I’d like to thank everyone for their patience while posts and newsletters have been so sporadic recently. Since moving everything back here from Substack, I’ve had a tendency to want to fix things that are annoying me here rather than do the hard stuff which is writing. You might say that it’s a bit like washing the car every Sunday and then never taking it for a drive and you may be right, but some of the recent changes have meant that the site actually crashes every night and the server has to be restarted. Not a problem I ever had with Substack but at least I can vouch for the absence of Nazis in my bar.
I’d like to apologise especially to Auckland readers who are now seven days in to a 12-day Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival that I’m only just getting around to previewing. As I said to RNZ Culture 101’s host Anna Thomas the Sunday before last, I’m not sure that previewing about five percent of the titles in the programme allows me to comment on the quality of the whole event, but that’s never stopped me before.
Anyway, here are some capsules of the films I have managed to beg, steal or borrow before kick-off.
Every generation needs an animated movie that makes them cry and the current one is a better candidate than most. Ugo Bienvenu’s (brilliant name, by the way) Arco manages to tug on the heartstrings pretty effectively while also having a fundamentally optimistic view of the far-off future. (The near future, less so.)
Ten-year-old Arco lives in the late 30th century where people use time travel suits to visit the flora and fauna of the past and preserve it for the future. Pissed off that he is too young to go and see some dinosaurs, Arco borrows his sister’s outfit and stumbles back as far as 2075 – a recognisable future of our own that at first seems like it ain’t too bad but we soon discover the dark side of it. Arco makes friends with Iris who is being raised by a combination of a domestic robot called Mikki and holograms of her actual parents who are busy working in the city.
The film is essentially about Arco’s attempts to return home before a) his parents find that he is gone and b) civilisation collapses due to climate devastation.
Incidentally, the listing on the NZIFF website has Arco down as in French with English subtitles but the printed book says that most of the sessions are actually of the English dub featuring producer Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo, Will Ferrell and America Ferrera. I previewed that version and can vouch for it as suitable for most kids.
Arco’s time travelling power comes from a diamond that attaches to his forehead and coincidentally, an identically shaped piece of costume jewellery is the totem that runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini) carries with her in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s chilly mystery, The Ice Tower. Stumbling into reinvention, Jeanne becomes Bianca when she takes shelter for a night in a building that turns out to be a film studio where an unenthusiastic crew is shooting a version of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen.
The crew are unenthusiastic because the Queen is being played by a tyrannical movie star (Marion Cotillard) but also because there is a dreamlike quality to the entire exercise – as if this is fantasy, or faded memory or, you know, dreams. Cotillard’s Cristina takes a shine to Jeanne/Bianca as the pair realise how many parallels they share with each other’s life.
As chilly as it sounds, The Ice Tower also feels like a passing of the torch between Cotillard and the star-on-the-rise Pacini. Also of note, the fictional film’s director is played by Hadžihalilović’s life partner and regular collaborator, Gaspar Noé (in case you’ve ever wondered what he looked like).
Every year under the directorship of Paolo Bertolin, the NZIFF gets more up-to-date and the dinkum Aussie comedy The Fox is so new that there isn’t even a proper poster image for it yet.
A bunch of talented Australian comedians (and Jai Courtney) have been gathered together by Dario Russo for a deliciously dark romantic fable. Courtney plays boofhead Nick, who doesn’t know that his fiancé Kori (Emily Browning) is cheating on him with the local vet (Damon Herriman) who is, in the process, cheating on his wife (Claudia Doumit).
When he discovers the betrayal, Nick is persuaded by a talking fox with the voice of Olivia Colman that there is a solution – pushing Kori into a magic pit where she will re-emerge as a much more compliant participant in the relationship. The foul-mouthed magpie who is watching on (Sam Neill) isn’t so sure.
Vulgar, sexy and very, very Australian, The Fox is a grown-up crowd-pleaser and gets delightfully weirder the longer it goes on.
National Geographic bought the documentary The Tale of Silyan right out of Venice last year and it’s also going to be a crowd-pleaser (although of a very different kind). As the North Macedonian economy founders – no European Union to be an export market – farmers like Nikola struggle and the young people seek better opportunities in the West. When his children – and eventually his wife – leave for Germany, Nikola is left alone to either sell the farm and join them or slowly wither away.
In Disney fashion, he instead discovers a wounded stork – a bird that is not only symbolically important in Macedonia, their fertilising of the crops is vital to the continued health of the soil – and nurses it back to fitness, and get this, healing himself in the process.
A very pleasant 90-or-so minutes, I did find myself wondering how much manipulation there might have been behind the scenes and how much was actually organic.
Another documentary from the National Geographic family, Time and Water is a horse of a different colour. A kind of psychogeographic portrait of Iceland through the lens of poet Andri Snær Magnason and his remarkable family.
What happens when the glaciers that define the Icelandic culture and character recede at the same time as the memories of his grandparents, among the first people to unlock the remarkable secrets that those glaciers contain?
As Magnason goes back and forth between his fading grandparents and the disappearing glaciers, we get to understand the fragility of memory and of how it makes us who we are, whether we are people or a nation.
Understated but quietly devastating at the same time.
The German powerhouse Sandra Hüller reaches even greater heights as Rose, a female veteran of the Thirty Years War who has gone through life as a man. Somehow in possession of a document that entitles them to some property as an inheritance, they persuade the village elders to authorise the transfer and start her new life.
It’s not all that simple, however, as she is expected to take full part in village life, including marrying one of the local daughters and producing an heir. This is understandably challenging for Rose but before she can solve it, a child is actually born meaning that both Rose and her wife (Caro Braun) have secrets that they don’t want to have revealed.
Shot in striking black and white by Gerald Kerkletz, Markus Schleinzer’s film is formally satisfying and emotionally gripping. I think we are going to be hearing a lot about it when awards are handed out next year.
After Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie rocked my world a few weeks ago, it’s good to know that the Canadian freak flag continues to be flown by the crazy gang behind Buffet Infinity, a horror-satire told entirely using the media of cheap 90s late-night local TV commercials.
The battle between competing restaurants in the Westridge, Alberta, mall soon pales into insignificance when a giant sinkhole opens up in the car park. Except, it doesn’t. The mysterious hole is soon forgotten even though evidence suggests that it may be a demonic portal of some kind, but the battle between one café’s homemade special sauces and the constantly growing all-you-can-eat offering next door spills out into the community and every small business owner who fronts their own handheld commercials is now a target. Or a perpetrator. Or a vessel for the delivery of an unspeakable evil. Or something.
It loses its commitment to the bit at the end, in favour of something more explanatory, but it’s an extra fun ride while it lasts.
The New Zealand International Film Festival has already started in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland (until 9 August) and also plays:
Ōtautahi Christchurch – 6 August to 23 August
Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington – 12 August to 23 August
Ōtepoti Dunedin – 14 August to 30 August
Ahuriri Napier – 27 August to 6 September
Kirikiriroa Hamilton, Matakana, Ngāmotu New Plymouth, Tauranga-Moana Tauranga, Whakaoriori Masterton, Whatū Nelson – 27 August to 9 September
Further reading
I managed to get myself quoted in Rolling Stone Australia’s preview of the anniversary NZIFF screenings of Duncan Sarkie’s Out of the Blue. My quote comes from this appreciation I wrote for NZ On Screen back in 2024. Out of the Blue was also a recommendation here in 2023 as well as an original review when it hit cinemas in October 2006.
It has just struck me that I am coming up to the 20th anniversary of my first reviews here (and at Capital Times). Blimey.
… liked this!