Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 9 April

The Class (aka Entre les murs) (Cantet, 2008)

Back in the day, New Zealand had a little mini-International Film Festival that ran roughly every Easter, called the World Cinema Showcase.

Originally star­ted inde­pend­ently by Richard Weatherly (someone here will cor­rect me if I’m over-simplifying), it was even­tu­ally absorbed under the NZIFF wing and in 2013 became a much smal­ler “Autumn Events” pro­gramme before being dis­posed of com­pletely in 2018.

As it hap­pens, I pre­viewed the 2009 edi­tion of the Showcase on this very day and I was curi­ous to see what I had recom­men­ded then and wheth­er New Zealand sub­scribers would be able to see any of those recom­mend­a­tions today.

Well, friends, the news on that front is not good.

From Carlos Reygadas’ “Mexican mas­ter­piece” Silent Light, Jean-Claude van Damme going glor­i­ously meta in JCVD , Francis Ford Coppola’s wine-funded “poten­tially pro­found fable” Youth Without Youth, Charlie Kaufman’s Synechdoche, New York (fea­tur­ing a barn­storm­ing Philip Seymour Hoffman), the late Terence Davies’ por­trait of Liverpool, Of Time and the City, or the music doc­u­ment­ary Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, not a single one is avail­able on a stream­er or digit­al rent­al in Aotearoa.

Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated, which intro­duced me to Tom Hiddleston, can be found on Mubi and Anne Hathaway in Jonathan Demme’s post-rehab drama Rachel Getting Married is a digit­al rent­al from Apple.

So much for the rich­ness of the digit­al ‘long tail’.

This is the thing about stream­ing. You can always find some­thing to watch, but you can very rarely find the actu­al thing you want to watch.

I sup­pose that’s why I’m here. To dig a little deep­er into what is actu­ally avail­able and hope we can con­tin­ue to con­found the algorithm* some­how and bring you and good films together.

Pardon the long, frus­trated digres­sion then, and allow me to recom­mend the 2008 Cannes Palme d’Or (and 2009 Academy Award nom­in­ee for Best Foreign Language Film), The Class in which nov­el­ist and teach­er François Bégaudeau plays a lightly fic­tion­al­ised ver­sion of him­self as he attempts to wrangle a group of unruly inner-city teen­agers in his French class.

As I put it:

“… prob­ably not high on the list of Education Ministry recruit­ment mater­i­als (and yet any teach­ers watch­ing will recog­nise and empath­ise with the hero­ic struggle on screen). A multi-cultural, urb­an school in Paris is the scene of a mod­ern day com­pet­i­tion for the hearts and minds of an ali­en­ated gen­er­a­tion – vital and vivid.”

Where to watch The Class

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from AroVision or Apple

Australia: Digital rent­al from Apple or Amazon

Canada: Digital rent­al from Apple, Amazon or Cineplex

USA: Digital rent­al from Apple, Amazon or Vudu

UK: Digital rent­al from Chile, Curzon or Amazon