Over more than thirty years, Kerry, Josie and Diana's struggles have been recorded for this series. They are now 47 and two are grandmothers." -UrbanCinefile
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
USA | 2009 | Documentary
"When you see the gripping documentary you realize that the saga of the Pentagon Papers may be every bit the equal of Watergate in its moral urgency and almost seismic drama. Daniel Ellsberg, a defense analyst who worked with Robert McNamara and believed in the Vietnam War, began, by 1965, to question the escalating intensity of Lyndon Johnson’s bombing campaign." -EW
The Oath
USA | 2010 | Documentary
"Tells the story of two brothers-in-law once close to Osama bin Laden. Abu Jandal was his bodyguard, an Al Qaeda insider who in 1996 recruited Salim Hamdan to work as bin Laden’s driver. As the film opens, their fates have diverged: Abu Jandal drives a taxi through the dusty streets of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, while Hamdan faces war crimes charges in Guantanamo Bay prison..." -NZFF
Nostalgia for the Light
Chile, France, Spain, Germany | 2010 | Documentary
At 3000 metres altitude, the Atacama desert, with its zero humidity and extraordinarily clear skies, is a perfect place to observe the stars. It is from this vantage point that the filmmaker, fascinated by astronomy since childhood, gazes out at the universe and, down, close up, beneath the desert’s sands. -NZFF
The Peddler
Argentina | 2009 | Documentary
Daniel Burmeister is an itinerant artisan filmmaker who travels around rural Argentina making action movies with the locals, in exchange for food and board. He’s got a bundle of ready-made scripts he can easily adapt (this documentary charts the making – or remaking – of Let’s Kill Uncle), and if he has to draft in ringer firemen for communities too small to have their own fire brigade, so be it. -NZFF.
Presumed Guilty
Mexico | 2009 | Documentary
Corruption and incompetence in the Mexican justice system come into vivid focus in this close-up account of a campaign to exonerate a young breakdancer, Antonio Zúñiga, who is serving a 20-year sentence for a murder he could not possibly have committed. -NZFF.
Russian Lessons
Russia, Norway | 2009 | Documentary
"The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia – and its previous incarnation in 1993 – forms the crux of this extraordinary documentary exchange, filmed not after the fact or from the comfort of an unaffected place, but directly from the separate front lines of conflict among soldiers, refugees and victims." -San Francisco International Film Festival
The Rainbow Warriors of Waiheke Island
The Netherlands | 2009 | Documentary
"Twenty-five years later, 6 members of the original Rainbow Warrior crew are now living in a harmonious community on Waiheke Island." - DOXA
Salam Rugby
Iran, New Zealand | 2010 | Documentary, Sport
Women’s rugby in patriarchal Iran may sound like an anomaly, but as this documentary by Iranian-New Zealander Faramarz Beheshti shows, Iranian women are more than ready to dive into the nearest ruck or maul if only the authorities would allow it. -NZFF
Secrets of the Tribe
Brazil, UK | 2009 | Documentary
"Anthropologists may travel to remote lands studying strange, complicated communities, but judging from Secrets of the Tribe, some of them could find just as much material by staying at school and investigating each other." - Hollywood Reporter
Space Tourists
Switzerland | 2009 | Documentary
"Even us Baby Boomers who got advanced math shoved down our throats in the wake of Yuri Gagarin's trek aboard Sputnik, and couldn't care less about outer space, will be entertained by this spry, melancholy glimpse into the last half-century's race to space." - Hollywood Reporter
Strange Birds in Paradise
Australia | 2009 | Documentary
West Papuans speak (and sing) of years of persecution in this film by Charlie Hill-Smith, a white Australian who first travelled to the Indonesian province on the island of Papua as a tourist in 1999. As his movies of that trip demonstrate, he was enthralled by the lush beauty of the place and fell in enthusiastically with the friendly locals. -NZFF.
There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho
New Zealand | 2010 | Documentary
"A documentary about the people of a Takuu, a tiny low-lying atoll in the South Western Pacific where the impact of climate change becomes increasingly apparent with every rising tide." -NZFF
Turtle: The Incredible Journey
UK, Austria, Germany | 2009 | Documentary
From the moment she emerges from an egg on a Florida beach, a baby loggerhead turtle knows where she’s going. Twenty-five years, many storms, skirmishes, and 10000 kilometres later, she’s seen the Atlantic and she’s back to lay her own eggs on the very same beach. -NZFF.
The Two Escobars
USA, Columbia | 2010 | Documentary
The two Escobars, upstanding soccer hero Andrés and notorious drug baron Pablo, were not related by blood, but as Jeff and Michael Zimbalist’s lively documentary shows their fates were helplessly entwined thanks to Colombian soccer’s Faustian pact with the drug trade. -NZFF.
Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
Canada | 2009 | Documentary, Music
"There's a feast of interview material, live performances, and recordings that will be satisfying to Gould aficionados and tantalizing to neophytes. If you want to know why this man is considered one of the greatest pianists of the last century, or you've ever pondered the links between genius and eccentricity, or if you just want to encounter a veritable fireworks display of personality, this is the movie to see."-Vancouver International Film Festival
NY Export: Opus Jazz
USA | 2010 | Musical, Drama | Audience Award (Emerging Visions), SXSW Film 2010
"A note-perfect adaptation of Jerome Robbins' 1958 "ballet in sneakers" that updates the street-cool vibe of a piece reminiscent of his West Side Story… With no overt narrative, the film uses mostly wordless, tone-poem-like scraps of city life as transitions between dance scenes." - Hollywood Reporter
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
France, USA | 2010 | Documentary
"Director Wiseman and his cinematographer, John Davey, track the development of seven ballets, ranging from Rudolf Nureyev's more traditional The Nutcracker Suite to the avant-stylings of Pina Bausch's Orpheus and Eurydice." - Village Voice
Oil City Confidential
UK | 2009 | Documentary, Music
"This highly entertaining film, a study of the pub rock blues band Doctor Feelgood, completes Julien Temple's trilogy on British in the 1970s, preceding chronologically his movie on the Sex Pistols, The Filth and the Fury (1999) and his biography of Joe Strummer, The Future is Unwritten (2007)" - The Observer
Pianomania
Austria, Germany | 2009 | Documentary, Music
"Concert pianists can be a fussy bunch, but they’re nothing compared to the temperamental demands of a Steinway grand piano. Pianomania gets up close and personal with a group of world famous virtuosos..." -San Francisco International Film Festival
The Runaways
UK | 2009 | Biopic, Drama, Music
Kristen Stewart is Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning is Cherie Currie in this film about '70s bad-girl rock band, The Runaways. This is the feature debut from music video director Floria Sigismondi (clips for Marilyn Manson, Christina Aguilera and The White Stripes).
The Red Shoes
UK | 1948 | Drama, Romance, Music
Powell & Pressburger's 1948 stunner - rated by Martin Scorsese as one of the best films ever - based on the fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson: a young ballerina must choose between her art and true love. "Profoundly serious, sublimely innocent, yet deeply and mysteriously erotic." -Guardian.
Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
USA | 2010 | Documentary, Music
Stephin Merritt may be the greatest American songwriter you’ve never heard of. Merritt and his band the Magnetic Fields are best known for their 1999 magnum opus 69 Love Songs, a rare triple album that lives up to its high concept and follows a wry, literate tradition of American songcraft stretching back through Randy Newman to Rodgers & Hart and Cole Porter. -NZFF
Trimpin: The Sound of Invention
USA | 2009 | Documentary, Music
"The artist known simply as Trimpin is a sonic experimenter, a combination of inventor, engineer and composer, who builds stunning installations, such as a mountain of self-tuning, automatic electric guitars or a perpetual motion machine." -London Film Festival
Trinity Roots, Music Is Choice
New Zealand | 2010 | Documentary, Music
Sarah Hunter’s music-filled documentary is a sharp and lively memento of the jazz-inflected Wellington reggae unit TrinityRoots. The film draws on generous footage of the band rehearsing, recording and performing, along with friendly testimony from critics, collaborators and their mums. -NZFF.
When You're Strange
USA | 2009 | Documentary, Music
"With archival footage from The Doors set against scenes of the violence of their times, When You're Strange tracks the brief rise and fall of the band whose sound helped define the era's altered state…" -Screendaily
American: The Bill Hicks Story
UK | 2009 | Documentary, Comedy
"When comedian Bill Hicks was really on – which, toward the end of his far-too-brief 32 years, was nearly all the time – he was on fire; hearing him unload on the Gulf War or the religious right or advertising hacks was like having your ears blistered by a dragon – a brainy, exceedingly funny dragon." -Austin Chronicle.
Basquiat: Radiant Child
USA, Germany | 2009 | Documentary
Jean-Michel Basquiat was a 21-year-old graffiti artist and art world party boy when he became a star, catapulted from Bohemian poverty to multimillionaire in little more than a year. Filmmaker Tamra Davis was a pal and the treasure at the heart of her tender, informative documentary is a conversation she shot with him, relaxed and smiling, intimate and playful at the height of his career. -NZFF
The Arbor
UK | 2010 | Documentary
British playwright Andrea Dunbar was 19 when her play The Arbor was staged at London’s Royal Court in 1980. Its raw portrayal of the cycles of violence and addiction on a tough Bradford housing estate was drawn directly from her own experience, brutalised and pregnant at 15. Two plays and one film later, she was dead at 29. -NZFF.
Bill Cunningham New York
USA | 2010 | Documentary
Photographer Bill Cunningham, well into his ninth decade, has two weekly columns in the "Style" section of the New York Times: On the Street, where he identifies fashion trends as he spots them emerging on the street; and "Evening Hours" -NZFF.
Gordon Crook: A Life of Art
New Zealand | 2010 | Documentary
Gordon Crook, who settled in Wellington from the UK in 1972, is rarely categorised as a New Zealand artist. His work reflects a distinctly mid 20th-century European heritage. Clare O’Leary’s film provides a highly entertaining and informative personal encounter with the frank and charmingly idiosyncratic Crook. -NZFF.
Howl
USA | 2009 | Animation, Drama
"Examines the poem ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. The movie combines animation, a simulated interview with Ginsberg (played by James Franco), brief dramatisations of Ginsberg's life and a landmark obscenity trial that surrounds the birth of his game-changing poem... a literary H-bomb" -Hollywood Reporter
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
USA | 2010 | Documentary
"Flamboyant exhibitionism and stoic masochism have rarely been wired together more visibly in a performer’s dynamo than in this funny, complex portrait, on-stage and off, of comedian Joan Rivers. No celebrity flunkies, the filmmakers spent a year – her 75th – filming the doyenne of bad-mouthed women’s stand-up. -NZFF.
Learning from Light: The Vision of I.M. Pei
USA | 2009 | Documentary
In 2008, a new building by Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei was unveiled in Doha, Qatar: The Museum of Islamic Art. Pei, best known for his glass and steel pyramid at the Louvre, is an inveterate explorer of diverse cultural traditions. -NZFF
Sam Hunt: Purple Balloon & Other Stories
New Zealand | 2010 | Documentary
If every New Zealander over a certain age feels familiar enough with Sam Hunt to say gidday to the guy, this vivid, unvarnished portrait, which contains that suggestion, might give us pause. -NZFF.
Two in the Wave
France | 2009 | Documentary
"The French New Wave crashed onto international shores when François Truffaut’s debut feature, The 400 Blows, premiered at Cannes in 1959, followed quickly by Jean-Luc Godard’s equally thrilling Breathless, based on a Truffaut story. The two filmmaking rebels, great friends and fellow graduates of the Cahiers du Cinema, for which both wrote extensively, hailed from different sides of the tracks." - Film Forum
Waste Land
UK, Brazil | 2009 | Documentary
"A Brooklyn-based photographer embarks on a massive project taking him to Rio de Janeiro's Jardim Gramacho, a garbage dump that receives more trash each day than any landfill in the world. The dump is inhabited by ‘catadores,’ men and women who pick through the trash to recover recyclables..." -Hollywood Reporter
The Woman with the 5 Elephants
Switzerland, Germany | 2009 | Documentary
"Svetlana Geier is the woman behind celebrated Russian-to-German translations of Dostoyevsky's novels – her ‘5 Elephants’ – but she's also someone still coming to terms with a past haunted by Stalinist persecution and a complicated proximity to Ukraine's Nazi occupiers..." - Variety
In the Attic: Who Has a Birthday Today?
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Japan | 2009 | Animation, Family
A lo-fi stop-motion extravaganza. Even though they have been discarded by humanity, life is pleasant for an enclave of old toys. Every day Buttercup, a girly girl’s doll, bakes a cake for a teddy bear, a marionette knight, and a silly-putty man, who roll a special birthday die for the daily honors. Yet, danger lurks in the far reaches of the attic. -Epoch Times
Autour de Minuit
France | 2009 | Animation
Autour de Minuit is one of the most dynamic animation and production houses in Europe. Their modest, cramped Parisian office is home to an eclectic stable of animators, including Edouard Salier, BIF and H5 – the crew who put together this year’s Academy Award-winner Logorama. This is a collection of their work. -NZFF.
My Dog Tulip
USA | 2009 | Animation
"Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this animated film is that people who don’t consider themselves dog people are irresistibly drawn to it. In this way, audiences resemble J.R. Ackerley, upon whose best selling memoir the film is based, far from sentimental about it, Ackerley’s memoir dryly notes the social consequences attendant on dog ownership." -San Francisco International Film Festival
Summer Wars
Japan | 2009 | Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi
Hosoda Mamoru's much fêted new anime pits tradition against technology when the chaos of a digital world gone awry invades a domestic idyll. His film portrays a world whose citizens are in thrall to a virtual city dubbed Oz, a carnivalesque digital playground reminiscent of the work of artist Murakami Takashi. -NZFF.
Amer
France, Belgium | 2009 | Horror
A film divided into three parts; the childhood, adolescence, and womanhood of a character named Ana. The film is a near dialogue-free ode d’amore to Italian orrore maestros, in which the technicolours of Mario Bava, the sensual camerawork of Dario Argento and the pulse pounding scores of Ennio Morricone provide a lush bed for the grisly deaths... –IS.
Birdemic: Shock and Terror
USA | 2010 | Thriller, Comedy
"...fails to deliver the terror, but more than compensates with shock - i.e., the sounds of jaws falling to the floor in stunned disbelief, likely to be heard during pic's frequent acoustical dropouts. Howingly bad films are a dime a dozen, but the evident Ed Wood-like sincerity with which writer-director James Nguyen lovingly crafted this compendium of cinematic don'ts gives it a goofy, almost surrealist charm..." –Variety.
Dream House
Hong Kong | 2010 | Horror, Comedy
"There are many horror stories and many comic fables to be found in the world of real estate, but perhaps none as hilarious, outrageously stylish and thoroughly disgusting as Dream Home. Leave all concerns about morality and good taste at the door for this saga..." -salon.com
Human Centipede
Netherlands, UK | 2009 | Horror
The most disgusting film at this year’s Festival is also possibly one of the funniest, with a sick conceit that will have you either clambering for a ticket or running a zillion miles in the opposite direction… random captives have their kneecaps surgically removed and their mouths sewn to the anus of the lucky person in front of them. Are you still reading this? - IS
Splice
Canada, France | 2009 | Sci-Fi, Horror
A sci-fi horror about two genetic engineers (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) who secretly conduct their own expreriments, splicing DNA to make new hybrids. The result is Dren: a strange creature that exhibits uncommon intelligence and an array of unexpected physical developments, soon becoming their worst nightmare. Produced by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth).
The Loved Ones
Australia | 2009 | Horror
"An impressive debut feature, which spills blood, boils brains and cannibalises naked teens with wicked energy… Lank-haired heartthrob Brent (Xavier Samuel, already the subject of fan attention due to his role as Riley in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, due out on July 1) is being stalked by plain Lola (Robin McLeavy), who haltingly asks him to the school formal…" - Screendaily
The Room
USA | 2003 | Drama, Comedy, Romance
"As a film, story and depiction of basic human interaction, Tommy Wiseau's The Room is a train wreck of almost incomprehensible proportions: Whole scenes are out of focus, while others are repeated in their entirety; characters appear without introduction, while others vanish without explanation; and the unfortunate cast engages in behavior that few would consider typical." -Washington Post
A Town Called Panic
Belgium, France, Luxembourg| 2009 | Animation
"Imagine the Toy Story franchise infused with the mischievous sensibility of South Park and crafted in meticulous stop-motion animation and you begin to get the measure of a film that seems tailor-made for cult status..." - Screendaily
Triangle
UK, Australia | 2009 | Mystery, Thriller
"A single mother, Jess (Melissa George), leaves her little son behind when she joins four other guests (two male, two female) on a friend's yacht for a trip to sea. Suddenly, a freak storm blows up, a muffled SOS comes from a nearby vessel and then the yacht turns turtle..." - The Observer
Wound
New Zealand | 2010 | Fantasy, Horror
Wound is the angry by-product of being bored by the utter predictable banality of our mainstream movies. After years of working in the documentary landscape, David Blyth's low-fi comeback is a shocking supernatural tale of mental illness, bondage, incest, revenge and explicit graphic violence... - IS.
Carlos
France, Germany | 2010 | Drama
This extraordinary three-film epic, made for French television, was showcased out of competition in Cannes to a storm of acclaim. "Bravura narrative filmmaking on a hugely ambitious scale, Carlos is a spectacular achievement. - Variety.
