Engaging and poetic observations about the effect of progress on human lives. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

GIVEN the Great Wall and the more recent Olympics, it’s hard not to see that China likes to deal in superlatives. The Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydro-electric project in the world, designed to harness the unpredictable Yangtze River for the good of the estimated 440 million people who live on its banks. The forced relocation of 2 million people seems a small price to pay for such progress, especially as the government is committed to compensating them with payouts and shiny-new accommodation – according to the government sanctioned tourist guides, anyway.

Steve McQueen directs a prison movie far from escapist. By DAVID LEVINSON.

LENDING a savage intimacy to the spirit of Bobby Sands – the IRA radical who spearheaded the Irish prison-strikes of 1981 – Hunger is a no-holds-barred immersion in human suffering. Directed by Steve McQueen, and winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the film confines itself to the Maze prison in County Down, where Sands (Michael Fassbender) is being held for the possession of firearms; upon greeting a newly-appointed cellmate, he bitterly reveals that he’s been sentenced to 12 years imprisonment. But any recourse to the comfort of time (no matter how slight) is cut short by the permanence of the two men’s surroundings – a sterile, baby-yellow lockup, the walls of which have been smeared in shit. Even the panacea of religion offers no comfort, as seen during a scene where Sands meets with a visiting priest (played by Liam Cunningham), who engages him in a theological debate over the merits of a proposed hunger-strike; curtly rejecting the priest’s qualms, Sands confirms that McQueen’s aim – beyond political and religious descant – is to restore to the abstract tide of history a physical sense of suffering. Thus, as openly fetishistic as any Cremaster movie, Hunger exploits the body as a medium: Prisoners spill urine into the hallway in protest, watching as lone puddles magnetically seep together; men outfitted in riot gear violently bear down on naked flesh; food, abandoned for days, writhes with maggots.

The vampire movie comes out of the dark. By JACOB POWELL. (contains spoilers)

COULD THIS be the best vampire movie since Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987) or Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of the classic Noseferatu? Directed by Sweden’s Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In defies simple genre description, combing vampire horror with strong elements of social realist drama, coming-of-age romance, and psychological thriller to create a film that is complex, layered, and broader in range than its “vampire movie” trappings might at first suggest.

Extolling her punk highness, the ferocious Patti Smith. By THOMASIN SLEIGH.

THIS DOCUMENTARY is refreshingly un-documentary like. In the first couple of minutes Patti Smith recites all of the standard biographical detail of her life – where and when she was born, where she lived, who she married, how many kids she had – all of the information that is supposed to describe and explain a person’s life. After this narrative, Patti Smith: Dream of Life drifts off into a non-linear collection of moments, relationships and footage of Smith’s performances. This eclectic assemblage of events gradually reveals more about Smith’s life and music than a usual chronological portrayal often does.

Recalling Philippe Petit’s outrageous, death-defying ‘heist’. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

WELLINGTON’s opening night film, Man on Wire, got the gala treatment the night before, and it’s easy to see why the story would be a crowd-pleasing one: an eccentric Frenchman decides to pull the middle finger at a conformist and regulated society and walk across a wire. Four hundred metres above the ground, suspended between the obviously now gone Twin Towers in New York. Without telling the authorities. With a slack cable. If you’ve got a fear of heights, this is probably not the film for you.

Mardi Gras meets apartheid in Mobile, Alabama. By JOE SHEPPARD.

FOLLOWING the excellent documentary on Nashville minstrel Townes van Zandt (Be Here To Love Me), US filmmaker Margaret Brown headed further south to her ancestral home in Mobile, Alabama, for the 2007 Mardi Gras. Established in 1703 – before the city of New Orleans was even founded – Mobile’s fortnight of spectacular rituals differs from her more famous Louisiana counterpart in one key way: all the parades, debutante balls, and ‘Mystic Societies’ are racially segregated, culminating in dual carnivals and twin coronations. (The sole integrated society, the Conde Explorers, has only one white member.) Brown manages to capture an historic moment when the white regents get down and party at the Comrades’ Ball for the first time ever.

Thirty-six auteurs add their two cents. By JACOB POWELL.

AS YOU WOULD expect from a film made up of discrete three minute shorts by more than 30 different directors, To Each His Own Cinema makes you, in its turn, laugh, muse, shake your head, cringe, nod knowingly, reminisce, tear up, and laugh again. What I did not expect, is how moving the overall experience would be. There is something deeply stirring in this series of very different reflections on the cinematic experience which is difficult for me to explain. I’m not sure why I didn’t think that it would be so affecting considering the weight of talent, intellect, and craft brought to bear on the project; perhaps it was because I felt it would be overtly manufactured. The idea of the Cannes governing body (??) asking a bunch of their favourite auteurs to make short films about movie going just didn’t strike me as likely to produce anything cohesive or as inspired as these directors would generate from their own creative impulses. Luckily for me, I was proved very wrong. Although it isn’t all top notch work, the overall viewing experience is so rich that I think any movie watcher would likely get a high level of satisfaction from watching this film.

A compelling exercise in humiliation-comedy. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

WHEN OUT OF WORK independent filmmaker Chris Waitt is dumped with no explanation, he decides to track down and interview his cavalcade of former girlfriends to learn why his romantic-life is so spectacularly unsuccessful. More importantly, he’d like to discover why it’s been several years since his last erection. This supposed documentary is too staged to ring entirely true; yet Waitt is such an endearingly self-effacing character it ultimately doesn't matter.

Alex Holdridge’s disarming, low-fi romance. By JACOB POWELL.

A ROMANTIC COMEDY light on production gloss and heavy on naturalistic dialogue, writer/director Alex Holdridge’s third feature, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, pushes most of the right buttons. First we meet Wilson (Scoot McNairy), a regular late 20s guy; he’s lonely and had a bad year of it, in terms of work, and a bad half decade of it, in terms of his love life. We are introduced to him as a video store employee who is in synch with his clientele; preferring to mull over some morose romantic movie than actually venture out into the wild and seek it off-screen. The amusing (just post) opening scene finds him caught in a compromising situation when his flatmates return unexpectedly from a trip and from this we learn about the unfortunate stage of life he is in and the friendships he has with these flatmates, Jacob & Min (Brian McGuire & Kathleen Luong) – the apparent picture of a happy couple with – whom he lives.

Out of Switzerland, a stop-motion delight. By DARREN BEVAN.

ANIMATION these days is sometimes overlooked if it doesn’t offer the smart, slick feel of the majority of output from the Pixar fold. Max & Co is a simple tale, aimed squarely at children, and is solid musical fun from beginning to end. It’s the tale of Max, a stop-motion animated fox (voiced by Lorent Deutsch) who sets out to find his father, a famous troubador by the name of Jonny Bigoude (bad pun) and winds up in Saint Hilare, a town which is renowned for creating and manufacturing fly swatters. However, Bzzz & Co (run by the frog playboy industrialist Rodolfo) is losing money hand over fly swatter, and despite the chairman’s pleas to liquidate it, an audit takes place. A manic wheelbound scientist by the name of Martin has other ideas on how to turn it around and put the profit back into it. As ever, his diabolical and fiendish scheming only spells trouble for the town, and Max and his new band of friends (including a sizzling turn by Virginie Efira as the cat cabaret crooner, who rivals Jessica Rabbit for sexiness) set out to save the day. Max & Co won’t win awards for its unoriginal storyline, but it has won audience accolades in Belgium for its enthusiastic and infectious humour, music, as well as the inventive quality of its animation. In fact, in a very short time, you come to care about all the animal characters – the majority of whom have been laid off – which is truly a coup d’etat from these relatively new filmmakers. Directors Frederic and Samuel Guillaume (who’ve previously only released an eight minute short) have really brought this fable of greed and identity alive with the puppetry of all the main characters – there is a Gothic feel to this and at times, it truly is stunning to watch – while the details of the background are intricate and beautifully capture the raison d’etre of so many French towns and villages.

Son of a Lion looks beyond the hostilities of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, giving voice to the region’s unfairly maligned people. Its visiting director, Benjamin Gilmour, speaks of his guerrilla filmmaking experience to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

A cinematic tour of the City of Lights. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

A SORT OF cinematic tourist brochure, Cédric Klapisch’s Paris is the film Paris, je t’aime should have been. The director of The Spanish Apartment crafts a heart-warming exploration of the lives, loves and neighbourhoods of the City of Lights. Opening with a head-spinning montage of its main players, we meet Romain Duris in the role of a cabaret dancer awaiting heart surgery. Juliette Binoche is his social-worker sister who moves in to care for him. There is the ageing and cynical history professor, played by Fabrice Luchini, who falls in love with a tempestuous student, and an assortment of working-class Parisians falling in and out of love.

An old master picks up the pace. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

The Duchess of Langeais (Don’t Touch the Axe) is much more accessible Rivette, which isn’t necessarily as bad as it sounds. His adaptation of a Balzac novella has a simple set-up: man pursues woman, she rejects him and then decides to pursue him. It’s also a theatrical script, the largely interior visuals (with the exception of the film’s bookends) and intimate mise-en-scène forcing the two lead actors to carry the film. And they do superbly. This is a film with a rare intensity in the acting – particularly Jeanne Balibar as the seductive, vulnerable Antoinette – and the two leads compellingly draw you into their little game of deception, love and psychological warfare.

Observations in three sectors of China’s garment industry offers an open-ended musing on consumerism. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

CHINA’s industrialisation-on-steroids throws up such a rich and complex tangle of issues that it could fill an entire festival of documentaries and still not be done. At the New Zealand International Film Festivals alone, 2006’s China Blue left audiences despondent with its intimate portrait on life in a South Chinese jeans factory. In 2007, the epic and perversely beautiful Manufacturing Landscapes made art of China’s ecological disasters and put into striking relief the sheer scale of ‘progress’. This year’s Useless continues in that vein, with fly-on-the-wall observations of three varied corners of China’s garment industry: workers in a large-scale production line factory; a designer who rallies against the mass-machine-production of clothes and has created the eponymous hand-made collection called ‘Useless’ (Wuyong) for Paris Fashion Week; and finally the simple life of increasingly out-of-work tailors in small town Fengdang.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Soviet revolution.

SERGI PARADJANOV’s The Colour of Pomegranates is one of the most formally and politically revolutionary films ever made, so it’s of no surprise that some his other work will be infused with the ‘dissident’ qualities that saw him languishing in jail for a considerable time. After all, he eschewed the montage, socialist realism and cautionary tales of collectivism that had been the staple of Soviet cinema since the heydays of early Eisenstein. Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors was also provocative in quite a different way to The Colour of Pomegranates – stylistically it was a hotpotch of camerawork with formal icon-like shots (paving the way for the latter film), shaky handheld shots, and some of the more inventive camera shots in film history (I’m talking specifically about the two deaths that punctuate the opening section of the film). But it’s not simply the camerawork that assaults – sounds (e.g. the giant trumpets or the swish of the grass), tastes (you could feel an apple being eaten), and touches. Paradjanov doesn’t hold back in his visual flourishes either – colour dissolves to black and white, impossible camera frames jump out without warning, images appear all in red – yet they all service the story. We feel Ivanko’s pain and solitude. Consequently this is a film to be felt, it’s cinema at its most sensual and elemental.

Two genre-bending final fantasies by way of Japan. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

CINEMA provocateur Miike Takashi’s previous Festival offerings have attracted praise, derision and outrage in equal measure. The maverick director’s latest entry, the genre-bending Sukiyaki Western Django, might easily be his most accessible to date (although not necessarily his best); not least of which because it features a delightfully unconvincing cameo by Quentin Tarantino, and a Japanese cast delivering lines in phonetically pronounced (although mostly unintelligible) English.

A roundup of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Get Smart, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Second-Hand Wedding, Charlie Bartlett (Film); Outrageous Fortune: Series Three (DVD).

Kathy Dudding’s ode to Wellington, The Return, discovers and celebrates the city’s micro-histories; the small stories and details that people too easily forget and ignore. She talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM ahead the film’s premiere at the New Zealand International Film Festivals.

In José Luis Guerín’s fantasy cityscape, love is on the run. By DAVID LEVINSON.

MAPPED on the droll urban odysseys of latter-day de Oliviera, José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia is a portrait of the artist as a young stalker, in which a dreary-eyed bohemian (known only as “him”) pursues a beautiful woman through the unmarked streets of Sylvia. A fantasy Euro-locale – all sun-glinted cobblestone and historic facades – Sylvia forms the perfect medium for its hero’s desire, and while hardly the first to twin the creative impulse with the libidinous one, there’s a method to Guerín’s horniness that rises above hat-tipping the ‘gaze’ in order to scope out girls: Striking an impossible balance between irony and wonder, he transmutes the raw base of his lead’s quest into a meditation on the act of creation.

JACOB POWELL on the New Zealand International Film Festivals annual short film programme.

2008 proves to be another year stock full of promising shorts from New Zealand directors. This year’s Homegrown (Programme 1) maintains the high level of work which 2007 saw come through, with perhaps a broader spread thematic coverage and production style.

The Scandinavian crime genre has a new Reykjavik thriller. By DARREN BEVAN.

WHEN A film opens with the death of a child, you know you’re in for a gritty ride. Jar City delivers on such an opening, its content based on the blockbuster book which rocked Iceland back in 2000. Following on from the child’s death, we jump to a bludgeoned body at the centre of a typical murder scene, which one detective remarks, “It’s as pointless as every other murder – and the criminals have left us plenty of evidence.” But CSI this is not: the hard bitten detective Erlendur, an investigator in the traditional mold, is an exponent of hard graft, gut instinct, and a stickler for leaving no stone unturned. This detective though is not perfect – he has a whore for a daughter whose standing in the community is used to taunt him by the very criminals he pursues – and in one particularly uncomfortable scene, displays a penchant for eating whole sheep’s heads for dinner. The film’s bleak tone is complemented by the deserted landscapes of Iceland, which director Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavik, The Sea) pieces together to reinforce the atmosphere and add to the sense of foreboding and doom. Laconic and deadpan humour features extensively, yet Jar City’s overall theme – the sharing of genomic and medical data, a real-life project which fueled the book’s controversy – makes for an unlikely adhesive between the grim mundanities of detective work and the apparently disparate plot threads. It’s a welcome addition to the more intelligent crime dramas we’ve seen recently, and one with plot twists you’ll have to pay attention to throughout.

Crime and punishment figures in John Crowley’s sophomore film. By JACOB POWELL.

BEGINNING in a fairly muted fashion, John Crowley’s second feature, Boy A, maintains its restraint throughout, and is the better for it. The film’s eponymous lead gained this moniker from the court case which saw him spend the whole of his adolescence behind bars. It is the label that the ever hungry media still use for him and seems about as apt a description as to who he might be as the new name, Jack Burridge, that he has adopted to start life over, or even his birth name, Eric Wilson, which represents the past the young man is attempting to leave behind.

Like Christmas, A Song of Good explores the darker territories of New Zealand urban life. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks to its director, Gregory King, about production challenges, dysfunctional families, and getting into the Rotterdam Film Festival.

Delicately poised, the New Zealand International Film Festivals launched officially tonight with Sima Urale’s Apron Strings, a hometown occasion for the Auckland filmmaker, whose drama opened the city’s 40th hosting of the festival in good taste. Last year, the unveiling of Taika Waititi’s Eagle vs Shark was saved for the parochial support of Wellington, which opens its 37th edition in a week’s time with documentary Man on Wire. Like that film, the 2008 programme walks something of fine line, perhaps not taking the absolutely risks that it could, but nevertheless demonstrating some daring to elicit gasps. The jawbreakers to date, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s exquisite Flight of the Red Balloon (of the two Juliette Binoche pictures scheduled, it’s the one you want to see), and Silent Light, courtesy of the talented but errant Carlos Reygadas (a filmmaker who has finally found his feet), will leave mouths agape in their pure expressions of cinema. Less conspicuous, but also must-see is Masayuki Suo’s I Just Didn’t Do It, a furious state indictment and stellar court drama in one; Night and Day, Hong Sang-soo’s funniest, and paradoxically most accessible (at two-and-a-half hours long!) man-flick yet; and Lake Tahoe, a heartfelt (and for a time, oddly Kafkaesque) sophomore feature from Fernando Embicke, whose Duck Season established a knack for youthful deadpan through time-lapsed adolescence. Lumière will continue to trawl the festival for its best bits over the coming weeks, beginning with daily reviews and reports out of Auckland from tomorrow onwards. Refer to our A-Z Guide for a cross-reference of all existing NZIFF features, columns and reviews. A selection of film lists to further pique your interest continue below.—Tim Wong

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: the visitor.

THE TRICKSTER is a common figure in literature and mythology, the mischievous imp which effects social change by subverting norms of behaviour. A movement within “African American” literature was to use the trickster figure to try and dismantle oppressive institutions – the trickster tells the truths about people that they pretend not to hear otherwise, effecting the way people view ‘everyday life’. It’s quite a subversive tool – I, like I suspect many in the audience, sided with the family, as opposed to the infuriating Harry (Danny Glover). When in actual fact, the film shows the evil Harry as a necessary tool in bringing the family together, for confronting uncomfortable home truths, and for forcing the characters to find their own family identity.

Two drug-addled documentaries at the New Zealand International Film Festivals. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

AN UNPREDICTABLY conventional documentary, and thus entirely appropriate, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson examines the bull-in-China-shop literary output of a mythical and rabble-rousing American journalist. Director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side – the latter also screening at this Festival) uses archived footage, talking heads, narration and reenactments to form a fractured overview of Thompson’s enigmatic life – and like his writing looks between the lines to sort fact from fiction. The film explains Thompson, as a young journalist, would type out The Great Gatsby word for word, determined to capture Fitzgerald’s furious vision of the American dream. And Gonzo is at its most gripping when examining Hunter’s belligerent assault on the absurdity of the political system. The film travels a more familiar path when tracking the story of Hunter’s decline: the tragically clichéd tale of a self-medicating author imprisoned by his own fame.

Courtesy of the New Zealand International Film Festivals, The Lumière Reader has two double passes to Three Monkeys in Auckland (July 27) and Wellington (July 30) to giveaway. To enter, email your name and address to lumiere@lumiere.net.nz under the subject heading "GIVEAWAY: THREE MONKEYS" with the answer to the following question: which Nuri Bilge Ceylan film screened at last year's festival? Auckland/Wellington residents only. One entry per person. Entries close July 22, 2008. Standard terms and conditions apply.

Sports and politics collide in two shrewd Olympic year tie-ins. By TIM WONG.

LESS OF AN essay on steroid abuse than an airing of America’s dirty linen, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* is far too overreaching to claim itself as a definitive or even cogent documentary on the subject of performance enhancing drugs, regularly tying itself in knots through sheer weight of exposition. Nevertheless, its director, Chris Bell, manages to draw some eye-popping juxtapositions, making a brilliant connection in his opening salvo between the duplicity of anabolic steroid use, and that most dubious, scripted of competitive sports, pro wrestling (by way of his childhood hero, Hulk Hogan, who proceeds to DDT the very un-American ‘Iron Sheik’ into the mat).

Hong Sang-soo on the male condition. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

TWO MASTERS at this year’s Festival have travelled over to Paris, and both have delivered exquisite pieces of filmmaking. The first, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon has already been celebrated on Lumière (and will be in the future). The second, by Korean Hong Sang-soo is also truly wonderful, a sharp, hilarious take on relationships and loneliness – Paris captured through a brilliant artist’s eyes. And I’m not talking about Hong’s irredeemable protagonist. Hong has been (rather unfairly) called the Henry Miller of Korean cinema, however, ironically, Hong goes to Paris and loses all interest in sex (or at least, his character can’t get any). This is classic stuff, made by one of Korea’s premier auteurs.

Vanessa Beecroft’s infuriating adoption quest makes her a tortured artist at heart. By THOMASIN SLEIGH.

AT ONE STAGE in The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins artist Vanessa Beecroft turns to the camera and says “I feel bad for the father, I feel like I’m stealing his children”. “Well yes Vanessa,” I said aloud, “that’s because you are.” This documentary, directed by New Zealander Pietra Brettkelly, follows Beecroft while she is in Sudan photographing her latest body of work and attempting to get together the paperwork together to adopt Sudanese ‘orphan’ twins. Beecroft would have you believe that they are ‘orphans’ in desperate need of her motherly care, but it turns out they have a father. And Sudanese tradition dictates that on the death of their mother the children should be looked after by their extended family – which they have plenty of. The ‘orphan’ idea is just one of the delusions Beecroft constructs for herself.