this is england

The Film Festival has been a fix­ture of Wellington’s winter cal­en­dar for nearly 40 years and for those of us who organ­ise our lives around glow­ing rect­angles of one kind or anoth­er there is no bet­ter way to spend a cold and wet after­noon than in the com­fy leath­er chairs at the Embassy, engrossed in a work of art.

Programming a Festival like Wellington may seem easy but I can assure you it’s get­ting tough­er every year. The sheer volume of inde­pend­ent film is grow­ing bey­ond all reas­on (I read that there were around 5,000 films sub­mit­ted to Sundance last year) and atten­tion must be paid to all four corners of the globe nowadays.

The glossy pro­gramme (doing double-duty this year as Festival Guide Book and Souvenir Programme) is 90 pages long and I dir­ect you to it forth­with – my role here is, with the help of some pre­views from the Festival office, to point your atten­tion towards some of the unher­al­ded titles avail­able amongst the hun­dreds on offer.

The first thing to point out is that, unlike the old days, there is noth­ing to be gained in try­ing to guess which films will return for a com­mer­cial sea­son. With the loss of the three (oth­er­wise unla­men­ted) Rialto screens in June, there is even less chance of a film com­ing back than before and the gen­er­al down­turn in attend­ance this year has made dis­trib­ut­ors wary. At the moment there are no plans to release The Savages (a well-observed, superbly acted drama with plenty of black humour star­ring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney) and even the Jack Black – Michel Gondry com­edy Be Kind Rewind is expec­ted to go straight to DVD post-Festival (although strong loc­al sales may pro­voke a change of mind). Recommendation: if the big screen exper­i­ence is import­ant to you, don’t wait.

Many films in the Festival are nev­er likely to come back com­mer­cially – they may not even have loc­al dis­tri­bu­tion and thus even a DVD release is unlikely. Of the fea­ture films I got a chance to see before dead­line, I was most taken with Silent Light by Mexican Carlos Reygada ( Japón, 2003). In an isol­ated Mennonite com­munity in Mexico, a hus­band has to deal with the con­sequences when he tells his wife of his love for anoth­er woman. A fable-like story, exquis­itely pho­to­graphed, with an end­ing that more than rewards the work you have to put in. I made the mis­take of watch­ing it over two nights which reduced its potency by about 75% and I recom­mend you get to the Embassy screen­ing (if pos­sible) where you can wrap it around you like a blanket.

Director Shane Meadows has been a per­son­al and Festival favour­ite for nearly 13 years and he showed with last year’s This is England that he is strik­ing a rich vein of form. Somers Town stars that film’s Thomas Turgoose (now 16) as Tomo, on the run from an unmen­tion­able fam­ily life in Nottingham. In London, he meets anoth­er lonely drift­er, Polish immig­rant Marek, and they spend the Summer lark­ing about and grow­ing up in the streets around St Pancras. Fully fun­ded by the Eurostar com­pany as an act of pure pat­ron­age, per­haps it could be a mod­el for the new KiwiRail com­pany to follow.

In the doc­u­ment­ary sec­tion (with the immensely strong music depart­ment jus­ti­fi­ably giv­en its own sec­tion of the pro­gramme) there is some­thing for every­one. With no less than three Iraq War docos to choose from you could do a lot worse than Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure about the abuse-revealing pho­to­graphs from Abu Ghraib. No one frames a story bet­ter than Morris and, while all most of the talk about the film has been abstract dis­cus­sion about the nature of pho­to­graph­ic real­ity, it should arouse plenty of right­eous anger simply for the hor­ror it portrays.

Crazy Love is anoth­er well-constructed tale. With this one it helps to not know too much detail going in, as the reveals are deli­ciously handled. Suffice to say that love is blind, in more ways than one.

If you wanted to explain to a stranger why New Zealand is known as Godzone, show them Barefoot Cinema, the doc­u­ment­ary about beloved cine­ma­to­graph­er Alun Bollinger. His idyll­ic life in Reefton on the West Coast, his career choices (not least to stay in NZ when his con­tem­por­ar­ies in the 70s and 80s left for Hollywood) and of course the AlBol-HelBol 40 year love story. There’s a dark shad­ow that appears but even that is handled by the fam­ily with impec­cable grace.

Ant Timpson has revived the some­what moribund Incredibly Strange Film Festival after sev­er­al years as a watered-down That’s Incredible sub-section. It still sits a little uncom­fort­ably with­in the whole but the pro­gram­ming is back to it’s best: you’ll find our cov­er star tucked away there in Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django. Meanwhile King of Kong plays like an amped up ver­sion of that cross­word doc­u­ment­ary last year, this time fol­low­ing vin­tage video game obsess­ives and the quest for the world Donkey Kong record. It’s a clas­sic good guy/bad guy set-up and you’ll be as manip­u­lated as any 8‑bit Mario, but it’s a lot of fun.

Finally, tucked away at the Film Archive for two lunch­time screen­ings is a little gem called The Return by Wellington film­maker Kathy Dudding. I have just re-watched my two favour­ite films, London and Robinson in Space by Patrick Keiller, and was delighted to see Wellington get a sim­il­ar aes­thet­ic treat­ment – beau­ti­fully com­posed, per­fectly bal­anced, stand­ing images of mod­ern Wellington (the Harbour and Oriental Bay for the most part) with Dudding’s grand­mother­’s memor­ies of Edwardian and post-WWI Wellington on the soundtrack. Mesmerising and moving.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 16 July, 2008. Cross-posted to the Wellingtonista.

Notes on screen­ing con­di­tions: All titles except Standard Operating Procedure were pre­viewed on DVD, usu­ally water­marked and time­coded. Standard Operating Procedure was pre­viewed in the Para­mount’s Bergman cinema.