Dogs, dreams and all things brass crop up around every pallid corner in You, the Living, a surreal twist on human life in all its depressing glory from Swedish writer and director Roy Andersson. A series of nutty vignettes – all of which may or may not have something to do with the bass drummer and tuba player of the Louisiana Brass Band – uncovers the lighter side of neuroses and finds anxieties in everyday communication. The long, artfully composed shots and the spare dialogue mean You, the Living feels a little like a chain of comic sketches, but the catastrophic weather, fascist imagery, unwavering irony and impossibly wan faces ensure that the greasy, filthy core beneath never remains hidden for too long.

I have always found it odd that sex, something that is so natural and crucial to human existence, gets such bizarre treatment in cinema. On the one hand, there are the art films that scream and shout out their exploration of sexual taboos, and consequently only serve to perpetuate those very taboos. Suddenly sex moves from the enjoyable to the painstakingly depressing. (Not that I have a problem necessarily with this approach). Or, on the other hand, you get the bump and grind variety that manages to reduce sex to something rigorously unsexy, (and frequently exploitative), and yet is still a taboo – hidden away in curtained video rooms, and dark alleyways. So it seems potentially refreshing that a film like Destricted challenges some well known artists and filmmakers to reclaim sex on film, make some short films that can be intellectually challenging, yet also interesting (perhaps even fun) to watch. Granted, it does feel like an exercise that the Cinema of Transgression/American avant-garde have been doing for years. Some of the directors on show here did it well; others certainly did not. I guess that’s the way with compilation films.

Paprika, the latest love-letter to cinema from writer/director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers), cements his reputation as the most versatile and intelligent auteur in anime today. His take on an anime staple – the devastating effects the intrusion of science has on the natural order – requires multiple viewings, to make sense of a brain-bending plot but also to soak in the exquisite details of a richly rendered deluge of imagery and to play spot-the-allusion (à la Millenium Actress). Kon’s mastery of genre covers the detective story, spy film, oddball romance, pyschological thriller and sci-fi epic, and a heady host of homages range from the traditionally Japanese (Maneki Neko, the Monkey King) to Hollywood (Tarzan, The Greatest Show on Earth).

Fans of director Patrice Leconte (Intimate Strangers, The Man on the Train) will be pleased to see that he hasn’t stopped filming unlikely relationships. But My Best Friend’s premise, set up so swiftly you barely get the chance to reflect on how ridiculous it is, sounds like something more up the alley of Francois Veber (The Closet, Ruby and Quentin), who last directed Daniel Auteuil alongside Dany Boon to hilarious effect in The Valet. In a city where the locals are notoriously rude yet even the most casual acquaintances are greeted with kisses, this comedy of manners meditates on the problems with the tightest social bond – friendship.

JACOB POWELL moves onto digital shorts as part of this year’s “Homegrown: Works on Video” programme.

TNZIFF 2007’s Homegrown: Works on Video programme presents somewhat of a mixed bag, replete with shorts that take you from contemplative musing to shock and anger, heart-warming smiles to several minutes of cringefest. Themes and genres are also widespread, covering comedy, horror-western, shockumentary, experimental and stylised drama-cum-mystery. Overall, the standard was reasonably high – complementing the trend in the Works on Film section of the Homegrown programme.

SIMON SWEETMAN considers the bizarre career path and unsung genius of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man in this candid look at the making of his first album in over a decade.

Black Book claims to be inspired by true events; there was a World War, which ended in 1945; there was a resistance movement; and the Netherlands were occupied, but for all the credibility it delivers, that is about as far as it goes. It is conducted as a flashback, from a Kibbutz in Israel, 1956, so we always know the heroine has survived. Indeed, the human instinct for survival is at the heart of the film. Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), as a Jew in occupied territory, is constantly forced into hiding and subterfuge, doing things she abhors in order to live, from learning to recite passages of the New Testament, to seducing Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch) the head of the Gestapo in The Hague.

Chris Kraus’ Four Minutes left me cold. I’d read other reviews prior to the screening, the bulk of which promised a complex, “believable and engaging” exploration of human relationships, to which our film festival’s official synopsis nodded eagerly, saying yes, yes, it would “seduce (even) the most cynical hearts”. So I was quite unsettled in the full, darkened theatre while Four Minutes unfolded, when despite having made an earnest effort to care, even towards the end, I really just couldn’t.

There’s a lot about Stephanie Daley that’s uncomfortable – the subject matter (teen pregnancy), the cinematography (a prevalence of close-up, hand-held shots that force the viewer into the characters’ proximity), and the fact that one must subject oneself to a cinema full of overly sympathetic, middle-aged women in order to watch it. But that is perhaps what makes this film so effective. It’s a tense drama that doesn’t try to shield the audience from its characters’ experiences just for the sake of making it more digestible. Stephanie (Amber Tamblyn) is a sheltered Christian teenager who is accused of killing her baby after giving birth to it, and then burying it, while on a school ski trip. However, she insists she had no idea she was pregnant, and it falls to psychologist Lydie (Tilda Swinton) to determine whether or not she’s telling the truth. The interview sessions cause both women to confront their own fears and denials in a story that explores female strength and vulnerability but doesn’t weaken or victimise the characters. The bulk of Stephanie’s story is told through a series of flashbacks, which draw unexpected parallels to Lydie’s current experiences. Swinton and Tamblyn deliver muted but extremely effective performances that carry the film without needing much assistance. Tamblyn’s portrayal of an innocent young girl giving birth in a public toilet makes for particularly harrowing cinema. It’s not an easy film to watch, but writer/director Hilary Brougher has crafted such a compelling story that it’s impossible not to let yourself be drawn into this darker side of suburban America.—Kim Choe

A documentary unearthing the uncertain memory of Danny Williams, A Walk into the Sea was made by Williams’ filmmaker niece (Esther Robinson) who seeks to build a picture of the uncle she never knew. Her enlightening film leads us backwards from his mysterious disappearance in his twenties (his body was never found) to his life in the midst of one of New York’s most well-known artistic hubs – Andy Warhol’s Factory. Backgrounded by swathes of Williams’ little-seen black and white film footage, various members of Warhol’s inner circle wax ponderously upon Danny’s place and person within The Factory scene. Including interviews with Factory intimates Billy Name, Paul Morrissey, Brigid Berlin, and Velvet Underground member John Cale (amongst others), Robinson rolls into a bubbling melange of egos, suspicion, and drug induced confusion. People give garbled and conflicting accounts; one moment claiming not to remember him at all, the next declaring with utter certainty the truth of some particular detail. These are interviewed alongside Danny’s family members who have built up their own myths surrounding his life and untimely death – some even speculating upon the veracity of the latter state. Robinson skilfully crafts together this multitude of spoken threads into a cohesive story of a talented and vulnerable young man who became a close companion to Andy Warhol whilst remaining an outsider in his world. Highlighting the imperfect mechanism of human memory A Walk into the Sea simultaneously showcases the enigmatic cinematic work of a man ahead of his time.

In related reading, ALEXANDER BISLEY talks to Juliet Binoche about Michael Haneke, Hou Hsiao-hsien, being Tom Cruise’s chick, and her latest film A Few Days in September, screening this July and August at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals....[Read More] (links to The Film Reader)

The opening chase scene – when street urchins Shiro (White) and Kuro (Black) playfully bound through chaotic traffic to lure two rival streetkids into a trap sprung by a giant clock, with Hindu elephant god Ganesh as the cuckoo – is a quick introduction to the central character of Tekkonkinkreet: Treasure Town, a cosmopolis equal parts seedy and sublime, where pagodas poke out from neon jungles and mosques jostle with steampunk slums. The imagination and effort behind the detail, colour and shape of this epic behemoth is stunning, and well worth forking out for on its own. The story isn’t so bad either: orphaned teenager Kuro lords over the streets as the black-hearted Batman of this Gotham until the yakuza muscle in on his turf, but even they can’t stop the aliens behind the construction of the biggest racket in town – the mega-Disneyland that threatens the integrity and history of what everyone calls ‘my city’. Noirish boss Suzuki is the best of the crooks: one step ahead of everyone else, he issues his commands based on horoscopes. Though a little saccharine at times, the themes are universal – innocence and experience, reason and madness, good and evil – and ultimately question the possibility of balancing any binary opposites in a world of plurality.

Treasure Town is dying – the quaint streets are strewn with litter, and the bright lights of commercial enterprise are threatening to engulf the struggling metropolis. Two street orphans, Black and White, are racing to protect their territory from the Rat – a property developer with gang connections, who will stop at nothing in his quest for dominance. What starts off as child’s play quickly spirals into something much more sinister, as they become embroiled in a fight against greed and corporatisation. Aesthetically, Tekkonkinkreet is proof that you don’t have to be Japanese to make good anime. American director Michael Arias (with art director Shinji Kimura) creates a stunning, haphazard world that at once owns, and is owned by, the two young boys. As their names suggest, they represent two of the opposing forces in the film, a classic good vs. evil tale that will be familiar to anime fans. Their friendship brings a warm heart to the unforgiving city, but also creates the most tension in it, with each one pulling and pushing the other to the point of destruction. The admirable characterisation makes even the most fundamentally menacing ones believable. The film is much darker than other well-known anime releases like Howl’s Moving Castle – dangerously too dark. The fantasy sequences, while dramatic, slow the narrative down too much. The film’s story and its message could have been delivered far more effectively without half an hour’s worth of fire and monsters. It’s a shame, because it’s so textured with symbolism and allegory that it would easily stand up to multiple viewings otherwise.—Kim Choe

Comedies from the Czech Republic come with high expectations nowadays, and the period class-farce I Served the King of England, from Oscar winners Jirí Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal, certainly didn’t disappoint. The whimsical humour has a charming and timeless appeal to it, and the wistful philosophy provides amusing diversion rather than real distraction. Served celebrates life’s pleasures, and the appreciation of food, women, money and Pilsner is realised gorgeously in a series of staggeringly opulent visual feasts (including a highly imaginative use of a Lazy Susie). The Prague hospo scene in the 30s and 40s yields beautiful Jugendstil sets, unlimited opportunies for mischief, and a rainbow of stunning costumes. Even when pint-sized protagonist Jan Díte was just earning small beer selling hotdogs at the train station, he knew all he ever wanted to be was a millionaire. Ivan Barnev is impossibly likeable as the crafty but clueless young Díte, who manages to turn an unlikely profit even during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. The Aryan stud farm is probably the most far-fetched of many picaresque set-ups, but the Germans are pilloried so mercilessly that even the stiffest salutes and purest eugenics – particularly from the excellent Julia Jentsch (The Edukators, Sophie Scholl) – are only laughable to the merry, indomitable Czechs. Highly recommended.

Leonard Cohen’s 70th is celebrated by peers and performers in this concert documentary framed around 2005’s tribute at the Sydney Opera House. SIMON SWEETMAN reviews I’m Your Man.

Wow. Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness was all that I hoped it might be, but thought, from the programme notes, it might not. Descriptors like “oddball” and “wacky” instantly conjure up (for me) thoughts of slightly left of centre mainstream Hollywood productions brought to life by the likes of Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore etc). There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness held the tentative promise of being much, much more interesting.

A two-hour Stella Artois commercial replete with weathered European men, amorous women, and frothy pints of beer, I Served the King of England also happens to satirise the absurdity of war, offend the Jewish, and lionise small people the world over. Yet it’s a much less outlandish retrospective of Nazism than Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book: a bold, brawny feminist war epic starring the drop-dead gorgeous Carice van Houten in an unapologetic performance of sexual gambit and brute emotional force. Nobody objectifies the female form quite like Verhoeven, and for a time, his heroine finds herself sucked into the vacuum left by Elizabeth Berkley and Sharon Stone. Ogle her private parts we might, but it’s those eyes that hit all the right spots, and van Houten transcends any lurid necessity with chutzpah and a degree of self-ownership; indeed, hers is the rarest of roles, a constructive, non-submissive Jew who isn’t going to take this shit lying down (except when seducing the Gestapo’s top brass).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks to Charles Burnett about Killer of Sheep, the social climate in which it was made, and the changes that have taken place in American society since the release of his classic film.

The five shorts in Homegrown: Works on Film were unified by a common focus on the eccentricities and creativity of New Zealand’s youth, stifled but never fully suffocated by intrusions from the Real World. Of course, Wellington’s celebrated Oscar dozer most famously showed how richly this recipe can be realised if personal touches are balanced against the limits of such a perspective and format. And if verisimilitude is the key, then Mark Albiston’s Run wins for extolling experimental shenanigans while Dad’s passed out drunk. Very funny at times, superb performances from kids and adults alike, and a nice piano score too. The other Cannes veteran, Fog, posed a depressing question: What if you grew up trawling fish at dawn in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Ngawi)? The crashing sea and the thick, blank fog speak as much as the young leads, whose defiance of authority is equally elemental. In Clean Linen, Daddy should have hidden his pornos better, because when mum finds out what the kids have been watching, the repercussions are dire. It was nice to see that for all the cultural differences, the expectations of the parents and the dynamics of the family – first generation Indian New Zealanders – paralleled their Kiwi counterparts and families the world around. For all the films, the post-production (courtesy of Park Road) was beautiful and sophisticated, but it did jar a little with the idealised view of provincial New Zealand on offer. I know there’s still plenty of VHS tapes and kitsch wallpaper out there, but haven’t we moved on from milkmen and glass bottles?

In a year abound with bad dads - from Alec Baldwin’s phone blowup to the leaked tape of a puffy, slurring Hasselhoff shot by his 16-year old daughter - it’s ex-crack-addict Rick Kirkham who steals the show. As a billowy-haired reporter for Inside Edition during the ‘80s, Kirkham was first introduced to crack cocaine by officers on drug busts, and in light of his jetset excess and needy glamour he was hooked before you could say bad-career-move. But even as he eventually traded the glitz for married life, he couldn’t shake his love for the white lady. What ultimately saves Kirkham’s story from the glossy endzone of a million other wreck stories like it, is his chronic self-chronicling, having captured on home video the before, during and after of years’ worth of highs; totalling 3000 hours worth of footage, filmmakers Michael Cain and Matt Radecki, in an endurance test of editing, have streamlined this mountain of avowal down into the hellish-but-laboured 90 minutes that make up TV Junkie.

Industrial wastelands and China’s insatiable appetite for growth are the sites of concern for Manufactured Landscapes and its subject, photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large format images bring global consumption into sharp focus. CATHERINE BISLEY reviews.

I remember the interschool waterpolo final in my first form. We lost the final by one goal against a team that had no problem dunking us, pulling our hair and kicking us in the balls. Man those girls were brutal. Having grown up obsessed with the Olympics, for a moment I felt like the Hungarian waterpolo team after that bitter loss. I had been especially fascinated by that game that the historians always seemed to talk about, the so-called bloodiest game in Olympic history, the one with the iconic picture of the Hungarian player (Ervin Zádor) with blood streaming from his eye. I felt like I’d taken part in a game like that in the final I played, though in later years, I realised the full extent of the tensions of that fateful game in 1956. And of course, my own team’s vengeful vows and bitter memories were utterly trivial in hindsight.

Leighton Pierce is a former musician who has been making avant-garde shorts on 16mm and digital for some time now, and the Festival managed to grab a curation of some of his more recent work; a collection of films from 2002-2004, and a wee gem from 2007, where it felt like an audience member had to sit back and let the images and sound wash over them. If the film was successful, it can be pieced together afterwards; if not, you’re still left with little moments of beauty. Pierce’s films are very sensory, and capture all these little fragmentary moments in life. He also maintains a strong focus on the elements, water, air, fire, wind and earth all make appearances and form a major backbone of his imagery. This is particularly evident in the opening film ‘Wood’, where fire and water intermingle to renew life by the final image, yet also according to Pierce, seeks to maintain “an overlapping acoustic environment”. ‘Evaporation’ feels like a child noticing little patterns of water that an adult probably would pass over.

Given how Night Watch ended with the central character losing his son after he allied himself with the forces of darkness, I had half expected to sit through a sequel in the vein of a supernatural Kramer vs Kramer – but I needn’t have worried. Day Watch is by turns brilliant and completely bonkers. Which is what you would expect of a film that concerns itself with an ancient mystical artifact known as the Chalk of Fate. As for the plot, The Light Others continue to monitor the Dark Others as the fragile truce between the two sides teeters on the bring. Again, the action centres around Konstantin Khabensky as Anton, who is plagued by the loss of his son Yegor, and finds himself slap bang in the middle of the oncoming war. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s being asked to trace a Great Dark Other who is causing chaos, attacking humans, and eluding those trying to identify him. Couple that with the fact he has to train a Great Light Other who could restore the balance, and you can understand why he’s having a particularly hard time. But the problems really start when Anton is falsely accused and framed for the murder of one of the Dark Others – an action which could end the fragile truce and plunge both sides into war. As Anton tries to extricate himself from the conspiracy against him, he finds himself drawn deeper into the quest to find the Chalk of Fate (a mythical piece of white chalk which holds the key to the world).

TIM WONG reflects on another first day at the Wellington International Film Festival.

MIMING Little Dieter Needs to Fly almost note-for-note, Rescue Dawn is a faithful and formidable prisoner of war ordeal book-ended by a weakness for military and Hollywood clichés. In the weathered hands of Werner Herzog, however, such concessions are almost entirely forgivable, and while amiably servicing the film’s commercial needs, he also circumvents any pressure to mythologize Dieter Dengler’s capture and escape into a Commando serial of pungent patriotism and chest-beating heroism. Christian Bale, himself a fine example of method madness and mainstream nous, embodies the rabid life-force of Dengler, particularly the ex-pat German’s propensity to talk, and the performance itself becomes a model for the obsession Herzog regularly warps his cinema with. The consumption of snakes and maggots, extreme emaciation, and an excruciating scene involving leeches are just some of the lengths Bale goes to for authenticity’s sake, and evidently also, in honour of Denger’s memory. The film’s other magnificent obsession is ‘Little Dieter’s’ need to fly – or in the context of the captivity, take flight – and there’s something morally precarious at times about his compulsion to escape at the risk and expense of others. Nature fetish aside, Herzog turns out a robust, riveting big screen movie that omits some of the more overt distinguishing features of his oeuvre, and it’s at least surprising he resisted the temptation to include one of the documentary’s more surreal – and indeed, Herzognian – moments of altered reality: when Dengler, exhausted and near-death, witnesses a grizzly bear emerge from the jungle overgrowth.

A dramatised retelling of the story he first explored in his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn retreads the path of many a Vietnam War POW story – albeit one imbued with Werner Herzog’s inimitable love for, and masterful grasp of, aural and visual details. Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) is a German-born man who emigrated post-WWII to America following a near death experience that left him with the unquenchable desire to become a pilot. In his first military action in this role we see him shot down while on a black ops mission inside of Laos; later, from the confines of a primitive jungle prison run by desperate slowly starving locals, he leads a daring escape with several other POWs also being held in the camp – some upwards of two years (prior to the official beginning of the war!)

You have to wonder what would compel a director to make a sequel to a film forty years on, particularly given that the original, Belle de Jour, is one of the most iconic films of the 1960s, and its director, Luis Buñuel, of the greatest directors of all-time. And especially when the new director himself is ninety-eight years old, and has been making films since the silent era. But this distance from the original adds a new dimension to the tale, and Oliveira’s own background infuses Belle toujours with a tinge of nostalgia and age-old wisdom.

Based on a well known series of fantasy novels – penned over more than a 20 year period (1968-1990) by American author Ursula K Le Guin – Tales From Earthsea is the feature debut of anime filmmaker Goro Miyazaki. Attempting to emerge from the shadow of a father who achieved greatness in the same field, I expected to meet with a work possessed of some new and unique qualities; unfortunately I was confronted with stock Studio Ghibli fare. Not being a great fan of anime, I can’t give as informed comment as others on Tales from Earthsea from that perspective. I am, however, familiar with the more popular recent films of Hayao Miyazaki (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke), and really saw nothing (excepting for the source material storylines) from Miyazaki junior which hadn’t already been covered – and covered well.

IAN PRYOR engages visiting American director Chris Sivertson on his breakout feature film, The Lost, a contentious psychological thriller of small town murders.

Courtesy of the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, The Lumière Reader has a double pass to giveaway to The Edge of Heaven in Auckland (Sat July 28, 8.30pm/Civic) and Wellington (Sun Aug 5, 8pm/Embassy). UPDATE: congratulations to A. Levarre-Waters and S. Darlington; your tickets are in the mail. Meanwhile, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN reviews The Edge of Heaven for Lumière....[Read More]

JOE SHEPPARD reflects on Day One of the Wellington International Film Festival.

Hand Painted Under Camera provided me with an auspicious opener to 2007’s celebration of all things film, with enough ideas, styles and voices in 69 minutes to sustain a whole festival. When every frame is hand-painted, you’d think everything would be streamlined as economically as possible, but the lyrical centerpiece Alexander Petrov’s of ‘My Love’ unfolded with all the richness and decadence of a dozen Russian Empires. Weaving an oneiric tale of upstairs-downstairs passions, Petrov has lovingly painted a gallery of impressionistic landscapes and portraits but never forgotten the real focus on depth of theme and character. Well worth the admission price on its own. Also deserving mention: Martha Colburn’s ‘Destiny Manifesto’, which connects the twitchy Wild West and the moribund Middle East with red ribbons of guilty post-colonial blood.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM previews six short films from the Sundance Film Festival.

SHORT FILMS are an exceedingly difficult medium to do well. Not that I’m saying short stories are easy to write (on the contrary), but short stories can capture wider issues and themes a lot easier than a short film. So to see this art-form done well is certainly pleasurable. Perhaps there is also an added element that few filmmakers once they’ve started making features, return back to the short form – consequently, it’s frequently young and vibrant filmmakers out to make a point who utilise the shorter form. And that seems to be the general trend here with this enjoyable collection of short films.

(Contains Spoilers)
Feted upon release for its controversial content, Death of a President looks into the realm of possibility if George W. Bush were to be assassinated. Given how contentious the President’s policies have been both at home and abroad, it’s not a difficult leap to make. On the eve of a speech in downtown Chicago, Bush’s motorcade is met with fierce opposition as thousands of barely controlled protestors take to the streets to vent their fury at his stance on the war in Iraq. Director Gabriel Range accurately conveys the mob mentality and the claustrophobia – as well as the simmering hatred – within the protests. It’s no spoiler to reveal the President ends up dying, but the rest of the film concerns itself with the after effects – and how quickly the assassination becomes a focal point for change in Government policy both at home and abroad.

For the purposes of remaining on the right side of an embargo, Eagle vs Shark will get the full review treatment at a later date. But it’s with hard-to-contain fondness that I can report, following last night’s pre-festival Gala, on the irresistible geekery of Taika Waititi’s lionhearted comedy. More so than spotting Napoleon Dynamite cribbage, what seems to have been lost in translation amongst a slew of glib, offshore criticism is the inherent New Zealandness of the film; something the Embassy’s parochial audience had no trouble interpreting. As well as transcending the cringe factor of provincial Kiwi vernacular, Waititi cushions the oft-told whimsy of an awkward romance with a higher appreciation of the lowbrow, and a weakness for all things Wellington. Another testament to the city’s incestuous creative community, the sights are lived-in, personalised and not at all obnoxiously touristy, while the sounds – The Phoenix Foundation, chiefly – are nothing if not tailor-made for the incandesce of cinema. Pooling local talent, Jemaine Clement is quite obviously at home playing a candlestick-making dweeb, but it’s Loren Horsley as The Girl who surprises and surpasses with an improbably infectious performance; at once gentle and exaggerated, it’s the stuff of an unfathomable crush. Though Waititi appears to be grafting the skin of a Michel Gondry concoction onto Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, the film’s soft-spoken modesty – a shy thing hiding behind the curtain, as introduced by its director – underlines it culturally. As for anyone seeking an antidote to the buffoonery of Sione’s Wedding, its appeal will be immense.—Tim Wong

Forget dialogue and forget plot; Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates is all about the camera. A camera which constantly intrudes into the action, firmly and unashamedly directing the viewer’s gaze and attention. With an obvious eye for setting gorgeously beguiling shots, the director and his cinematographer, Gökhan Tiryaki, at turns impress and frustrate. Five minutes in, I was ready to praise this as possibly one of the most beautifully shot pieces I had seen; five minutes further along I was wringing my hands in annoyance.

Sarah Polley rejoins writer-director Isabel Coixet in The Secret Life of Words, an immersive, bittersweet ‘sleeper’ about the damaged emotional interior of an oil rig nurse. JACOB POWELL reviews.

Kurdish filmmaker Bhaman Ghobadi has achieved international acclaim with his previous films A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq and Turtles Can Fly. In his latest, Half Moon, Ghobadi uses the rugged Kurdistan landscape, and makes it into a moving, and emotionally rich film. Reportedly based on Mozart’s Requiem, the film manages to wrest the desolation and supposed despair of the Kurdistan landscape and infuse it with a celebration of art, a tribute to the human spirit and a simple joy of being.

HELEN SIMS offers both an appraisal of A Civilised Society and a dialogue with its director, Alister Barry, on the documentary’s chronicle of free market reforms and education upheaval in the eighties.

(Contains Spoilers)
Turns out the red road is also the high road in Andrea Arnold’s Cannes heavyweight – a panopticon thriller which, borrowing a leaf from the Dardennes’ fablebook, dares its heroine to forgive. In camouflaging the basis of the relationship between Jackie, a CCTV operator, and the mystery man she stakes out though, the film is piloted less by moral ambition, and more by a lust for atmospherics: Indeed, the first 3/4 are spent hung out in free-floating anxiety, surfing between the refuge of her security room and the concrete migraine of a Glasgow housing estate.

JACOB POWELL reflects on Day One of the Auckland International Film Festival.

DAY ONE of TNZIFF 2007 saw me chew through four titles. Actually, the first film, Death at a Funeral, played the gala opening the Thursday night before official “day one”. Downstairs from the Civic Theatre in the pleasant surrounds Wintergarden festival lounge we were treated to some fine Triplebank wine and sponsor cocktails and a very reasonable opening speech delivered by Helen Clark – a step up from Judith Tizard’s appearance last year. The Prime Minister managed to be succinct (a definite bonus) while also displaying a very real interest in film. You got the feeling that she would be making her way to at least a few movies this festival.

Winding down from the ecstatic high-notes of Linda Linda Linda, Nobuhiro Yamashita renews his fascination with social misfits in this quasi-Fargo affair involving a hit-and-run victim, a decapitated head, blackmail, rat poison, gold bullion, and backwater sexual mores. Clearly there’s something in Matsugane’s H20, a snow-covered provincial town whose local hairdresser pimps out her pregnant daughter to customers, and where a dead body on the side of the road is an opportunity for a feel-up. Meanwhile, two lowlife criminals coerce the twin brother of a police officer into helping them retrieve something valuable from beneath a frozen lake. Unlike previous outings, Yamashita’s deadpan manoeuvrings don’t quite achieve the same comic abruptness, but the situations are just as awkward, the mood as always unpredictable, and the spare and observant humour resoundingly unconventional.

JACOB POWELL finds short films in strength at this year’s “Homegrown: Works on Film” programme.

PLAYING early in this year’s festival programme, 2007’s Homegrown: Works on Film selection (presented c/o the wonderful crew at MIC Toi Rerehiko) is quite inspiring. Last year there were a few good little pieces amongst some so-so ones; this year there were some really moving examples amongst a stable full of starters. No newbies this year, but a couple of second-time directors, including a return by 2006 entrant Tearepa Kahi with his new short Taua. Raising the bar further on an already impressive standard, this is not a year to miss out on our NZ short film catalogue!

GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN traverses the cultural divide in Fatih Akin’s follow-up to Head-On, The Edge of Heaven, a film to reconcile German and Turkish differences.

I love going to cemeteries. There’s something majestic, something foolhardy, something particular vain about the human condition that gets represented in them. It’s an attempt to reverse the mutability of life with an ever-lasting monument. I’ve never been to Père-Lachaise, but when I go to Paris one day, this cemetery will be one of the first places I go to. Dutch documentary maker Heddy Honigmann seems to share similar views about cemeteries, and wanders Père-Lachaise capturing moments of life and transcendence. It’s a beautiful work that aims to show that by looking at death, we can also find traces of life.

The third feature in a durable filmmaking partnership, Kissy Kissy completes Alexander Greenhough and Elric Kane’s loose trilogy on twenty-something ennui, while giving further legs to the trademarked ‘Aro Film Movement’. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM interviews the co-directors on the eve of their film’s premiere at the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals.

In today’s Godless world, the claim for divine inspiration as genuine artistic kudos may be a dead limb, but hell... some shit really does write itself. For instance, the story of one Richard Gazowsky, a Pentecostal minister from San Francisco, who, upon receiving the green light from above, embarks on a mission to seed the gospel by way of the box office. In this case, Gazowsky must’ve accidentally channeled Don Simpson, because getting his vision for a Christ-core Star Wars (Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph) off the ground requires a purported $200 million (a cool $50 million more than Transformers) – no doubt to encompass such pointless extravagances as shooting in 70mm, as well as flying the entire production company (hilariously titled What You See is What You Get, or “Wizzywig” for short) to Italy.

With an oddball title, and a premise that plays between fiction and reality, How is Your Fish Today? might be seen as a Chinese riff on Charlie Kaufmann, or could just as easily be tarred with that reductive label ‘quirky’. However, this would be to ignore the film’s thematic concerns and meditative mood, and ultimately its rather subversive streak (especially considering its Chinese origins). It looks at a struggling scriptwriter, Rao Hui (played by Rao Hui), who gets a commission to write a story about Lin Hao (played by Lin Hao), a man who in the fictional story murdered his wife in Southern China. His first script is rubbished, and consequently Rao draws himself into the proceedings more and more as he writes again. Eventually the film becomes a blur of real and make-believe, and ultimately, what images are shown, cannot be trusted as being true. In this respect, the film questions the veracity of propaganda, and exults in the disrepute of images.

Climates, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s first foray into the digital format, is “a painful, unapologetically downbeat film... at once respulsive and attention-grabbing,” says SIMON WOOD.

JOE SHEPPARD gives into the “puerile logic and cult factor” of Death Note and its sequel, Death Note: The Last Name, brought to us back-to-back under the auspices of Ant Timpson’s That’s Incredible Cinema.

Visionary Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke casts his eye again on the landscape of China’s accelerated economy, rapid social change, and erosion of old to make way for new. TIM WONG is in awe of the director’s latest, Still Life, set amongst the developing Three Gorges Dam.

GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers Gus Van Sant’s career – an oeuvre dominated by outsiders often ensnared in obsessive solitude – and its most recent addition, “Paranoid Park”.

GUS VAN SANT caught my eye in 1995 with To Die For. Based on a novel by Joyce Maynard of the same name, Van Sant’s film was a dark look at a young American woman whose ruthless ambition and boredom with her married life pushed her to the edge, and, tragically, beyond. Maynard’s fiction, inspired a great deal by the true story of a teacher who seduced her young lover into killing her husband, had an element of satire that Van Sant borrowed for the celluloid version. But the movie was far more spine tingling than the book, and, if I am right, Nicole Kidman, who was a weather girl – not a teacher – shot into limelight with this work. Co-starring with Matt Dillon and Joaquin Phoenix, Kidman created a sensation with her remarkable performance that drew attention to the evils of consumerism. And Van Sant’s label as a “bard of dysfunction” became even more apparent with this film.

Zacharias Kunuk’s and Norman Cohn’s follow-up to Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner chronicles the investigations of anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, and his research into Inuit folklore, culture, and history during the 1920s. MUBARAK ALI offers a reading of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.

In related reading, TIM WONG describes Little Dieter Needs to Fly as “a remarkable documentary of soaring human resilience... a memoir told with pathos and visible emotion, and other times with cool detachment, much like the captive résistance hero in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped – all of which is coaxed to the surface by Herzog’s decision to escort Dengler back to the sites of his trauma as a prisoner of war.” More on the extraordinary true story of Dieter Dengler as a prelude to Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, screening this July and August at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals....[Read More] (links to The Film Reader)

It’d be fair to say that Jason Kohn is probably not the most popular man in Brazil at the moment. Maker of the Sundance-winning Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), Kohn takes a sweeping look at the corruption and inequality rife in Brazil, and makes a cogent and powerful documentary in the process. Kohn used to be a researcher for documentary legend Errol Morris, and Morris has been a big mentor in Kohn’s filmmaking career. You can also see traces of Morris’ style in the film – off-centre interviews, the inclusion of translators into the shot (reportedly based on an interview Morris did with Mikhail Gorbachev), and an almost pitiless approach to some of his subjects. Indeed a major criticism of Morris has been an apparent tendency to make fun of some of his ‘weirder’ subjects, and Kohn arguably at times treads this line (particularly with the plastic surgeon). For the most part however, he manages to get some fascinating testimony from a wide variety of his sources.

In When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Mikio Naruse draws us into a world often intimated in movies but rarely ever fleshed out: that of the Japanese bar hostess. A postwar offshoot of the Geisha tradition, these bars serviced men through the company of women and the comfort of drink. Forty years on, and the mizo shobai, or “water trade”, has come to evolve once more: catering exclusively for female clientele, somewhere deep within Osaka’s nightlife district resides Café Rakkyo, a club occupied by an elite brethren of ‘host boys’, and their magnetic, if ultimately tragic leader, Issei. Like Naruse’s mama-san Keiko, Issei’s patience as head host and self-confessed love thief is tested daily: the vigilance of fashion and appearance; the harvesting and feigning of relationships; the constant drunken nights out; the necessity of shrewd business instinct. Cultural change however has given birth to a new monster entirely, and The Great Happiness Space gets under the skin of what on the surface appears to be just another throwaway leisure pursuit of the rich and emotionally needy.

Fraught with uncertainty, life’s crucial transition into adulthood is evoked through the restless youth of five Swedish young men in Falkenberg Farewell. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM relives the moment.

Tough-as-nails gangster/revenge pictures are to Korean Cinema what horror movies peddling vengeful spirits and supernatural curses were to Japan: phenomenally successful on the heels of a breakout international hit; a viral strain of knockoffs and remakes in the aftermath; a fad that’s presently run out of steam. A brace of new films attempting to breath life back into Korea’s criminal underworld deliver mixed results; the less effective of the two, No Mercy for the Rude, spoofs a genre already made fun of by the likes of A Bittersweet Life, which in its overearnest appreciation of chivalry and machismo, became an accidental parody in and of itself. Park Chulhee’s film occasionally straddles an artful line between humour and seriousness – the kind of tonal shift Bong Joon-ho (The Host) has a patent on – but his comic elements are essentially restricted to absurd caricatures: a ballet-dancing contract killer for one, while the film’s doomed lead, a mute hitman saving money for a speech-correcting operation, is played by none other than Shin Hakyun. Whether a lazy typecast or an admirer’s nod to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Park has a certain eccentricity in mind, but never quite finds the right balance: the black comedy a second thought rather than the impetus behind a film that concedes ultimately, if ruefully, to the final image of a dying man, flailing in blood, cradled in the arms of his lover to the melodrama of orchestra strings.

Family dysfunction is rooted in news of a pending suicide in Nanouk Leopold’s measured Wolfsbergen: a film seemingly about death, both in its literal and figurative forms, discovers MUBARAK ALI.

Jesus Camp looks at evangelical followers of the Christian faith who believe that the future of religion is their children. Kids as young as six years old are being groomed to believe in God and to follow blindly as a soldier in his army. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s film is captivating – not because the hypocritical evangelist Becky Fischer is so frightening; not because of the massed sight of young children crying when being brain-washed to fight against abortion and not because of the footage of an overly precocious nine-year-old walking up to a complete stranger in a bowling alley and telling the adult that everything is going to be okay because God has a special plan for her. Those are all magical moments, and crucial to an understanding of this film’s motive – but what makes the movie is Ewing and Grady’s fly-on-the-wall approach.

Not quite the Orwellian proxy its programme notes will have you believe, Red Road nevertheless transfers some of 1984’s high anxiety to the present day, where in the wake of London’s subway bombings and a pervading terrorist threat, CCTV outposts cast an eye over every nook and cranny of the urban terrain. In Glasgow, Scotland – a city of conspicuous grayscale malaise – a lonely surveillance operator happens upon a man from her past, first staking him out via a network of cameras at her disposal, before pursuing him directly in a confrontation that turns every rape-revenge movie on its head.

Charles Burnett’s blaxploitation retort is a microscopic, politically-charged authentication of Black American life. Largely unseen, it screens belatedly in retrospect. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM introduces us to Killer of Sheep’s restored importance.