2025 NZIFF Preview*

The Shrouds, The Ballad of Wallis Island, Workmates, Pavements and 2000 Meters to Andriivka are all playing in the New Zealand International Film Festival.

The first thing I’d note about this year’s fest­iv­al pro­gramme is that it feels even more con­tem­por­ary than last year. In recent years, I could avoid beg­ging the fest­iv­al for screen­ers by raid­ing my inter­na­tion­al stream­ing ser­vices but this year very few of the 100+ pro­gramme are so far into their life­cycle that they have made it online.

Indeed, most titles are fresh from this year’s big fest­ivals like Sundance, Berlin and Cannes or are still mak­ing their way around the cir­cuit. A few have received cinema releases over­seas but most still have that to come – if they are lucky enough to have that in their future.

At the end of last year I did a sur­vey of the films from many inter­na­tion­al ‘best of’ lists to see which had made it to screens here and was sur­prised to see how many were M.I.A. or had only screened at the fest­iv­al. Looking at that news­let­ter again, I can tell you that Good One, Green Border, Sleep, Pictures of Ghosts, Eno¹, The Seed of the Sacred Fig², The Settlers, Totém³, Omen, The Delinquents and Samsara are still not avail­able online here des­pite con­sist­ently fea­tur­ing in ‘Best of 2024’ lists.

Another not­able trend is the return of clas­sic and ret­ro­spect­ive films. I remem­ber ask­ing Bill Gosden why the fest­iv­al wasn’t pro­gram­ming old movies and he told me bluntly that it was because they didn’t sell. Nowadays, audi­ences are respond­ing strongly to vin­tage films being pro­grammed by the Roxy and Embassy (in Wellington) and the Academy and Hollywood (in Auckland) and the fest­iv­al is step­ping up to meet that demand. Hard Boiled, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Werckmeister Harmonies and the sur­prise late addi­tion of Forgotten Silver, all bode well for audi­ences who want to exper­i­ence cinema his­tory on the big screen with – hope­fully – big audiences.

To pre­pare this pre­view, I man­aged to find a couple of titles on American stream­ers but the rest are cour­tesy of Madman (which sug­gests they will have a life after the fest­iv­al, either the­at­ric­ally or on their DocPlay ser­vice). Because the pro­cess of find­ing these five titles was pretty close to ran­dom, I was sur­prised at how many con­nec­tions there were between them. 

The Shrouds might be David Cronenberg’s most overtly per­son­al film in an almost 60-year career. It con­tains many of his visu­al trade­marks – the body hor­ror moments are less plen­ti­ful but just as shock­ing when they arrive. Cronenberg avatar Vincent Cassel plays a griev­ing hus­band (Cronenberg lost his wife, Carolyn Zeifman, in 2017) who invents a kind of 3D scan­ning wrap­per that can present an image of your deceased loved ones decay­ing body onto a head­stone screen or, if you prefer, you can mon­it­or it remotely using an app.

He’s a tech CEO now, plan­ning a glob­al expan­sion of these digit­ally enhanced buri­al grounds, but he’s also haunted by images of his late wife (Diane Kruger who also plays her twin sis­ter) and the ter­rible deteri­or­a­tion as can­cer spread through­out her body.

While grief is both text and sub­text in The Shrouds, Cronenberg also gives us a mod­ern thrill­er includ­ing both con­spir­acy the­or­ies and actu­al con­spir­acies, as well as satire about Chinese indus­tri­al espi­on­age, digit­al sur­veil­lance, self-driving cars and AI assist­ants who can present them­selves as wom­bats to make them­selves less creepy.

Ultimately, The Shrouds is about what hap­pens to someone when they can’t keep a prom­ise to the dead and The Ballad of Wallis Island nav­ig­ates sim­il­ar ter­rit­ory, although shrouded in cringe com­edy rather than body horror.

What would you do if you were Lotto mil­lion­aire sev­er­al times over and also a huge fan of a once pop­u­lar but now defunct pop-folk duo from an earli­er dec­ade? You’d throw money at them to come to your remote semi-private island to reunite and give a con­cert just for you, wouldn’t you? Human nature.

Tim Key (poet, writer and Alan Partridge’s “Sidekick Simon”) is Charles. Socially awk­ward but very wealthy, he brings musi­cian Herb McGuire (Tom Basden who co-wrote the film and all the songs) to the island for a gig and, without telling him, also invites former music­al and romantic part­ner Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan).

The first third of the film emphas­ises the cringe aspect thanks to Charles’ inab­il­ity to either read the room or turn off his motor­mouth but that’s even­tu­ally replaced by some­thing quite heart­felt, helped by all the per­form­ances but espe­cially Key who turns out to be doing some­thing quite subtle. There’s a final shot where you can see he is hav­ing to finally let the past go and face the future and the mix­ture of excite­ment, fear and regret on his face is quite priceless.

For a while I was won­der­ing why a com­mer­cial com­edy like Wallis Island was in a fest­iv­al that’s full of much dark­er work but by the end I real­ised that it’s because it’s really good.

Another film that relies on tak­ing the mickey out of the per­form­ing arts for its com­edy is Workmates, made by Fantail’s Sophie Henderson and Curtis Vowell. As a former the­at­ri­cian myself, I could see how accur­ate this por­tray­al of a tiny, under­fun­ded, theatre in cent­ral Auckland was but also the glar­ing moments when that accur­acy was sac­ri­ficed for (too) cheap laughs.

Henderson plays Lucy, former play­wright now ded­ic­ated theatre work­er Lucy and Matt Whelan is former act­or and now ded­ic­ated theatre co-worker Tom. It’s not entirely clear why there’s no real demarc­a­tion between their roles except that we need them to be thrown togeth­er in the mad­cap run­ning of this ven­ue. Except that Tom’s girl­friend is preg­nant and he needs to find a “prop­er job”.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

The chem­istry between the two leads is the main pleas­ure in Workmates and that ease sug­gests that someone should give them all decent devel­op­ment time and pro­duc­tion budget so they aren’t stuck in such a self-referential situ­ation. Theatre is so rarely por­trayed well in film – The Great Lillian Hall’s Cherry Orchard is a decent example even if the pro­duc­tion details are non­sensic­al while the off-Broadway pro­duc­tions in Materialists and A Different Man are simply not ser­i­ous – that it’s slightly dis­ap­point­ing to see the loc­al ver­sion treated as a fig­ure of fun, even by its own practitioners.

The doc­u­ment­ary Pavements is also not to be taken ser­i­ously – a delib­er­ate tac­tic on the part of the band Pavement and writer-director Alex Ross Perry. When the beloved 90s indie band reunited for a tour in 2022, they chose not to doc­u­ment it with a tra­di­tion­al rock doc­u­ment­ary. Instead, they organ­ised the devel­op­ment of a juke­box music­al inspired by their music (Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical), a fake biop­ic in the tra­di­tion of Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody, star­ring hot young TV act­ors as the band, and a museum exhib­it of their memorabilia.

All of which is entirely in the spir­it of the ori­gin­al incarn­a­tion of the band, supreme iron­ists in a dec­ade that seemed fuelled by it. Pavement spent the 90s telling people how little they cared for the trap­pings of rock and how much dis­dain they had for their con­tem­por­ary career­ists, but when, in 1995, a Lollapalooza crowd humi­li­at­ingly pelts them with mud they not only have them­selves to blame but suc­cess­fully avoided build­ing a fan base that might have defen­ded them or pre­ven­ted that from happening.

I care little for Pavement’s music and the film’s iron­ic dis­tan­cing does little to bring me to it. In fact, the only real moments of sin­cer­ity in the film are the seg­ments around the musical’s rehears­al and performance.

The 90s was the last dec­ade where bands like Pavement could have made it as big as they did. You only have to watch Ondi Timoner’s Dig! to see how record com­pan­ies, pro­moters and MTV were fall­ing over them­selves to throw money at unlikely hit bands, fund­ing their three-sided vinyl records and indul­ging their snide attitudes.

Having said that, on its own terms Pavements is often very funny but watch­ing a band not want to make a con­nec­tion to its audi­ence for over two hours was exhausting.

20 Days in Mariupol was a heart­break­ing doc­u­ment­ary about the relent­less Russian assault on the Ukrainian indus­tri­al city and the toll taken on the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. Thanks to journ­al­ists who refused to evac­u­ate when self-preservation instincts should have been scream­ing at them to get the heck out, we have a doc­u­ment of the atro­cit­ies com­mit­ted thanks to this pro­foundly stu­pid and unne­ces­sary war.

Now, more Associated Press report­ers have put them­selves in harm’s way for a film about the front­line in that con­flict, 2000 Meters to Andriivka. A tiny sliv­er of forest between two mine­fields is the path for Assault Battalion 3, on a mis­sion to lib­er­ate a tac­tic­ally import­ant vil­lage, poten­tially sever­ing the Russian sup­ply lines to Bakhmut. At least that was the theory.

Thanks to the embed­ded report­ers and GoPro hel­met cams on the sol­diers, we get as close to the hor­ror of battle as I ever want to get. I once hear someone describe the ter­rible hand-to-hand fight­ing in the Falklands con­flict – an ugly real­ity kept from the folks back home – as like “a daft brawl in a bar”. The Ukraine con­flict has more tech­no­logy than that – real-time drone foot­age allow­ing bat­tle­field com­mand­ers to steer their squads from fox­hole to fox­hole – but it’s still fierce and ter­ri­fy­ing, inch-by-inch.

I read some­thing the oth­er day point­ing out that Putin has been in charge of Russia for so long that any­one under 25 hasn’t known any oth­er régime. The indoc­trin­a­tion on the Russian side is com­plete and as long as they can con­tin­ue to throw will­ing bod­ies at the front­line no one in Ukraine – or the rest of Europe for that mat­ter – can be safe.

This film is des­per­ately sad and can’t avoid end­ing with a sense of hope­less­ness at the waste of it all.

*I know for Auckland sub­scribers this isn’t a pre­view any longer. I hope you are already hav­ing a great festival!

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1. Because Eno is a digit­al present­a­tion that re-edits and reor­gan­ises itself for every screen­ing, it’s unlikely to ever appear as a stream­ing product. Maybe as an app? ↩︎
2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig did get a brief the­at­ric­al release but isn’t avail­able for home view­ing yet. ↩︎
3. The Seed of the Sacred Fig did get a brief the­at­ric­al release but isn’t avail­able for home view­ing yet. ↩︎