A Latvian omnibus unified by four new directors. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

COMPILATION films don’t often gel together as one feature. For the most part, directors approach their part with a singular vision, and when mashed-up with the other parts, an uneven tone and narrative usually results. Vogelfrei, a portmanteau film made by four young Latvian directors, demonstrates that a unified approach and a carefully plotted narrative progression can allow a multi-directed project to really work structurally and thematically. The film succeeds in allowing each director their own voice too, no small feat, and in the process, demonstrates that there is some very promising talent coming out of Latvia.

A vanguard of the Korean New Wave returns to cinema – without vengeance. By TIM WONG. (contains spoilers)

TWO TIRESOME trends – religion bashing, and in particular, Korean ultra-violence – are put to bed this year with the belated Secret Sunshine, a bright light amongst a procession of gangster and revenge pictures, which, by way of recent film festivals here, have appeared to hijack the entire annual output of a national cinema. With the exception of Hong Sang-soo and The Host, local audiences could be forgiven for thinking the makers of Old Boy have had a monopoly on film exports ever since, repackaging their flashy, yet increasingly soulless action pieces for world distribution. Such movies have found their way into this festival not necessarily at the expense of others, although it could be argued that had Lee Chang-dong continued to direct, his films would have supplanted the likes of A Bittersweet Life and No Mercy for the Rude by default. Now having completed his civic duty, Lee’s return to filmmaking can not some soon enough – 2002’s remarkable Oasis, his last outing prior to accepting the portfolio for Korean Minister of Culture, remains among the best films of the decade. Meanwhile, a quota of ditsy comedies, manipulative melodramas, and one-dimensional Kim Ki-duk movies wait in the wings, best kept at arm’s length.

In Paris, a Taiwanese master soars. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

SOMETIMES it’s easy to forget just how poetic cinema can be. Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those rare films, an achingly beautiful paean to life, to escape, to humanity. Commissioned by Paris’ Musée D’Orsay and an homage to Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, this is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first picture made in Europe. The film’s subtle pace may off-put some (I’m euphemising, there will be a considerable amount of audience members who won’t submit to the gentle, understated, complex rhythms of the text). But that’d be a shame – because they’d be closing themselves off to a masterpiece by one of cinema’s great filmmakers, and one of his most emotionally rich depictions of everyday life.

Shane Meadows on boyhood and true romance. By TIM WONG.

IF This is England was Shane Meadows’ 400 Blows, then Somers Town is his Antonie and Colette, and Thomas Turgoose his Jean-Pierre Léaud. A casual buddy movie couched in Meadows’ fondness for adolescent relations, it centres on Turgoose – now slightly older, and slightly deeper in voice from the 12-year-old skinhead he so memorably portrayed – as a midlands runaway who befriends a lonely Polish teen in North London. Left to his own devices while father works hard and drinks late, the soft-spoken Marek (Piotr Jagiello) roams the city as a keen photographer, bonding with Turgoose’s out-of-pocket Tomo as they set about courting an attractive French waitress (Elisa Lasowki). Fashion disasters and comical odd-jobs await, courtesy of a charitable entrepreneur (Perry Benson) who, fearing for Marek’s safety, swaps the boy’s Man United strip for an Arsenal knockoff (emblazoned with “Terry Henry”), and provides the homeless Tomo with a place to crash. Their misadventures, dictated by the promise of romance, are not unlike those of Antonie Doniel, with the resemblance to François Truffaut’s breezy manchild odysseys qualified by a lightness that might’ve otherwise been eclipsed by Meadows’ darker tendencies. The naturalism of the two leads helps defy this, and just when you think Meadows is about to lurch the story towards violence, he refrains, forgoing tragic consequence for ecstatic wish fulfillment. Shot in unobtrusive black and white, the film’s modesty is its biggest charm.

Guy Maddin’s hometown phantasmagoria, a documentary within inverted commas. By TIM WONG.

HILARIOUS! Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is an outrageous documentary tease, the Canadian’s most hysterical film to date. Ostensibly a paean to hometown roots, Maddin’s affection for ‘The Peg’ quickly turns south, and from within the frosty confines of a looping railcar, is compelled to reveal the truth about Canada’s ‘Gateway to the West’. A sleepy hollow as nocturnal purgatory, deviancy and absurdity lurks beneath the city’s wintry façade, with Guy, our tour guide, providing a lusty commentary on Winnipeg’s dark side: an unauthorized history, replete with shocking asides on brothels, hermaphrodites, man pageants, locker rooms, and other sexual mores. Amusing still, are Maddin’s autobiographical forays, where actors are cast in place of immediate family members (that’s Detour’s Ann Savage as Guy’s beauty shop mother), and long buried memories are exhumed and overanalyzed like a Ross McElwee film. Which is to say My Winnipeg is vintage Maddin, from the childhood anecdotes, to the insertion of ice hockey and ballet, to the lurid turn-of-the-century aesthetic: those grainy celluloid splashes, woozy cross-fades, brusque inter-titles, and extreme genital close-ups all contributing to the film’s drowsy, jokey malaise. Though angrily ensnared within a reoccurring dream, Maddin’s mock-umenting is not without fondness and good jest, and the director even turns fiercely protective at one point, lamenting the destruction of his beloved Winnipeg Arena, and the developers who’ve leveled the olde world charm. In a rare colour sequence, he films the demolition of the stadium, which refuses to topple even after the dynamite explodes – a sign, perhaps, that his beloved native city shares in his nostalgia, and has a life force all of its own.

Adapted from her acclaimed graphic novel, Marjane Satrapi’s memoirs are far from black and white. By JOE SHEPPARD.

Persepolis won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year and it was well worth the wait to see such an accomplished, accessible and utterly unique film at the Paramount in Wellington. Equal parts social history and Bildungsroman, the animated Persepolis was adapted from an autobiographical graphic novel by the Iranian French author Marjane Satrapi. The story goes that Alexander of Macedon went on a legendary bender in the Persian capital Persepolis, awakening the next morning to find smouldering ashes where the city used to be. Some six hundred miles north in modern Tehran, East again clashes with West as the rebellious and independent young Satrapi struggles to find her identity amid the turbulence of the Islamic revolution and the totalitarian theocracy of the ensuing years. Sent to Vienna for a liberal education, Satrapi had to grow up adapting to life in two vastly different cultures. The resulting film is an appropriate farrago of different ideologies and languages, genres, episodes and styles that cohere into a fascinating and moving impression of a chaotic upbringing.

New directors and old mavericks collide at the New Zealand International Film Festivals. By TIM WONG.

IN La France, a left-of-field war musical harmonised by twee interludes, the wonderfully unorthodox Sylvie Testud bends her gender for not the first time in her career – La Vie en Rose her last androgynous outing as Edith Piaf’s long-time cohort Simone Berteaut. Playing Camille, the forlorn wife of a WWI soldier, Testud masquerades as a man in order to join a company of inglorious French troops headed vaguely in the direction of her MIA husband. Within lean, pragmatic surroundings – a squad-based parable not unlike Fixed Bayonets or The Big Red One – director Serge Bozon circumvents the anticipation and cheap thrill of battle gore with the spectre of combat, and for all the film’s soft spoken whimsy and twilight surrealism – its willowy night-time sequences some of the most entrancing ever lit – there’s something disquieting, even faintly post-apocalyptic about its march towards a conflict which never presents itself. All in all, a strange delicacy among war movies, disengaged from both the cruel primitivism of Bruno Dumont (who would’ve turned the scene where Camille’s sex is revealed into a pack rape), and the showmanship of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s hyper-romances (A Very Long Engagement a bloated, pre-existing version of this film). Finally subversive, Bozon even emasculates the genre’s machismo by directing his grubby male cast to sing their musical numbers in the key of James Blunt.

TIM WONG discusses the new look New Zealand International Film Festivals programme, unveiled earlier this week.

UNDRESSED, the New Zealand International Film Festivals cut a lean figure in 2008; the corporate regalia of their former naming rights sponsor discarded as their redesigned programme looks to strike a new pose. Reformatted to a contentious A4 – already a talking point among those who prefer to travel compact – the taller, thinner hardcopy aims to trim the waistline of a programme now carrying over 170 films, although cynics are more likely to attribute its anorexia to budgetary constraints. Whether or not you approve of the makeover, it’s important to note the only real casualty of Telecom’s desertion has been the luxurious souvenir tome, with the festival’s capacity to import cinema – if ever there was any doubt – unhindered and at full strength.

Annually in June through to August, The Lumière Reader reports from the New Zealand International Film Festivals in earnest. Dispatches include the ongoing review of films, daily columns filed during the festival by Auckland and Wellington correspondents, interviews with visiting filmmakers, and our concluding post-festival wrap. An overview of this year’s coverage continues below.