Media Release
A major highlight of the New Zealand filmgoers’ calendar, the Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival opens in Auckland on October 5th. The festival, which celebrates the best and latest contemporary Italian film on offer, is the largest single-culture film festival and the largest Italian cultural event in New Zealand. This year, in celebration of the festival’s 10th anniversary, a record number of feature films will be screened.

Media Release | 27 September, 2005
New Zealanders will have a unique opportunity to see some spectacular examples of Chinese cinema in October/November. The 2005 Chinese Film Festival will be touring Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, between October 27 and November 13, featuring a selection of 10 films from some of China’s top filmmakers.

...to the new Lumière Reader. Currently, you're viewing the DIY bits and pieces of a new design that, given a few more weeks, will resemble something of an actual website. In the meantime, most of the hyper links don't work, things may not function quite as they should, whilst the entire back catalogue of existing content requires a long and arduous relocation to its eventual new home. The makeup of this site will be explained in weeks to come; for now, we ask you bear with the "under construction" roadblocks, as well as the illusion of things actually being done.
      The old Lumière Reader, no longer updated, can still be viewed here, and will remain online until renovations are complete. The TNZIFF weblog, which will also eventually be discontinued, can be viewed in its usual place until it merges officially, along with everything else.

Eastwood/Anderson/Russell/USA/2004; R4
Roadshow, NZ$34/39/29.95 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

SEX. There’s plenty of explicit sexual content in Kinsey. A fair and balanced, cerebral and grandly enjoyable biopic of the liberating, flawed American sex researcher Alfred “Prok” Kinsey and American paradox. “God, what a gap between social front and reality!” Kinsey penetratingly described the era. Kinsey is more intellectually than sexually stimulating. Also stimulating this month from Roadshow: The Life Aquatic, Million Dollar Baby and I Heart Huckabees.

In this era of pinprick voyeurism (could Foucault have ever predicted the nippleslip?), puritans will have you believe that an a-okay on output is the same call on any off-field activity. Everyone else will tell you that we’ve just stopped caring, ‘cos if the price is right, artistic temperament will always dwarf media bait-and-pull: Even R. Kelly – man with the most thinly-veiled designs in music today (hell, in anything today) – is labeled pervert like it’s something that should be written on a tax return (though if persistent mongering leads to more flaming acts of self-martyrdom like Happy People/U Saved Me, that can only be a good thing, right?). So why is it that a professed sweet tooth for teen-girl movies has people looking at me like I deserve to be charged under Megan’s Law?

French precursor to Psycho? To that I say: pooh-pooh, let’s ditch the retroactive casting-of-shadows, because the differences are eminent. I mean, sure there’s the twin foregrounding of cut-both-ways misogyny: Hitchcock liked to dress ‘em up as much as down, and in a similar vein, Les Diaboliques kicks off inside a pulpy her-on-her hotbox, before quickly inducing vertigo with the return of the patriarchal overseer. Yet Clouzot doesn’t have half the restraint of the omni-chinned Brit, and that kind of dollhouse bruising alone won’t cut it.

Media Release | 15 September, 2005
Films from entries by students at Elam School of Fine Arts have been selected for ELAM PAST AND PRESENT – an exhibition evening held at the Academy Cinema on 17 October showcasing the films of past and present Elam students.

Three months, two cassette-sides, and one out-of-his-depth aspiring journo later, DAVID LEVINSON brings us his one-on-one interview with Undertow director David Gordon Green.