TIM WONG discusses the new look New Zealand International Film Festivals programme, unveiled earlier this week.

UNDRESSED, the New Zealand International Film Festivals cut a lean figure in 2008; the corporate regalia of their former naming rights sponsor discarded as their redesigned programme looks to strike a new pose. Reformatted to a contentious A4 – already a talking point among those who prefer to travel compact – the taller, thinner hardcopy aims to trim the waistline of a programme now carrying over 170 films, although cynics are more likely to attribute its anorexia to budgetary constraints. Whether or not you approve of the makeover, it’s important to note the only real casualty of Telecom’s desertion has been the luxurious souvenir tome, with the festival’s capacity to import cinema – if ever there was any doubt – unhindered and at full strength.

As always, a criterion of the festival’s annual haul is the ratio to which it is programmed; that is, how many one-off rarities there are to every distribution certainty. Glaring commercial prospects Be Kind Rewind, The Visitor, The Escapist and The Savages aside, the promise of the unknown looms larger than ever before, dispelling rank scepticism over the festival’s agenda as a trade show for the time being. Even the pessimists must agree that 2008’s programme is nothing if not intriguing, opening and closing with documentaries Man on Wire and Waltz with Bashir respectively – a surprise departure from the Cannes-embroidered, attention seeking bookends of previous years. That the equivalent of A Mighty Heart or The Wind That Shakes the Barley won’t commence this edition of the festival comes as a welcome relief, not to mention a reminder of the non-fiction genre’s continued insurgence.


Deeper into the line-up, the marque ‘Worlds of Difference’ section backtracks 18 months to restore a contingent of films out of reach in 2007: from Cannes of that year, Bela Tarr’s dockside noir The Man From London; stacked auteur omnibus To Each His Own Cinema; the engaging, animated Persepolis; Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-dong’s first film since Oasis (and a tenure with the Korean government); The Banishment and Alexandr Sokurov’s Alexandra, both out of Russia; and the transcendent Silent Light, a work of remarkable maturity from its usually bombastic Mexican director Carlos Reygadas. Secured from the most recent Cannes competition: winners Gomorrah (Grand Prix) and Hunger (Camera d’Or); new features from Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Three Monkeys), Bent Hamer (O’Horten) plus the decorated Dardenne Brothers (Lorna’s Silence); and in a wise substitute, Wong Kar-wai’s forgotten masterpiece, Ashes of Time (Redux), in place of his first genuine failure, the disastrous My Blueberry Nights.

Common sense also prevails in the wider Asian Cinema sphere, with old (and late) masters treated like kings. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, a work of ecstatic beauty and rare marketability (in Juliette Binoche), finds itself gracing the Civic, the Embassy, and four other centres outside of Auckland and Wellington – the first time for a Hou film in memory. Smartly positioned alongside Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (double billed with White Mane), it makes for one of several companion pieces incorporated into the programme: Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astree and Céladon a natural match; the aforementioned Silent Light and Secret Sunshine spiritual pairs; and in Olympics year, what could more pertinent than two documentaries (Bigger, Strong, Faster and The King of Kong) illustrating in tandem the desperate measures within competitive sport?


Returning to Asia, while the festival has remained loyal to regulars Hong Sang-soo (Night and Day) and Nobuhiro Yamashita (A Gentle Breeze in the Wind), in the absence of Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakal (who do not have new movies to show), its coup is undoubtedly in the Edward Yang retrospective, headlined by Holy Grail A Bright Summer Day – to screen only a handful of sessions in its four-hour entirety, before vanishing back into cinema folklore. The once renegade Takashi Miike, out of fashion for some time, remerges with Sukiyaki Western Django, one of 15 ‘Incredibly Strange Films’, strangely undersold by their horizontal page layout. Rumours and a misleading press release last month suggested Ant Timpson’s bastard festival was to regain its independence, although all that’s merely been rebooted is the original branding. Which is say arthouse, over grindhouse, prevails. Recommended for masochists is Michael Haneke’s self-remake of Funny Games – a torture movie geared towards audience stupor and complicity, its box office non-performance means it’s unlikely to screen under optimal conditions again.

Films that I can vouch for are Guy Maddin’s hilarious phantasmagoria, My Winnipeg, a documentary within inverted commas; timely Up the Yangtze, which humanises the flotsam around China’s Three Gorges Dam with rare intimacy; La France, a war musical unlike no other (unfortunately not showing outside of Auckland); The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, local filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly’s unflattering, but never judgemental portrait of a self-centred, adoption-obsessed artist; the glorious The Red Balloon, too exquisite for words; Shane Meadow’s Somers Town, a minor, yet delightful follow-up to This is England; and two overall standouts, Silent Light and Flight of the Red Balloon, which currently vie for the title of best in show. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though – there’s plenty more to be discovered over the next six weeks.