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.

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.