With tickets now on sale, Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF) is about to get underway. Steve Newall has another batch of picks from the 2024 programme.
A few weeks back, I recommended 11 standout films to catch at NZIFF this year. Omitting classics like Heavenly Creatures and Peeping Tom that are part of NZIFF this year, these 11 picks offered an intriguing overlap of documentary, drama and genre efforts. The same is true of this next batch, another collection of films from around the world that make the festival experience what it is.
If you haven’t planned your festival yet, I can’t recommend the Wishlist function on the NZIFF website highly enough—it’s proved an invaluable help in planning my fest each year. Tickets are now on sale, so get yourself sorted! We at Flicks look forward to seeing you out there, perhaps at one of the following…
Black Dog
As Paris plays host to the Olympics, here’s a drama that’s also about the world’s pinnacle sporting event… kinda. Guan Hu’s Un Certain Regard winner at Cannes follows former stunt motorcyclist Lang, who returns to his remote Chinese hometown after a prison term—and finds unfinished business, including with a local gangster. The looming 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the government’s accompanying policy of eradicating wild animals, offer an opportunity, but Lang finds himself forming an unexpected relationship with the wild dog whose bounty he initially seeks to collect.
Cuckoo
Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer leads a cast including Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick and Kiwi Martin Csokas in director Tilman Singer’s follow-up to 2018 hypnosis horror Luz. Cuckoo looks be back on similar genre terrain, scaring up a storm as it follows teen Gretchen (Schafer) when she goes to live with her father in the wake of her mother’s death. Dad’s an architect working on a resort in alpine Germany, Gretchen’s stepmother treats her like the cuckoo in their nest, and resort director Herr König (Stevens), well he seems to be concealing something…
A Different Man
A Different Man
The Winter Soldier, the Worst Person in the World, and one of alien Scar Jo’s victims in Under the Skin team up for this black comedy about appearance, ego and… actors. Seeing an opportunity to reverse his neurofibromatosis, aspiring actor Edward takes part in a drug trial that leaves him looking like Sebastian Stan, providing a boost in confidence that proves shallow and temporary. What he’s definitely not ready for is the introduction of Oswald (Adam Pearson), who might resemble Edward pre-treatment, but is full of the charm and confidence he has always lacked.
Grafted
Gory Kiwi black comedy Grafted also follows the quest for external physical transformation, as a young woman turns mad scientist in a bid for acceptance. In the wake of her father’s bloody death (after he takes radical measures to treat his facial disfigurement), Wei shares the same shame about her hereditary condition, and picks up where his scientific research left off. Pressured by colleagues, friends, and her own sense of exclusion, Wei’s methods veer into extreme territory, as her motives slide towards exacting bloody revenge.
Hollywoodgate
Fascinating on-the-ground account made by a solo documentarian with rare (and somewhat limited) permission to capture events in the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Ibrahim Nash’at and his camera follow Taliban air force commander Mawlawi Mansour as he embraces newfound airborne capabilities, with everything from cough drops to Black Hawk helicopters left behind for Talibs to commandeer. Even with its requirement not to film everyday Afghans and their plight, Hollywoodgate pierces the propaganda veil—though that isn’t without threat to its director…
Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line
Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line
Documentary on the 40+ year career of groundbreaking, culture-leading, and hit-making Aussie rockers Midnight Oil looks to offer many things. Chronicling their remarkable journey as a band, Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line also offers context to their campaign for social, racial and environmental justice. Telling things like they really were was something that did not sit well for many Australians—and probably still doesn’t—so a journey back to the 80s, 90s and 00s may say as much about society across the ditch as it does about the group of men who set out to make change just as much as they made era-defining songs (Beds Are Burning, Blue Sky Mine, US Forces etc).
A Mistake
Rain director Christine Jeffs returns to the big screen with her first feature since 2008’s Sunshine Cleaning. Elizabeth Banks (Wet Hot American Summer) stars in New Zealand-set medical thriller A Mistake, adapted from Carl Shuker’s Ockham-shortlisted novel, and capturing the aftermath of a surgical error that has rippling professional and personal consequences. When a single action can have huge ramifications, the cost of accountability and the reputation of individuals and institutions make for uneasy bedfellows…
The People’s Joker
The People's Joker
Don’t mistake Vera Drew’s unofficial superhero parody for the new Scary Movie. Taking unauthorised liberties with DC IP, The People’s Joker doesn’t just riff on this material for absurdist LOLs—although there’s plenty of comedy, as suggested by its appearances from Tim Heidecker, Scott Aukerman, Maria Bamford, David Liebe Hart et al. Using the citizens of Gotham to tell a deeper story, Drew’s film (in which she also stars) uses a transgender character based on the Joker as a vehicle for a personal account of gender dysphoria and their own experiences, with plenty of satire and super-shenanigans along the way.
Pepe
(With apologies to Elizabeth Banks) move over Cocaine Bear, Pepe the hippopotamus is coming through… A Namibian native, Pepe was brought to Colombia by drug lord Pablo Escobar—exactly the sort of person who you imagine decides that they need a hippo—but met his own demise after that of his owner. That doesn’t stop Pepe the film from telling his story, or maybe that of his ghost, as the hippo’s spirit wanders and speaks to us from beyond the grave. Unclassifiable cinema, by the sound of it, earning Dominican filmmaker Nelson de los Santos Arias the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2024 Berlinale.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus
Get your tissues ready, and prepare to sob in the cinema (but sob quietly, please!). The late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto returns to NZIFF screens with this, his final live performance, filmed just months before his death. In black and white we’ll see a man and a piano, traversing compositions from his half-century career, from reinterpretations of Yellow Magic Orchestra to Sakamoto’s soundtracks and minimalist pieces. Intimate to the extreme, this is what the dying Sakamoto chose to leave us: Opus is how we can honour him and his legacy.
Sasquatch Sunset
Sasquatch Sunset
Beneath the furry costumes, Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keogh are among the human actors playing a bigfoot family in Sasquatch Sunset. The dialogue-free conceit is to picture how they live—as directors David and Nathan Zellner told Rory Doherty in their interview, it started from a joke about why the only footage of Bigfoot is of them walking. What else do they do? “We wanted to normalise all their behaviour and be open to wherever it took us. We knew there’s inherently going to be a lot of absurdity to that—something you see your dog or cat do you [might] think nothing of, but then you see this animal that has human-like characteristics and it suddenly becomes uncomfortable.”
