Multi-racial, psychedelic cult band Love mourned the death of their frontman, Arthur Lee, in 2006. Love Story, SIMON SWEETMAN writes, tells the tale of their music, their influence, and their heart-breaking latter years.

Neither Hollywood grifters nor smooth-talking David Mamet racketeers, four pathological opportunists form the rotten core of Con Man Confidential, a revealing, infuriating journey into the dangerous minds of real life fraudsters. Often gloating, occasionally remorseful, the documentary’s subjects confess to their crimes of deception with a common disdain for the greedy and bourgeois. They’d make great characters in a Michael Haneke movie if only they weren’t seduced by the colour of money themselves. Ironically, the foursome also try to con us with the rationale that if you’re gullible, you deserve to be cleaned out. This time, they’re fooling nobody.

This utter odd-ball gem from Scotland will no doubt disappear from view unless its highly talented director (Laurin Federlein) or actor/musician Magnus Aronson strike it big later on. But in theory the accolades should be for Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness alone – a beautiful, moving and hilarious work. It opens with Vincent (Aronson) trying to convince a local about a great plan of his. He’s not particularly convincing – nervous, stilted and to be honest a terrible salesman. Is he a conman? Deluded? A visionary? He seems to fail, but a musical interlude carries him away, and he travels through the Scottish highlands on a wee scooter. As the film progresses you realise he’s utterly earnest and totally believes in what he’s trying to do – he believes the people in the Scottish Highlands are lonely, so he decides to make a mobile disco to unite the people and show them a good time. Unfortunately for Vincent, the people seem happy enough.

Mexico is one of the hottest filmmaking countries at the moment, and this internationally acclaimed work does its bit to enhance that reputation. The Violin is a poetic and slow-burning film, and garnered a Best Actor award at the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes in 2006 for 81-year-old non-actor Angel Tavira. Tavira was the subject of a documentary by Vargas, an actual violinist who lost his hand when he was thirteen, and offers a wonderfully moving performance as a violinist (Don Plutarco) who sells his art to the occupying military force in order to allow Plutarco to smuggle weapons to guerilla forces behind the military’s back.

“Old Joy’s rhythmic contemplation will pull you right down inside it, almost painfully, but ultimately in uplifting and surprising ways,” writes MELODY NIXON of Kelly Reichardt’s spiritual, minimalist revelation.

Bless Canadian director Guy Maddin. Without his crazy surreal silent films, contemporary filmmaking would be a whole lot more boring. And while it’d be easy to relegate his peculiar brand of expressionism in Brand upon the Brain! as a throwback to 1920s filmmaking, this film plays like a hyper-kinetic DJ mixing his favourite scenes from his memory. Maddin claims this film is 96% autobiographical. I’m not entirely sure if he ever grew up in a lighthouse on a desolate island, or fell in love with a brother/sister duo sent to uncover Maddin’s mad scientist father’s experiments on an orphanage on the island. Also I’m not sure if his relationship with his mother or sister were exactly as depicted in the film. No matter, it was highly entertaining no matter what. The film ultimately constructed a highly inventive and disturbing depiction of childhood.

Isabelle Huppert, a festival staple, has never entirely convinced as a mother on screen – at least, not one who exudes traditional maternal instincts. Christophe Honoré understood it best when he cast her as the incestuously corruptive parent to Louis Garrel’s whiny, Catholic repressed schoolboy in Ma mère – although chances are the director was just as blatantly trading off Huppert’s psychosexual heat in The Piano Teacher. Residue from those two films initially threatens to overthrow Private Property, where Huppert can be seen modeling a skimpy negligee in the opening scenes. Standing behind her, sons Thierry and Francois (real-life brothers Jérémie and Yannick Renier) josh her whorish appearance while seemingly ogling her ageless figure; later, dumb and dumber tease her for inviting their neighbour over by role-playing some doggy-style intercourse.

The life and times of rock ‘n’ roll frontman, rude boy, and departed punk legend are preserved in Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, Julien Temple’s ode to The Clash, their lead singer, and his close friend. SIMON SWEETMAN reviews.

Bush’s America has never vegetated so much green in Old Joy, a spiritual roadtrip of two old yet fading friends en route to a hot springs concealed somewhere deep in the foothills of Oregon’s majestic Cascade mountain ranges. With not a duelling banjo in sight, the mates – one, a full bearded salt-of-the-earth clinging to the leftist ideal, the other a father-to-be who’s abandoned his activist youth for the pragmatism of family life – get reacquainted on a weekend camping excursion of lost trails, roadside diners, campfire confessions, and ecological tranquillity as their pilgrimage into a seemingly uncharted emerald forest of fern leaves and shimmering creeks might as well have been cribbed straight from the New Zealand’s Middle Earth.

Programmes browsed, circled, dog-eared and fingered-through, Lumière’s editors and contributors compile their ten most wanted films in anticipation of July’s Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.

TIM WONG reports from the Wellington International Film Festival programme launch.

Sturdy without scaling new heights, this year’s programme unveil nevertheless managed to invoke surprise: the lack of controversial content, for one; the news that Telecom will not be renewing their naming-rights sponsorship (which means what for attracting international guests?); the long-overdue introduction of a festival concession ticket. Such points of discussion, though, were superseded by the event’s feature presentation. Sensing another middling, all-purpose documentary on the launch invite (Dave Chappelle’s Block Party aside, recent years have seen attendees humoured by the likes of Double Dare and Touching the Void), the night’s real bombshell was, against all expectations, the film itself: not another tall tale of survival, but a quiet revelation of human fallibility, fraudulence, and compelling oceanic adventure.

Eschewing conspiracy theory and flagrant bullshitery, filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk pursue documentarian Michael Moore in their reasoned and well-considered retort, Manufacturing Dissent. SIMON SWEETMAN reviews.

TIM WONG previews with enthusiasm a winter savior, the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals programme, due out to much anticipation this week.

Indexed capsule reviews and summaries of every film seen by Lumière staffers at the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals. Cross-referenced links to existing features, reviews and columns on The Lumière Reader + our ‘recommended’ and ‘favourite’ stamps-of-approval accompany each film in our at-a-glance festival guide, updated throughout. (Last Update: 11/8)

Indexed capsule reviews and summaries of every film seen by Lumière staffers at the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals. Cross-referenced links to existing features, reviews and columns on The Lumière Reader + our ‘recommended’ and ‘favourite’ stamps-of-approval accompany each film in our at-a-glance festival guide, updated throughout. (Last Update: 12/8)

The Lumière Reader’s extensive coverage begins late June. The festival’s all-new website, now boasting programme teasers, confirmations and other news, can be visited at nzff.telecom.co.nz.

KATE BLACKHURST looks back on the problems explored, and on occasion encountered, by the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS NETWORK sponsored the recent Human Rights Film Festival at The Paramount (in addition to the Academy Cinema in Auckland, and the Regent in Christchurch) which brought a plethora of problems exploding onto the screen. Many of these films made uncomfortable viewing and all of them were inspiring. The range was varied and international, including a couple of New Zealand documentaries.

KATE BLACKHURST reports belatedly from the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

NEW ZEALAND sign language became an official language of New Zealand in April 2006. The Act has limited legal consequences and basically permits sign language to be used in court if a deaf person is on trial. It has far more social repercussions, however, as it is a safeguard for sign language and will guarantee its continuation and development. Sign language has led to a more assertive political consciousness, ensuring that deaf people need not be cut off from society.

KATE BLACKHURST reports belatedly from the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

SOBAZ BENJAMIN with the assistance of the National Film Board of Canada has produced a fascinating documentary about race which questions, “Why is race the primary thing that defines me?” He mixes the personal and the political to illustrate that race has a lot to do with identity and a sense of belonging.

KATE BLACKHURST reports belatedly from the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

THIS 2006 USA documentary from director Gillian Caldwell is only 26 minutes long, but the images and issues raised will last much longer. Filmed as a succession of harrowing interviews, the filmmaker examines the CIA Rendition Program. The chief architect of the rendition program and former head of the Osama Bin Laden unit at the CIA, Michael Scheuer, claims the program was initially established to get documents and information about people travelling and that, “Interrogation was never a central goal,” but that changed after 9/11.

KATE BLACKHURST reports belatedly from the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

WHEN IS A film about sport, not about sport? When it’s about the Palestinian football team. This is not a joke but a serious and thought-provoking documentary charting the amazing struggle the team undergoes to compete internationally. With no training facilities, domestic league, nor home ground, the team dreams of qualifying for the 2006 World Cup and triumphing over adversity, but there is a big difference between dreaming and reality.

TIM WONG imparts some straight talk on “Calamity Jane”, screening as part of this year’s Outtakes Film Festival.

HAVING RECENTLY completed a mini-retrospective of Doris Day vehicles – including The Pajama Game, Young Man With a Horn, and two out of three of Day’s couplings with ironic screen stallion Rock Hudson – there’s little doubt that programming hammy musical-western Calamity Jane into Outtakes 2007 is a stroke of camp genius. On a scale of butchness, Day may be entirely unconvincing as the legendary bruiser and brawler of the Old West, but as far as gay subtext goes, this is about as queer as a movie gets without it knowing so. In fact, almost inadvertently within its opening passages – marked by mediocre drag act ‘Frances Fryer’ taking to the stage – the film threatens to become a westernised Peking Opera Blues, complete with gender inversions and musical numbers performed largely by men. The star of that film, the incomparable Brigitte Lin, generated an indelible niche career out of transgendered roles, playing everything from martial arts women disguised as men (Dragon Inn), to invincible eunuchs (Swordsman II), to the male lead in a classic Chinese romantic melodrama (The Dream of the Red Chamber, a lesbian film festival candidate if ever there was one). What Day lacks in Lin’s beguiling androgyny though, she makes up for in sheer spread-legged gusto, turning in an almost vaudeville impression of what she thinks it means to be Jane: the crotch-swinging walk, the frog in the throat… it’s at once embarrassing, valiant, and strangely endearing.