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.

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.

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 replaced 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 hated Shortbus? 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.

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.

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 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 premičre 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.

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.

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 Lumičre 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 Lumičre/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.

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 Buńuel’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.

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.