“A Civilised Society charts the reversal of values in New Zealand’s education system driven by the free market reforms of successive Labour and National governments from 1984. In the documentary filmmaker Alister Barry demonstrates and laments the erosion of the right to free education in order to realise one’s fullest potential, and the resulting loss of the values of equal opportunity and community. It is also a film of protest and peaceful, but by no means passive, resistance to the policies of successive governments by teachers and their unions. Barry’s belief that “A high quality universal public education system is a fundamental requirement of an egalitarian society” pervades the film” writes HELEN SIMS in her dialogue with Alister Barry....[Read More]

In first impressions out of Auckland, JACOB POWELL in won over by this year’s Homegrown: Works on Film programme; is similarly impressed with The Secret Life of Words (“A slow-burn, bittersweet story with an aesthetic depth to easily immerse oneself in... one of my sleeper picks for Festival 2007”); and reports back from Day One via Death at a Funeral, Red Road, Cocaine Cowboys and A Mighty Heart. Also out of Auckland, DAVID LEVINSON offers a third take on Red Road: “In camoflauging the basis of the relationship between Jackie, a CCTV operator, and the mystery man she stakes out though, the film is piloted less by moral ambition, and more by a lust for atmospherics.”

Further previews come from BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM on Half Moon (“Reportedly based on Mozart’s Requiem, the film manages to wrest the desolation and supposed despair of the Kurdistan landscape and infuse it with a celebration of art, a tribute to the human spirit and a simple joy of being”), and TIM WONG on The Matsugane Potshot Affair (“Unlike previous outings, [Nobuhiro] Yamashita’s deadpan manoeuvrings don’t quite achieve the same comic abruptness, but the situations are just as awkward, the mood as always unpredictable, and the spare and observant humour resoundingly unconventional”) and Syndromes and a Century (“Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s most breathtaking film to date... a singular, spellbinding duplex of urban and tropical harmonies”). And in related coverage, Lumičre’s ALEXANDER BISLEY (also film critic for the Sunday Star Times) talks the Festival with Mark Broatch online at stuff.co.nz.