As Auckland concludes, Wellington rolls on. Of the 160+ films we've had the choice of, Li Tao's thoughtful and moving Waves has surprised us most thus far. A reminder that the best documentaries aren't necessarily about big issues, humanitarian plight or hot-button current affairs, the rapport with her subjects is at times astonishing, and a real testament to the power of people on film. Its trump moment is a one-in-a-million: as Father's Day and birthday converge, Ken breaks down as he floods himself with memories of home via a family slideshow on his laptop. Completely oblivious to Li and her camera's presence, it is the kind of distilled human capsule documentary filmmakers pursue all their life, but rarely ever capture. A diamond amongst the rough of nagging leftist docos, this has also been most refreshing entry in the Framing Reality section.

Latest Additions: JACOB POWELL reviews Fabián Bielinsky’s The Aura, the Argentinian filmmaker’s last ever film, as well as reality TV train wreck American Cannibal: The Road to Reality; CALEB STARRENBURG revels in Japanese deadpan rock out Linda Linda Linda; MELODY NIXON considers Saratan’s reality-jolting view of life in Kyrgyzstan; TIM WONG includes his thoughts on A Scanner Darkly, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Linda Linda Linda and The Wild Blue Yonder + new capsule reviews for Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story, Matthew Barney: No Restraint and 58 more in our Festival Form Guide.

Werner Herzog’s new “science fiction” film finds itself classified in the “Framing Reality” section of this year’s festival. It’s not a documentary, but clearly has a message to pitch about global warming and manmade waste and neglect. His solution? Relocate the entire human race to another planet for several hundred years, allow the Earth to recuperate, and then return. If only it were possible, given Brad Dourif’s cynical rant about rocket fuel and space exploration and how, if a manned craft were to travel to the nearest star Alpha Centauri at the fastest humanly possible speed, only 15% of the journey would be complete after 500 generations and the entire evolution of mankind, from Neanderthals to iPods.

At the festival this year, you can watch a terrified five-year-old hang from a noose in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Reluctantly, I agreed to give this a second chance, as there’s no resisting Park’s fiendish talent for shot design, amplified to baroque heights on the big, big screen. And if you’ve ever seen a Lee Young-ae movie, then there’s immense fun to be had in watching her apply more eye shadow than a Times Square hooker, or cheering as she unloads two rounds of her designer handgun in between the toes of a child-murdering bastard.

We've stared at its cover for weeks; sat next to its poster in bus shelters; watched it come alive before every festival film. Now, having seen A Scanner Darkly, the inspiration behind this year's trump festival image is a little clearer. Granted, Richard Linklater's new rotoscoped film is anything but a still life; as if employing a layer of tracing paper over the surface, his posse of artists have taken their markers, scored thick black outlines, and filled in the rest of this Philip K. Dick colouring book. It's one dazed and confused filter, simultaneously numbing and sugar-coating the aimless reality of a group of slackers who, as addicts of the corporate-sponsored drug "Substance D", get to fuck around in a stained glass world of perpetual surveillance and 18 (or is that 9?) speed bikes.

Saratan provides a reality-jolting view of life in Kyrgyzstan in the post-Soviet era. Far from being stark and bleak however, it is quirky and engaging and provides rare insight into the lives of rural Kyrgyz people. Part social(ist) realism, part comedy and part voyeurist drama, the film moves from comic adventure to deep reflection, and offers viewers cinescapes and actors of the likes they may never have come across before.

Fabián Bielinsky’s sophomore feature was sadly his last; his sudden and premature death occuring in June this year. The Aura, the follow-up to the wildly popular Nine Queens, screens posthumously at this year’s film festival. JACOB POWELL reviews.

Nobuhiro Yamashita could rightly be considered Japan’s answer to Jim Jarmusch: as evidenced through his oddly affecting No One’s Ark. With his latest offering, Linda Linda Linda, Yamashita is clearly bidding for a younger mainstream audience. Though turned saccharine sweet, he retains and even refines his acute appreciation of laconic and deadpan comedy.

Rousing in an entirely non-Mel Gibson way, Ken Loach's Cannes-conquering time capsule of Ireland's tumultuous twenties is a fiercely determined statement for which Iraq is really only a stone's throw away. Political propaganda or not, The Wind That Shakes the Barley isn't the pointed allegory of a childish Lars von Trier; rather, it is a stern reminder that history continues to repeat itself. In troubled times, it is little surprise that the festival's opening night films have for the past two years agitated and provoked. That pockets of the audience were seen scurrying to the exit is no less than a stamp of approval.

Congratulations to our Wellington winners of The New World giveaway, J. Mussgnug and B. Sansom. Your double passes are in the mail.

Latest Additions: CATHERINE BISLEY reviews Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, an unfilmable film; MEI-LAM WONG experienced “fps”, Auckland's Live experimental cinema programme at the legendary Civic Winter Garden; TIM WONG caught Naked Childhood, Fearless and Shortbus on the Wellington festival's opening weekend; BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM liked Three Times (unlike certain others); MUBARAK ALI interprets Abel Ferrara's Mary; CALEB STARRENBURG compares Napolean Dynamite to The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang; JACOB POWELL channels his own taste for coffee and childhood trauma in Black Gold and Keane + new capsule reviews for Princess, The Method and more in our Festival Form Guide.

The first documentary on my festival list this year was Black Gold. I must admit that this was one I put on my list more because I felt I should see it (being the great consumer of coffee that I am) than because I wanted to, or thought it would be a great film. Happily for me I was proved wrong.

Claustrophobia. I remember having this intense feeling, occasionally, growing up. At the bottom of a ruck in a schoolboy rugby game; the time my brother shut me in my wardrobe which only had a handle on the outside; once when some friends put me in the boot of their car as part of making a short film. It was feeling of being smothered, of not being able to escape, of being confronted with a situation outside of my ability to control. This very real feeling is what filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan evokes, slowly but surely, in his latest directorial effort, Keane.

The young bohemian couple sitting next to me fled the theatre after only 10 minutes – quite obviously offended. Apparently this wasn’t what they’d signed up for. I couldn’t help but think, as they’d lined up to buy their tickets, surely the film’s titled had betrayed something of its character? Perhaps it was the opening scene, in which Gavin, Hobie and Maynard “prepare to do battle” with ridiculously oversized Styrofoam swords, that sent them packing? Or maybe it was the scene in which the emo kids wager the geek kids a ninja star they can’t find big-foot tracks? Or when the punk kids bet the metal kids they can’t run on water like the ‘Jesus’ lizard.

Matthew Modine returns to Abel Ferrara’s cinema after his tortured turn as cocaine/Beatrice Dalle-obsessed movie star in The Blackout, this time as the director of a controversial film about the final days of Jesus and his relationship with Mary Magdalene. Typically, the narrative unfolds in two cities: in Jerusalem, where Modine’s lead actress, Marie (an ambiguous performance from Juliette Binoche), has retreated with her newfound discovery of spirituality, and in New York City, where Modine’s film’s premiere is being covered by the spiritually-challenged and unravelling Ted Younger’s (Forest Whitaker) TV show. Ferrara’s is a film of overlapping identities that shift gracefully between the various screens, of an intrinsically Ferrara-ian meta-ness of dissolving images held by recurring obsessions with filmmaking, spirituality, and fidelity, and of sublime tonal inconsistencies held in naked embrace, ironically making the film a truly spiritual investigation into faith and morality.—Mubarak Ali

Hou Hsiao-hsien is a director who plays on little moments, looks, feelings and emotions. He’s the modern equivalent of say, Dreyer or Ozu (though I don’t think his style is as locked down as those two masters). In fact, in Three Times we see Hou exploring three different styles with three different vignettes. The film revolves around relationships set in different time periods – 1966, 1911 (during Taiwan’s resistance to Japanese rule) and 2005. Played by the same actors (principally Shu Qi and Chang Chen) the stories explore the differences in relationships, social conventions and role of women. The film’s points come from having the three films alongside each other – this is definitely a film where the whole is more important than the parts.

The illegitimate love child of The 400 Blows, Naked Childhood is secretly the better film: its imprint of pre-teen adolescence certainly a more cosmic remembrance of childhood to Truffant’s very particular and personal memoir of embattled youth. It also feels encapsulated in time, quite unlike the petulant Antoine Doinel, whose adventures over 3 1/2 subsequent films petered out into cinema’s equivalent of 42 Up. The boy in Pialat’s film, 10-year-old Francois, is a little terror, hurling scrap metal from a highway overpass, throwing a switchblade at his foster brother, and dropping a cat down a stairwell. At times glazing over into a possessed stare, the kid could be Damien’s long lost brother for all we know, and his tantrums are no less than demonic (his bedroom door bearing the brunt of it). And yet he is capable of genuine tenderness, forging an affectionate bond with the plucky grandmother of his elderly (and stoic) foster parents. These, and other moments of mutual appreciation, are the film’s best and sincerest scenes. Pialat, in his first feature, observes with an air of clarity – something he would perfect 23 years later in his penultimate film, the lucid Van Gogh.

A live cinema programme curated by Phil Dadson and Sam Hamilton, “fps” was the first of its kind to be shown at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals. Night One of the programme drew a mixed crowd to the legendary Civic Winter Garden. From the usual art-house types through to those daring to stray off the well-trodden road, the large group had organisers scrambling to provide additional last-minute seating.

A shambolic merry-go-round of film-within-a-film quandaries, cine-quotations and Steve Coogan in a giant womb, Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is dastardly entertaining. CATHERINE BISLEY watches the chaos unfold.

The best science fiction is premonitory without totally losing its bearing on reality; it stretches and simplifies human nature until it can be seen flying in a set formation, susceptible as a whole. Considering the threat present in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly – corporate-sponsored drug addiction – the “7 years from now” tag seems almost like a formality (just google “fluoxetine” +”lawsuit,” and make sure you have the afternoon free). Further undoing any luxury of preemption is the way Linklater insists on continuity with his current universe of goof-offs: co-”D” (or Death) addicts James (Robert Downey Jr.), Bob (Keanu Reeves) and Ernie (Woody Harrelson) spend much of the time just fucking around in the wastes of suburbia.

For a film-within-a-film about the making of a film, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story doesn't manage to dethrone Irma Vep, Lumière's all-time favourite movie about making movies. But we haven't had as much fun since. Michael Winterbottom, a ridiculously prolific and erratic director, turns his latest film into a reflection of behind the scene featurettes, production debacles, celebrity arrogance (this is pretty much the same Steve Coogan from Coffee and Cigarettes), and a thousand other tid bits usually destined for the extra disc of a deluxe special edition DVD. It is extremely digressive, shambolic for the most part, and rather like a hall of mirrors – and yet dastardly entertaining. Coogan upside-down in a giant see-thru womb says as much. For UK TV fiends, the familiar faces are in ample supply: among many, Stephen Fry, Dylan Moran of Black Books, Ashley Jensen of Extras, and everyone's favourite squeaky Scottish lady, Shirley Henderson.

Also, we've extended our ticket giveaway to The New World for Wellingtonians until the 24th. [Enter Here]

Latest Additions: CALEB STARRENBURG goes back to school in Brick; DAVID LEVINSON has words with Laurent Cantet's Heading South, John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus and Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly; both JACOB POWELL and NICHOLAS BUTLER check out Homegrown: Works on Film [a] [b]; TIM WONG learns more about manic depressives in It's Only Talk; + new capsule reviews for Police Beat, Pulse and more in our Festival Form Guide.

Brick is a hard and fast film-noir set in the context of a contemporary Californian high school. Think The Maltese Falcon meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or perhaps The O.C. But in a good way. This is the kind of film that will lead you to dread or yearn after high school all over again. Granted, no one at my school owned a handgun or dealt cocaine. At least no one I knew of.

Like Time Out’s stoney-faced spectre, the three colonial lionesses that prowl Laurent Cantet’s Heading South just wanna play hooky, though they’ve usurped the psychopathology of the former with a more modest aim: to lie in the sun and get laid. The burnished savannah of Haiti is their home-away-from-home (circa the “late 70s,” as an early title card notes), and stumbling out of the fogged hive of corporate lounges and car interiors that ruled Cantet’s first film, the opening here is almost enough to make you choke on your spritzer: On a beach scene cut from diamond, two lithe young black boys entertain Charlotte Rampling’s aging Ellen, the three of them trading coy seductions like gifts between cultures. And while that may not sound like much on paper, unlike Malick, who uses history as a throughline to naive transcendance, Cantent deals out anachronisms with spiked discord.

So does it make me a prude if I still wanna ride the big yellow bus, in the hope that Cindy will finally sit next to me? John Cameron Mitchell might say so, but then again I wouldn’t trust him to deliberate over anything that might take longer than an orgasm. Progressive couples at the hippie-yuppie nexus may enjoy the drone of fellow bees, and even learn how to maximise the energy flow of their IKEA lounge suite. But for me this is just the same antibourgeois pamphlet that was being handed out four decades ago (the principle difference being that hunter and hunted now seem to have merged irreparably): It draws circles of exclusion outta the twin imports of hipster iconography and Victorian-grade repression.

The short story came to mind as I was watching the Homegrown: Works on Film short film programme. I am a big fan of the short story and some of my favourite writers are so for their mastery of the genre. I appreciate the fast moving plot, conciseness, and lack of unnecessary descriptive detail. It fits perfectly in to my modern impatient world. The short film on the other hand fails to satisfy me in the same way, as I prefer the nuances of a feature film’s longer story. Often during the Homegrown screenings I was left unfulfilled and wanted an hour or so more.

Reviewed by David Levinson

THERE IS no modern romance, owl-glassed luminaries and angular femmeboys yawn in time, but the cult of passion has merely been sublimated to a ghost in the machine: he blogged, she blogged, and the no-wow phenomenon of co-ordinated myspace profiles . Those who throw back “we’re just fucking” with lightning reflex do so less out of bohemian quixotism, and more in testament to love’s finite reserve. Meanwhile, a million faces simultaneously masked by dayglo apples isn’t a sign of unified isolation: Technology disciplines and diversifies, and beneath the toecap of social gate-keeping, we still eggsit visions of happiness.

Saturday saw me take my annual pilgrimage to the screening, in some cases first screenings, of the locally produced short film programme – and good time was had! The finishing of all these shorts was top notch as was the acting. What sets apart this year’s selection was the lack of absolute clunkers which has, in my opinion, tarnished the programme a little in the past. It seems as if our local industry is not only active and thriving, but also taking a step up in terms of new filmmakers as well as our more recognised feature directors.

Niki Caro/USA/2005; R4
Warner Bros, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Jenny Macintyre

North Country is based on a true story. It is every woman’s nightmare.

Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) takes a case of sexual harassment against her employer, a giant Minnesota Iron Mining company. Sexual harassment is so endemic in the culture of the mine that Josey’s father Hank (Richard Jenkins) says she brings shame on the family by going to work, asking if she wants to become a lesbian.

Evoking in spirit the 21st century aura of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo, Ryuichi Hiroki’s cinematic blog of a thirty-something manic depressive is similarly besotted with its radiant lead actress. Like Mambo’s Shi Qi, Shinobu Terajima’s blithe modern woman traverses ecstatic highs and subterranean lows in a performance of staunch, yet fragile independence. The camera can’t get enough of her.

While we’ve preferred to leave the Homegrown programme untouched and to the imagination in the past – mainly due to the local short film selection standing as a compact film festival in itself, and better left experienced in the moment, on-the-fly, and amongst the pockets of excited audience members whose films are about to be immortalised for the first time on the big screen – several preview screeners turned up in our mailbox last month that we couldn’t say no to. From what we’ve seen, the standard is indelibly high and confidently assured.

The 38th Telecom Auckland International Film Festival is officially underway, with festival patrons clambering for tickets, and late-comers apparently being turned away in last-minute disappointment. You have been warned. Congratulations to our two Auckland winners of double passes to The New World, J. Mcrae and S. Bulley; Wellington winners will be drawn July 24th. You can still enter [here]

Latest Additions: IAN CHRISTOPHER feels the heat in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth; headaches are par for the course in the extraordinary Mind Game, the year's most mentally-exhausting animated feature according to CALEB STARRENBURG; TIM GRAY submits his third installment of Ticket Stub Scrawlings, taking in Keane, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and A Bittersweet Life from Ant Timpson's That's Incredible Cinema! programme; TIM WONG samples some of the early competition in the Homegrown short film programme, and Mitsuo Yanahigamchi’s zany and nimble comedy-of-filmmaking, Who’s Camus Anyway?

The third annual installment of TIM GRAY’s Ticket Stub Scrawlings featurette considers three from Ant Timpson’s “That’s Incredible Cinema!” potion: Lodge Kerrigan's volatile Keane, Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy-capping Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and Kim Jee-woon's violent spectacle A Bittersweet Life. Let the Scrawlings begin.

This year’s animation programme may be modest in size, but teems with rarefied genius; Masaaki Yuasa’s hallucinogenic anime Mind Game the head-splitting pick of the bunch. CALEB STARRENBURG insists the migranes are all worth it.

Media Release | July 13th, 2006
Three New Zealand short films selected to screen at prestigious overseas film festivals and two hot off the editing suites will make their New Zealand première at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals in Auckland and then travel to other key city centres.

Screening as part of the Homegrown: Works on Film, a collaboration between the Moving Image Centre and the New Zealand Film Festivals, each of these films has received support from the New Zealand Film Commission to produce a 35mm screening print.

Entries for Radio Active's Handle the Jandal DIY NZ Music Video Competition for 2006 are currently open, and close on August 1st – which leaves budding musicians and filmmakers alike less than a month to scrounge together a clip. The contest is restricted to non-funded music videos by New Zealand musicians only. Categories vary, and will be judged (along with a supreme winner) as part of an awards ceremony to be held in Wellington later in the year. Download the entry form here, or see flyer below for further info.

Al Gore puts his foot down in An Inconvenient Truth, the most urgent and alarming statement on the threat of global warming yet. IAN CHRISTOPHER is all ears.

Media Release | July 11, 2006
That's the question on everyone's lips who saw this scorching hot ticket at Cannes. The juries may have been looking the other way, but there were plenty on the Croisette who considered this and Shortbus the real standouts. Evoking echoes of Jaws and the biological horrors of early David Cronenberg with B-movie zest, The Host is the kind of full-bodied horror show, both scary and hilarious, that so many filmmakers strive to generate without ever quite succeeding. And that's the perfect way to cap this year's That's Incredible Cinema programme at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals (which opens in Auckland this Thursday). This has officially become the most anticipated movie event of the year, so grab a ticket and get in line to have your arse kicked six ways to Sunday.

Black Bush (aka Dave Chappelle) cares about white people. He’s also a funnier, more convincing spokesperson for race relations than his Texan counterpart (when was the last time George W. spiked an administration speech with a good dick [not Cheney] joke?). Though, not certain that fest director Bill Gosden was trying to make a case for impeachment by launching this year’s TNZIFF with Dave Chappelle’s Block Party – part-blockumentary, part-concert feature, and more than just another sprig in the capital-happy impertinence of player-approved clothing lines, grills, toothbrushes, etc. –, the boy nevertheless done good.

Terrence Malick's The New World – only his fourth feature in a resume that stretches back to the seventies with Badlands and Days of Heaven – craves to seen projected large, and stands as one of the festival's must-see movies, particularly on the enormous Embassy and Civic screens. Courtesy of the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, we have two double passes to The New World to giveaway, to both Auckland and Wellington screenings. A simple question and email to us will suffice. Entries close soon. Click on the following link to enter....[Win Festival Tickets]

Latest Additions: BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reviews Phillipe Garrel's nod to revolution Regular Lovers, plus writes on quirky French screwball comedy Gentille and music documentary loudQUIETloud: A Film about the Pixies; JACOB POWELL delves into the hypocrisy, irony and downright stupidity of the American film industry's MPAA in This Film is Not Yet Rated.

A farcical journey behind the closed doors of America's archaic and wholly secretive MPAA ratings board, Kirby Dick's This Film is Not Yet Rated is at once hilarious and ironic. JACOB POWELL examines the hypocrisy.

The Pixies will go down as one of music history’s most influential and underrated bands of their time. Musicians like Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke have openly admitted that their sound wouldn’t be the same without the Boston quartet’s mix of loud/quiet dynamics, surreal lyrics and the screams of ‘Black Francis’. However they split up in 1991 missing the alternative wave they helped create, leaving it to their influenced ones to make all the money.

Courtesy of the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, The Lumière Reader has two double passes to giveaway, each for Auckland and Wellington, to Terrence Malick's glorious new film The New World. To enter, simply email the subject line "NEW WORLD: AKLD/WGTN" (remembering to indicate your city) + your name, postal address, and the answer to the following question* in the message body to lumiere@lumiere.net.nz. Entries close for Aucklanders on July 12th; Wellingtonians on July 24th. One entry per person. Not open to Lumière/TNZIFF staff and associates. Standard terms and conditions apply.

*Question: How many feature films had Terrence Malick directed prior to The New World?

If quirky is your thing, then this French film has so much quirkiness it hurts. In the classic style of Hollywood screwball comedies in the 30s and 40s, Gentille presents slightly off-kilter characters in a frequently hilarious and skewed look on relationships. The excellent French actor Emmanuelle Devos stars as Fontaine Leglou, an anaesthetist who spends most of her time trying to avoid having to say yes/no to her Arctic palaeontologist/former triathelete boyfriend Michel's proposals for marriage. She is also being pursued rather strangely by a doctor who is a patient at a mental hospital (it plays on the idea of normalcy versus derangement quite clearly). You’re never really sure what’s going on in her life as you don’t actually see her work, know whether she loves her boyfriend or whether she’s even faithful to him (made abundantly clear in the humourous opening sequence).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM drowns himself in Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel’s vast, giddy, richly contextual time capsule of sixties French youth and the fleeting promise of revolution.

The Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals' hospitality extends once again this year, with a generous invitational of local and international filmmakers attending screenings of their films. The major international guest this time around is one Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Crimson Gold), whose latest film Offside exhibits in all four main centres. Filmmakers in person have yet to be confirmed for Christchurch and Dunedin, but can be sampled for Auckland and Wellington respectively.

Latest Additions: CALEB STARRENBURG tallies the body count in Kim Jee-woon's violent and energetic A Bittersweet Life; BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM revisits Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, a powerful and disturbing classic of cinema; TIM WONG writes enthusiastically about this year's Out of the Past programme and potentially the festival's best film, The Death of Mr Lazarescu; MUBARAK ALI juggles the neo-realism and quasi-documentary reality of In Between Days, Offside and Oxhide.

If In Between Days takes a stripped neo-realist approach to storytelling and Offside continues with its maker’s own obsessive relationship with a quasi-documented reality, then Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide represents the borders between fiction and documentary at their most permeable. In itself, this is already the most celebrated Chinese debut since Jia Zhang-ke’s Xiao Wu, though formally, it differs from Jia’s film in important ways.

A ruthless and unflinching account of life in the slums of Mexico City, Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados remains as powerful and disturbing fifty years on. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM revisits this underseen cinema classic.

Following Crimson Gold, Jafar Panahi's hot streak continues with Offside, the closest he’s got to a comedy yet. Filmed at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium during the actual World Cup qualifier match between Iran and Bahrain, the film exists in a semi-documentary state, resting comfortably on a host of (quintessentially Iranian) naturalistic performances from a cast of non-professionals.

Reviewed by Shahir Daud

IN THE LEAD up to this year’s film festival, it’s important not to forget the Hollywood blockbusters playing at your local multiplex. After all, it would be easy not to notice that the world’s favourite man in tights has returned to the silver screen, this time as a pixel perfect Photoshop rendering. Superman has indeed returned, but like Lois Lane’s Pulitzer prize winning essay asks, does the world need him?

One of four out-and-out revenge sagas to dominate this festival’s That’s Incredible Cinema programme, A Bittersweet Life is easily the coolest, most frenetic, and bleakly humorous of the violent quartet. CALEB STARRENBURG tallies the body count.

Korean-American director, So Yong Kim, molds In Between Days – her feature debut that has won prizes at Berlin and Sundance earlier this year – as a predominantly visual experience that is filled with assured performances from non-professionals who seem to be caught in urgent, half-expressed emotional and sexual expressions of Adolescence. Aimie (Jiseon Kim) has recently made the move from Korea to Toronto and lives with her working mum. Lonely and not entirely assimilated into her environment just yet, she develops an innocent, unrequited crush on her somewhat aloof Korean guy-friend from school, which plays over a course of wintry days and nights.

Potentially the festival’s best film, The Death of Mr Lazarescu may also prove to be its most misunderstood. No mistaking that Cristi Puiu’s sophomore effort is this year’s Kings and Queen; Arnaud Desplechin’s multifarious tragicomedy from 2005 a similarly vast, freakish 150-minute tour de force of networked mayhem and colliding human beings. Audiences apparently didn’t get that film (the reaction didn’t appear to be as immediately positive, at least), and Lazarescu’s wares are even less obvious, and doesn’t benefit from the rep of French cinema or the hook of an Emmanuelle Devos. Here, our ailing protagonist is played by the shabby, sixty-something Ion Fiscuteanu – hardly poster material – and how exactly you market a Romanian film about an elderly, self-defecating drunk seeking urgent medical attention is beyond me.

Google “DVD” alongside two of the most wanted films from this year’s retrospective quota – namely, Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Army of Shadows and Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados – and the search results are far from promising. Neither of these sought-after diamonds appear to have gained digital immortality; malnourished film buffs can only yearn for their shiny disc release. Desperately, for those of us bound to the remote outreaches of the globe, the hunger for viewing alternatives is even more so than most. Geographic isolation and archaic censorship laws sure don’t help. An annual lifeline like the festival’s Out of the Past programme certainly eases the frustration though, and this year’s ten Maurice Pialat films (in addition to the aforementioned features plus three restored New Zealand landmarks) are said to be equally as special and unseen.

For the uninitiated still browsing the programme or mulling over whether to even go, we suggest perusing the festival's own Tour Guides, with neatly categorised lists ranging from cosy "Date Movies", to hardcore "Revenge" pictures, to urgent "Activist" films (although some might argue the deluge of leftist docos in recent years have had a dulling effect). Our own pre-festival picks – the editors' and/or otherwise – may also be of interest.

Latest Additions: BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM considers the rare beauty of Iraq in Fragments; CATHERINE BISLEY renews her passion for tutus and Tchaikovsky with Ballets Russes; SIMON SWEETMAN crashes Dave Chappelle's Block Party, this year's most affirmative, rambunctious film; plus, 21 capsule reviews in our Festival Form Guide, including new entries for Loulou, The Passenger, Van Gogh, and The Death of Mr Lazarescu.