BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Goethe Institut selects, round two.

SOME OF THE most interesting films of all-time came out of the socialist countries in the late 60s. But while East Germany’s film industry lacked the sheer inventiveness of places like Czechoslovakia or even Russia, some fascinating films were still made. I Was Nineteen is some kind of masterpiece, a dark brooding depiction of the last days of World War Two. We see the film through the eyes of Gregor Hecker (Jaecki Schwarz), an ex-pat German who fought with the Soviets. He’s only nineteen, a boy who rushed into life forgetting that the door was still open behind him. He’s forced to re-engage with his German-ness, and acknowledge the fact the Germans did some rather horrific things, despite fighting on the side of the ‘good’. He mirrors the conflict of East Germany too – despite being on the ‘good’ side, it had these dark, dark roots.

ALEXANDER BISLEY picks the ten films he’s most tickled about seeing at this year’s film festival.

A Christmas Tale: Arnaud Desplechin’s masterpiece was my favourite film of 2008. Diabolically elegant and incisive, it audaciously, addictively explores life’s sprawl. Catherine Deneuve’s mighty matriach Junon’s cancer demands a dysfunctional French family get together for Christmas’ ceremony. Jean-Paul Rousillon (patriarch Abel), Matthieu Amalric (enfant terrible Henri) and Emmanuelle Devos (Henri’s girlfriend Faunia) are similarly terrific. Desplechin is Dylanesque!

A new section dedicated to ‘slow cinema’ champions four mesmerizing, must-see films. By STEVE GARDEN.

AMERICAN independent filmmaking has been a rich source of cinematic substance for cinephiles in recent years – Lance Hammer’s Ballast, Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble, and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, to mention only a few. Reichardt’s new film, Wendy and Lucy is every bit as subtle and perceptive as its predecessor, only much darker. This time the political implications are more to the fore, but without a hint of didacticism or finger-pointing. Reichardt leaves all interpretive possibilities completely open to the viewer. While her intention may have been to consider what it feels like at the bottom of the social order in present-day America, the film’s depiction of the consequences of economic rationalism has an implicit global reach.

Remembering the legendary soul explosion of Zaire 1974. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

ONE OF THE key aspects of Black Consciousness in the States in the late 60s and early 70s was harking back to Africa. A cultural shift occurred in trying to re-establish ties back to what was taken away through slavery and colonialism. This process occurred within popular music – and the seismic shifts can still be felt within contemporary music. Genres like funk, soul, disco, jazz and the soon-to-become hip-hop scenes, and superstars like Miles Davis and James Brown were throwing in African (pardon the gross simplification) polyrhythms, instrumentation, and harmonies into their music. But that’s only part of the story. Within the African continent, considerable musical development was occurring. New outrageously brilliant genres like high-life, mbalax, afrobeat, Afrofunk, etc. were making a mockery of conceptions of a unified “African” sound. So it was inevitable that one day these would collide. Soul Power captures such a moment, when talent from the United States and around the African continent met in Kinshasa, the capital of then-Zaire for a three day music festival known as “Zaire 1974”. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s documentary includes some incredible music, and though it’s a little light on the “African” musicians, it’s still an excellent account of a great show.

The outrageous theatre of Brillante Mendoza. By STEVE GARDEN.

IT APPEARS that Brillante Mendoza is the hot new name in world cinema. The 49-year old Filipino took out the Best Director prize at Cannes in May for his most recent film, Kinatay, his eighth feature in just four years! His 2008 film Serbis (Service) is nothing if not challenging – it almost dares you to fault it. One might be tempted to cite Mendoza’s liberal use of art-film clichés (agitated and prowling hand-held camera work; long close-to-the-shoulder travelling shots; unsimulated sex scenes;) as evidence of a calculated appeal to the art-house and festival circuits, if it wasn’t for the fact that the film is so palpably convincing.

Two takes on French families. By TIM WONG.

IMPROBABLY French, Summer Hours and A Christmas Tale mine a delicate commercial sensibility without ever compromising the authorship of their ace filmmakers. Strongly in favour of narrative and good looks, both are also bright, handsome examples of art cinema, tailor-made for a film festival determined to fight its way through economic gloom. The programme notes will shamelessly flog the attractions of Juliette Binoche, Catherine Deneuve, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly alumni (Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny), but who gives? Last year’s sublime Flight of the Red Balloon drew numbers (and big venues) on the back of Binoche’s ubiquity alone, even if many in attendance seemed oblivious to the greatness of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Audiences are unlikely to miss the point this time around though, given the universal experience in which each film magically engages.

Two by Agnès Varda, cinematic poet. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM and STEVE GARDEN.

IT’S NOT HARD when you’ve got a beautiful person in Paris to make a beautiful film. But when that’s all you’ve got, it takes a special director to make something that’s not only resonant but a classic. But then Agnès Varda is one of those directors. She’s a director of moments, of the little pieces that people tend to forget, a gleaner who can become entranced with an accidental jiggling of a camera lens, a director who has been confronting mortality since this, her first feature. I am a little biased – her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse) is one of the most emotionally wonderful pieces of cinema ever made. And a film like Cléo from 5 to 7 shows just how important these themes of mortality, of wringing beauty out of the discarded, of being a hopeless dreamer in an otherwise cruel world, have been throughout her career.

Another manic film creation from the scavanging Craig Baldwin. By STEVE GARDEN.

THOSE familiar with the found-footage creations of Craig Baldwin (O No Coronado, 1991; Tribulation 99, 1992; Spectres of the Spectrum, 1999) will have some idea what to expect from his latest excursion into cut-and-paste retro-chic, Mock Up On Mu. Baldwin’s inventive concoctions have always been more than mere film-geek indulgences. He is obviously a fan of industrial-films, government-films, and all grades of pop and pulp culture from B to Z, but he is also very adept at subverting the original intent of the material to ironic and pointedly critical effect. In Mock Up, Baldwin takes his iconoclasm further by enlisting the services of fellow cult-film connoisseur, Damon Packard (creator of the infamous Reflections of Evil, 2002). Packard turns in a suitably over-the-top caricature of L Ron Hubbard (one-time sci-fi author and founder of the Church of Scientology), now based on the Moon where he plots all manner of nefarious bits of business that involve a tattooed femme-fatale called “Agent C” and a dubious defence contractor by the name of... Mr Lockheed Martin.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Goethe Institut selects, round one.

ONE OF THE best parts of the Film Society year is when the Goethe Institut provide a few of the more obscure German films for viewing. This year, to commemorate twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Film Society is screening four East German films. Each was made by the state sponsored studio DEFA (which took over from the hugely influential UFA studios of inter-war and WWII Germany). The first film programmed, Berlin-Schonhauser Corner, is a 1950s teen melodrama set in East Berlin. The conceits of Hollywood teen movies like Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild Ones – the angst, the awkward rebellion, the acknowledgement of the adult world – are transplanted onto the Eastern German adolescents, and the result is a rather gritty and compelling film.

Albert Serra sublimely re-imagines the nativity; documentarian Mark Peranson watches in awe. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

THE NATIVITY TALE is one of Western Civilization’s most potent stories, and it’s rare for anyone to have grown up in the West and not have been associated with it (Christian or not). Despite being so familiar, the remarkable achievement of Birdsong (El Cant Dels Ocells) is that it manages to re-flavour the Magi narrative with new spices. Focusing squarely on the three wise men (or kings depending on how the tale is told), and portraying their blind faith as a secular, almost everyday one, Serra demystifies the characters. Instead, they are argumentative, confused, even jolly chaps, not exactly sure of what they’re searching for, but desperate for something.

Olivier Assayas’s wise, wistful film about moving forward. By STEVE GARDEN.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS’s new film, Summer Hours (L’heure d’été) starts with a celebration. Frederic (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) converge on the art-filled family home with their partners and children to celebrate the 75th birthday of their mother, Helene (Edith Scob). Once the home of Helene’s uncle (a respected artist long departed, for whom she was a muse – and possibly more besides), the house is one of many ‘possessions’ that become virtual characters in this intriguing meditation on values and dissolution (aesthetic, moral, economic, and ultimately life itself). Just as summer gives way to autumn, Summer Hours slowly reveals the world as a place that Helene’s uncle could never have imagined. The opening shot of young people running carefree around the family home is returned to at the end of the film to poignant effect.

Life and love in Juraj Lehotský’s vision of blindness. By STEVE GARDEN.

LOVE IS FAR from blind in Juraj Lehotský’s assured feature debut, Blind Loves (Slepé lásky). The film is ostensibly a documentary about a small number of visually impaired people grappling with life and love. But Lehotský seamlessly incorporates a fictional layer into the mix that results in a work of rare honesty, intimacy and poetry. The cast (who are either completely or partially blind) essentially play themselves, and the clarity with which they ‘see’ things leaves no room for the pleading sentimentalism that can often mar films about disability. The teasing uncertainty as to what is and isn’t staged is only one aspect of the film’s thought-provoking appeal. Differences between sighted and unsighted perceptions are beautifully conveyed throughout the film, as in one particular (and quite unexpected) sequence involving a giant squid. That Lehotský manages to pull this scene off without disturbing the naturalistic restraint of the work testifies to his impressive directorial skill.

Should we care about Vogue magazine and its devotion to the fashion world? DANYL MCLAUCHLAN and BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM offer contrasting opinions.

DM: Some of the best documentaries only find their true subject while they’re making a film about something else and so it is with The September Issue, R J Cutler’s film that is ostensibly about Vogue magazine editor-in-chief Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour and the creation of the September Issue, the upcoming year’s style bible for the $500 billion dollar fashion industry. (“In fashion, September is January”, one fashion editor explains helpfully.)

High fashion and subdued festivities at the 2009 programme launch. By JACOB POWELL.

THE BAR AREA outside the main theatre of Auckland’s Lido Cinema was well packed; replete with a blazing wood fire, tasty nibbles, complementary wine, Phoenix Organics drinks, and plenty of eager, expectant cinephiles. A visibly tired Bill Gosden fulfilled his ‘host’ duties as admirably as ever exchanging conversation with many of the guests, but the whole affair seemed a little pared back compared with previous years. I think this may be a flow on result of the depressed economic environment which sees our festival without a principal sponsor for the second year running. It is impressive that Bill and his team continue to create vibrant and vital festivals under such constraints.

ANNUALLY in June through to August, The Lumière Reader reports from the New Zealand International Film Festival in earnest. Our 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.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Van Sant on drugs.

IN MANY WAYS, Drugstore Cowboy might be Van Sant’s most satisfying film. And in terms of his ‘arty’ films, it might also be his most accessible. A downbeat film about drugs, the film seeks to neither glamorise nor heavy-handedly moralise about its protagonists. Instead, the characters just live, dreams cocooned away, knowing that a drug hit has the comfort of routine. Van Sant manages to turn a reasonably clichéd story into something fresh, raw and above all, moving.

ADDOLEY DZEGEDE reviews (and illustrates) JJ Abrams’s new Star Trek extravaganza.

AS I WRITE THIS, white petals floating on gusts of warm air swirl by the window. Birds are literally chirping, and the sun has cast an orange glow on the otherwise dull concrete of the building adjacent to my apartment. I say all this because it is nearly summer, and summer in the US, when our brains have melted into an icecream and entertainment-craving mess, is primetime for big, blockbusting action movies. It was such a day when, loosely familiar with Star Trek from a childhood spent with a sci-fi geek of a mom, but not much of a fan, I was dragged in from the sweet lethargy of a warm afternoon and thrust into the darkness of a cinema to watch the prolific JJ Abrams’s Star Trek.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Van Sant debuts.

IT’S A LONG-HELD, creaky theory of mine that the 1980s were the golden age of popular music – when indie artists managed to transcend the financial limitations of recording music of previous decades and make stunning music from hip-hop to metal (no other decade was arguably as diverse). The 1980s was also the time when a number of filmmakers replicate the no-fi, lo-fi movements in music – filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee (by no means novel given figures like Charles Burnett and John Waters before them) gained huge success on low-budget, self-produced films. Gus Van Sant was another well-known auteur who started in a similar fashion. His debut film, Mala Noche, didn’t have the same resonance that his later Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho had, but it broadcast a director who has proven remarkably hard to pin down (after all, he’s made everything from Finding Forrester to the Psycho remake to Elephant). In fact, this effervescent, if slight film basically sets up Van Sant’s career – and it’s easy to see his subsequent eclecticism resulting from it.

Joel Stern, co-founder of Brisbane-based arts collective OtherFilm, talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about bringing the avant-garde collection Isolationist Eye Openers: Historic Australian Film Art 1962-1998 to the Film Archive in Wellington.