We asked our writers to come up with their picks for the 2011 New Zealand International Film Festival. As expected, their tastes range from the tasteful to the graphic to the heart-warming to the downright weird…
Aaron Yap
LE QUATTRO VOLTE
I don’t often read programme synopses in detail before deciding on a film; this one had me at “the principal actors are mineral, vegetable and animal”. A.O. Scott’s mention of “the earthly transit and material transmutation of an old man, a young goat, a tree and a batch of charcoal” doesn’t hurt either.
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THE TURIN HORSE
Opportunities to experience Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr’s one-of-a-kind films on the big screen are pretty, pretty rare. And the fact that this is reportedly his last film ever makes it even more of a must-see. Event-wise, it’s like the Transformers 3 of slow arthouse cinema.
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THE LAST CIRCUS
Spanish maverick Álex de la Iglesia’s Jodorowskian (or Fellini-esque?) new film sounds like utterly deranged fun, especially if you are predisposed to digging carny life on screen like myself. It’s been described as a “Spanish Civil War-set psycho-clown action/thriller”, so yes please!
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MEEK’S CUTOFF
Always-interesting indie Kelly Reichardt re-teams with her Wendy and Lucy star Michelle Williams for an austere, stark revisionist western shot in the now-rarely-used academy ratio. Expecting dollops of carefully sustained mood and a period piece unlike any other in the fest.
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THE TREE OF LIFE
It’s difficult to turn down watching this long-long-awaited Terrence Malick film at the Civic really. There is a chance that it may turn out to be an epic lemon, but its ambitiously cosmic reach begs to be experienced in the largest theatre possible – and seen at least once.
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Tiny Furniture
Rebecca Barry Hill
TINY FURNITURE
Young New Yorker Lena Dunham has been praised for her droll filmmaking style ever since she climbed into a fountain and performed her ablutions for a YouTube clip. This satirical look at her own privileged existence in New York was good enough to win her a writing gig for an HBO comedy series.
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MY REINCARNATION
This sounds truly epic. Director Jennifer Fox filmed this father/son tale over 20 years, exploring the difficult relationship between a Tibetan Buddhist monk and his Italian-born son. Bound to provide an insight into Eastern spirituality, and touch on the big themes.
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LOVE STORY
Kiwi filmmaker Florian Habicht proved he can make a damned funny film with Kaikohe Demolition; here he turns the camera on himself in his quest for love in New York. Whimsy, romance, a hot summer in the Big Apple – a bloke’s Sex in the City perhaps?
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HEARTBEATS
You’ve got to get to at least one ‘art film’ at the festival, so it might as well be sexy. This won the Youth Prize at Cannes. In what sounds like a modern, uber-stylised Woody Allen update, two hipsters compete for a guy and wind up exploring their desires. Oo-er.
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THE TREE OF LIFE
Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner is perhaps the most anticipated film of the year, promising a touching family tale and, perhaps, the meaning of life. The festival’s big ticket item stars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, and has a much-talked-about ‘history of the universe’ scene. Bring your brain to this one.
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Cold Fish
Steve Newall
LOVE STORY
It’s great for the festival to open with a homegrown feature, and if anyone deserves the top spot its Florian Habicht. As if that’s not already enough, Love Story’s about a dude making a movie in New York so those who have an affinity for Habicht’s documentaries should expect things cranked up a notch.
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KILL LIST
You can’t go past any film the festival guide describes as being one part Mike Leigh, one part buddy movie and one part horror but that’s pretty much all I know about this. Oh, and the words paranoid pagan terrors appeal quite strongly too.
COLD FISH
Love Exposure melted my mind a couple of years back, setting me up nicely for a bit of Antichrist later the same day. Sono Sion returns this year with this serial-killer flick that should boast a bunch more humour than the other murder-happy flicks this year. Points off for no upskirt action, though.
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THE INNKEEPERS
Ti West’s retro-horror The House Of The Devil was great fun even if we never saw it on the big screen. Luckily he’s in similar territory with The Innkeepers, a piece of ghostly business filmed in the accom his Devil crew stayed in. I’m expecting an irony-free horror creepshow.
CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS
Werner Herzog is a master documentarian but it must have been his work on Bad Lieutenant that scored him a pass into the seldom-visited French caves that house some of the earliest art known to mankind. On its surface a strange choice for 3D, Herzog may yet breathe life into the format with this inspired shooting decision.
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Take Shelter
Andreas Heinemann
ELITE SQUAD 2: THE ENEMY WITHIN
This is the sequel to Elite Squad, which was both a study of personal corruption and a social expose of Brazilian crime, all wrapped in a gritty bad cop thriller. The follow-up is hopefully more of the same and has already done record box office business in South America.
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TAKE SHELTER
A dark psychological thriller about an impending apocalypse, which may or may not be real, has drawn comparisons to everything from Roman Polanski to Donnie Darko. Michael Shannon was born to play the central character in such a moody premise, one executed so well it won the grand prize at this year’s Cannes critics’ week.
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THE YELLOW SEA
Korea has developed its own inimitable brand of crime film – muscular, tense, stylish and shot through with black humour. At 140 minutes, this offering is the closest the genre has come to an epic saga and is helmed by Na Hong-Jin, the style’s appointed next big thing.
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13 ASSASSINS
Japanese shock jock and provocateur extraordinaire, Takashi Miike, is mellowing in his old age with this (comparatively) toned down samurai tale. Looks like a cross between the modern strand of extreme Asian cinema and a more classical Kurosawa sword-fighting period piece, which sounds like a wildly entertaining blend.
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FIRE IN BABYLON
Charismatic Caribbean athletes and a sweetly skanking reggae soundtrack tell the real life rags-to-riches tale of the West Indian cricket team in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Shaping up as the best sports documentary since When We Were Kings, with which it shares a bunch of similarities.
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Being Elmo
Rajneel Singh
NOSFERATU – A SYMPHONY OF HORRORS
A masterpiece of German Expressionism and silent film, master director F.W. Murnau and his occult-fascinated production company Prana Films produced this illegal, but astonishingly robust and well-written adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1922 and yet the film still remains, to this day, a triumph in the genre of horror cinema. The chance to finally see this classic-of-classics, a work that is often the first stop in any film buff’s early-cinema education, on the big screen at the Civic Theater (one of the grandest silent movie cinemas still with us today) and accompanied by the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra is an experience that must not be missed. Film purists be aware, this is a new score by Timothy Brock, not the original silent film score by Hans Erdmann.
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13 ASSASSINS
Famous (and infamous) director Takashi Miike always promises a wild ride whether he’s pimping the lifestyle of the Yakuza crime syndicate, constructing a weird pastiche remake of A Fistfull of Dollars with Japanese actors, telling the surreal adventures of a family of hoteliers or – here – whisking you back to the blood and katana feudalism that was the way of Japanese Samurai. Viewers can look forward to outstanding Bushido sword action, broad swathes of inhumanism, a touch of Miike’s trademark weirdness and a gripping and horrifying tale of revenge against crimes of atrocious atrocity. Miike always offers something fresh and never-before-seen, even if doesn’t always work, and that is reason enough to catch his latest exploits on the big screen.
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BEING ELMO: A PUPPETEER’S JOURNEY
In what promises to be a fun experience for youngsters and adults, this Sundance Jury Award-winning documentary offers a touching, humorous and rare glimpse behind the scenes of the Jim Henson workshop’s most famous creation: Elmo and his puppeteer and voice artist Kevin Clash. Fans of Henson’s work will find that trademark brand of humour injected into this fascinating look into the process of an artform that still, to this day, captivates little and big humans alike. Although the subject matter is light and certainly push an agenda or hit hard against the walls of established perception, there is a lot of emotional power behind this work and, just a warning, there’s a section featuring footage from Henson’s funeral that will have you adults bawling your eyes out; I kid you not.
VIVA RIVA!
If you’re in the mood for something a little ‘different’ in the context of getting away from the usual film festival tropes of slow brooding cinema, incredibly strange movies or the challenging arthouse fair, Viva Riva maybe the film for you. A straight-up, unabashed, crime film from – get this – the Democratic Republic of Congo. What? You didn’t know Africa had a thriving film industry that is now muscling in on the international genre film market? Well now you do. Taking out Best Picture, Director and Cinematography at the 7th Annual African Academy Awards, Viva Riva is a refreshing take on genre movies as you get to see amazing and exciting African talent take on the cinematic language of the mobster movie and executed with a sense of pride, vision and ambition that should make New Zealanders green with envy.
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CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS
The collision of paleontology, Werner Herzog and 3D sounds like a dream come true for my tastes, but what recommends this amazing documentary more than all those elements is that it’s an astoundingly moving and profound piece of filmmaking to boot. No matter the subject matter, no matter the budget, no matter the ambition, Germany’s resident madman Werner Herzog will never bore his audience and that fact alone means that there is something for everyone in a piece as this. Photographed in stereoscopic inside one of the most unique places on earth, Herzog is the first (and possibly the last) filmmaker allowed to document the oldest cave-paintings ever discovered and takes you on a fascinating journey through time and through the earth to our civilizations earliest moments. The film is also screening in 2D for all you seasick people.
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Submarine
Karl Puschmann
SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO
Being a sci-fi geek, a manga fiend and an uber-fan of crazy Japanese pop culture, Space Battleship Yamato is pretty much a must-see for me. Epic space battles, much explosions, cool special effects and only “one slim chance of survival” for the characters… It’s almost as if this film was tailor-made for my cinematic needs. Minus the Steve Tyler of course…
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SUBMARINE
Submarine dives pretty close to my quirky, twee, hipster-cinema cut-off point, but thankfully doesn’t submerge beneath it. I say this because even if the trailer was soundtracked to nothing but glockenspiels and acoustic guitars I’d still have to see it. Why? Writer-director Richard Ayoade. He stars in the brilliantly funny, little-known-here, UK sitcom The I.T. Crowd, and, as I love that show my fandom demands I see his cinematic debut, so see it I shall.
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THE TRIP
The Trip was made by editing footage from comedian’s Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s critically acclaimed, BAFTA winning, but-not-screened-in-New-Zealand, BBC television series of the same name into a feature length film. So because our television overlords obviously think of us as slobbering, brain-dead morons who are too stupid to realise that we’ve been watching endless Friends repeats for over a decade now, we’re pretty much forced to go to the cinema to see this.
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HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN
I’ve been waiting for this one a long time… And when I first saw the hilariously gruesome and blood soaked trailer I knew this was one film that I just had to see on the big screen. I’m guessing that a lot of the more OTT kills are ‘spoiled’ in the trailer but still… it looks so utterly, completely and ridiculously badass that this is one hobo that I’m down with. (The littlest one being the other…)
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GANTZ
The fifth and final spot is always the most problematic, necessitating as it does a cull of significant proportions. And while I really should go see outright classics like Metropolis or Noseferatu on the big screen while the opportunity is there, I’m weak and swayed far too easily by the popcorn-munching, bullet-ridden action promised by the cult Japanese film Gantz.
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NZIFF 2011: TRAILER SPECIAL | FULL LINE-UP | OFFICIAL SITE
