sentinelle

Those of us that try and take cinema ser­i­ously have very few for­ums where we can truly express our pas­sion and the Monday even­ing screen­ings at the Wellington Film Society are the alter at which we worship.

For over 60 years Wellingtonians have been gath­er­ing to watch flick­er­ing images from all over the world. In the days before the words nerd or geek we were called buffs (and were proud of it) and we still gath­er in our hun­dreds at the Paramount pic­ture theatre to bathe in the glory of a rect­an­gu­lar image on a sil­ver screen – shad­ows cast by films from exot­ic places (and some from less far afield).

This year’s Feb-Nov pro­gramme kicks-off on Monday with a real treat – Garden of Earthly Delights is the first screen­ing in a series of films by acclaimed Polish film­maker Lech Majewski and it’s a prime example of the kind of screen­ing that only the Film Society can provide. It’s an award-winning art movie about love, loss, mor­bid­ity and cre­ation and the dir­ect­or will be present at the screen­ing to take questions.

Other high­lights in this year’s broadly cur­ated pro­gramme include a couple of early films by Gus Van Sant (Milk), recent doc­u­ment­ar­ies Manufactured Landscapes and Darwin’s Nightmare and rare 35mm present­a­tions of fest­iv­al favour­ites La Sentinelle (1992), Diva (1981) and Paradzhanov’s mas­ter­piece The Colour of Pomegranates (1979).

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 4 March, 2009.

While filling in for Graeme Tuckett on Nine to Noon this morn­ing I gave the Film Society a bit of a deserved plug. It really is a treas­ure. You can listen here (or down­load):

[audio:http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ntn/ntn-20090304–1148-Film-048.mp3]