Overview of The Lumière Reader's Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals coverage. Includes summary of all features, reviews, form guide, and festival column entries published in 2006.

The editors and festival contributors name their favourites from this year's Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.

The balance between art and life is more precarious than ever, writes DAVID LEVINSON at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.

TIM WONG’s festival tally yielded a lot of good, and not quite enough great. He reflects on a year of elusive magic numbers at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.

IMOGEN NEALE reacquaints with In My Father’s Den ingenue Emily Barclay, returning to the screen in We The Living, a new short film travelling the country as part of the Homegrown: Works on Film programme at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.

Week two of SIMON SWEETMAN's Telecom New Zealand International Film Festival daytrip consisted of mixed pleasures: Thank You For Smoking and You’re Gonna Miss Me considerable highlights; Wah-Wah and loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies less so.

Though the Best Picture finalists for the 2006 Air New Zealand Screen Awards were a mixed ensemble, with neither four particularly standing out, votes went predictably the way of Roger Donaldson's The World's Fastest Indian: the gentle, conservative choice, a sort of thinly-veiled patriotism for everything that is clean, green and keen about New Zealand. Locally made Hollywood productions have dominated the scene up until this year; finally, New Zealand films with New Zealand content have been able to emerge from the shadows. And yet awarding The World's Fastest Indian top honour seems anything but progressive.

His recuperation complete, JACOB POWELL asks himself what made his year, and what threatened to spoil it at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals 2006.

The best thing on television, TOM FITZSIMONS professes his admiration for The West Wing, its eerie prescience, and its fictional President Jed Bartlet. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Home Video, The Lumière Reader has one copy of The West Wing: The Complete Fifth Season on DVD to giveaway. To enter, simply subscribe to our mailing list by emailing your name and address to lumiere@lumiere.net.nz under the subject heading "SUBSCRIBE + WW". Current subscribers can also enter. New Zealand residents only. One entry per person. Entries close September 15, 2006. Standard terms and conditions apply.

Read Tom's Ode to The West Wing on The Arts Reader....[here]

The best thing on television, TOM FITZSIMONS professes his admiration for The West Wing, its eerie prescience, and its fictional President Jed Bartlet.

Major South Island festivals for Dunedin and Christchurch have now finished; elsewhere, the roadshow moves onwards, currently in Hamilton and Palmerston North, with other smaller centres to follow. Meanwhile, our own festival sortie winds down, due to conclude at the end of the month. Post-festival reviews will publish over the next seven days, before we sign off for good until next year.

A roundup of the current best and rest on DVD. In this installment: Brokeback Mountain, Broken Flowers, Banana in a Nutshell, River Queen.

Stephen Gaghan/USA/2005; R4
Warner Bros, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by John Spry

A CAUTIONARY tale of religion, greed, oil and a gun, Stephen Gaghan’s latest film released to DVD earlier last month. It follows his directorial debut, the disappointing Abandon (2002), and in turn follows the excellently scripted Traffic (2000), directed by Steven Soderbergh. Many of the same techniques employed in Traffic operate within the narrative of Syriana to give a similar but disparate effect.

Not quite know-your-French-Algerian-authors, Mitsuo Yanahimachi’s Who’s Camus Anyway? may just be the most perfect summing up of the burden of hyper-awareness to date. Set at an anonymous university in Tokyo, it grafts the hummingbird structure of an Altman comedy onto postmodern parody. But whereas the latter usually ends up a clothesline for yesterday’s freshly-painted skeletons, Yanahimachi assaults the rude emptiness of each re-animation.

Tommy Lee Jones' first film as director may well be his second coming; for screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, it's clear on the evidence of Amores Perros and 21 Grams that he likes to do things in threes. Together, they've envisioned a robust Western for the 21st century, where cowboys are allowed the room to share, bond, and form strong lasting male relationships. The film's three burials refer to the death of Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cèsar), an illegal Mexican immigrant whose search for work ends with the generosity of Texan rancher Pete (Jones). Together, the two men become close friends, forging a mateship that is severed when Melquiades is shot dead by volatile border patrolman Mike (Barry Pepper).

As withdrawl symptoms set in for the North Island's festival hardcore, the fun continues for the patient down south. Dunedin's turn ends this weekend; Christchurch's leg trudges on for another week. Each bear rather condensed programmes – not necessarily a bad thing, given how daunting Auckland and Wellington's festivals are every year – and still carry many of the hottest tickets, including Shortbus, Ten Canoes, and the Jafar Panahi-attended Offside.

Latest Additions: JENNY MACINTYRE daydreams to Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep; TIM WONG extends the festival coverage with new entries on The Host, No More Heroes, KZ, A Lion in the House, OilCrash and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Still to come: SIMON SWEETMAN's Week Two festival review + the Editors' annual post-festival wrap.

A marathon of human resilience, A Lion in the House clocks in at just under four hours in duration. As usual, there’s always some fool who makes a mountain of a molehill over this (moaning was overheard during the festival), and to complain about its length is to trivialize the plight of its subjects. Embracing five cancer-stricken children and their families over six grueling years, this is as affecting as documentary filmmaking gets, and is bound to break your heart. It is also an intimate drama of ebb and flow; of medical setback and breakthrough as gripping as The Death of Mr Lazarescu. Both films share downward spiraling turns and moments of resignation, but the doctors and nurses documented for real couldn’t be any further from the Romanian circus act of Cristi Puiu’s film. Filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert invest heavily here, and they capture everything: Tim’s disdain for Republicans; a bedridden Justin being treated to a Playboy; utter bravery in the face of spinal taps and tube insertions; a poignant convergence as two families momentarily cross paths. Through the constant relapses, excruciating treatments, and fleeting windows of light, some die, and some live on. But the young keep fighting.

Michel Gondry returns to his native France with a romantic comedy that leaps from French to English as flippantly as it does between fantasy and reality. It is a ride from the opening scene, which I loved. Setting the scene, Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) is speaking to camera in his studio. Cardboard boxes are stacked in the shape and form of cameras; egg cartons line the room simulating sound baffles. Stephane is imagining himself to be host of his own TV show. Dubbed The Science of Sleep, this is an imaginary vortex of the unpredictable; a film that plays with you on every level. Highly creative, it is a total original.

Lest we forget. That’s the consensus among KZ’s tour guides, men who shepherd tourist parties and field trips throughout the monument of horrors that is Mauthasen’s notorious concentration camp. Having to relive the Holocaust on a daily basis, their only rationale is to assure we remember. As a rowdy group of teenagers squabble in the camp’s parking lot, they’re soon silenced into disbelief as the past atrocities of SS officers are administered in cold, methodical doses: stones in a wall are equated to death; green pastures are revealed as sites for mass murder; ritual dehumanisation is par for the course. At one point a student faints – hardly surprisingly, given the film’s penchant for gut-wrenching description, a thousand times more horrific when allowed to churn in the imagination. And as these stories are relayed, the camera tightens its frame on the many visitors. Their expressions speak volumes.

A throwback to the halcyon days of skateboard hysteria in New Zealand, there’s admittedly little here to grasp onto for those of us born too late in the eighties. But for those old enough to remember Leif Garrett and Robert Muldoon, No More Heroes may very well induce a flood of Super 8 memories, from rubber jandals, to knee-high tube socks, to strains of Kiwiana punk rock. Narrated by long-haired skate icons now balding and in their forties, the film’s nostalgia may also make you feel your age.

A brazen exercise in video gamesmanship, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is a monster mash for the PlayStation generation: a direct-to-cinema survival horror that isn’t based on a best selling video game. It comes from a square-eyed world known mostly by teenage boys, the kind of digital fantasy that so often ends up in the hands of Paul Anderson and Uwe Boll. As heinous as those two filmmakers are, video games have generally failed to covert to the big screen on a whole: the differential being that games are interactive and from a first-person perspective, a great masking agent for B-grade story lines (as most of them are). Deny the audience the control pad, and the comedown is rather large. Bong’s outlandish premise may play like a brawny Resident Evil sequel, but he’s downsized the computer programmers for a start. This might just be the best video game adaptation that never was.

August 6th marks the end of our Wellington Film Festival coverage; for the remainder of the month, our festival column continues with Dunedin (July 28-Aug 13) and Christchurch (Aug 3-20) legs now underway. The editors' traditional post-festival wrap rounds out this year's coverage at the end of the month.

Although the 35th Wellington Film Festival draws to a close this weekend, our festival surveillance continues. With Dunedin's leg currently underway, and Christchurch's just beginning (followed by the remainder of the country), The Festival Reader will remain active throughout August with ongoing features and reviews (including the Editors' annual post-festival wrap).

Latest Additions: SIMON SWEETMAN looks back on Week One of his festival, with considerable highs and lows; MELODY NIXON perspires at the slave-like conditions of China Blue; CATHERINE BISLEY descends into L’Enfer’s many versions of hell; + new capsule reviews for Men at Work, The Road to Guantánamo and 68 more in our Festival Form Guide.

On the frontline, SIMON SWEETMAN looks back on week one of his Telecom New Zealand International Film Festival sortie, with His Big White Self, Avenge But One of My Two Eyes and Black Sun among the fluctuating highs and lows.

Tom Tykwer’s entrancing Heaven came out in 2002 setting a high precedent for the films to come in the Heaven, Hell and Purgatory series that Krysztof Kieslowski left unmade on his death in 1996. This nuanced script was shot with great style, and complimented by stunning performances from Cate Blanchett and Giovani Ribisi. L’Enfer presents a number of versions of hell. In telling the stories of three sisters, Anne, Celine and Sophie, director Danis Tanovik lavishes the viewer with dark visuals and a warped and evocative sound design. Rich with classical illusions relating to transgression the three stories hark back to a common trauma that not one sister has dealt with. The central contention is that tragedy is dead and all that is left is drama, with the script also presenting the disparity between destiny and coincidence. In the final scene the girls‚ lives are drawn together and justice is meted out. With riveting performances from Karin Viard (Celine) and Emanuelle Beart (Sophie) and a Jean Rochefort cameo (which needs no qualifying adjective), this is a striking but not entirely convincing film.—Catherine Bisley

China Blue offers an accessible, cleverly constructed and ultimately heart-wrenching view into the lives of sweatshop workers in Sichuan province, China. The documentary follows the lives of three teenage workers in a blue jeans factory – Jasmine, Lipeng, and Orchid – who like most of the cheap labour pool in China are female and originate from poor, rural areas. Multi-layered, the film does not rely on mere reality sketches of the harshness of the workers’ lives but explores the personalities, aspirations and imaginations of the main characters with sensitivity and tact. Most provocatively, China Blue hints at who is responsible for the slave-like conditions these girls are bound to. It is not, as one might assume, only the factory owners and the negligent Chinese authorities who are to blame. Rather, director Micha X. Peled calls into question the whole system of global free trade and points at the responsibility retailers and ourselves – the consumers – all share. In the words of Jasmine: “Who are the fat, tall people who buy these jeans we make?”—Melody Nixon

Due to popular demand the Telecom 35th Wellington Film Festival is pleased to announce that several extra screenings have been added to the Festival programme which runs till late Sunday 6 August.

Our grotesque obsession with reality television is put to the sword in documentary American Cannibal: The Road to Reality. JACOB POWELL boards the train wreck.