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.

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.

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.