The 37th Wellington Film Festival began with a bang last Friday and the first day took no prisoners. By JOE SHEPPARD.

HAVING won the coveted Oscar for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film, The Counterfeiters was the first of the heavy hitters at the Festival and certainly did not disappoint. The opening scenes of heady decadence in 1930s Berlin and outrageous affluence at Monte Carlo contrast sharply with the dark backdrop looming heavily over the film’s story: the famine and filth of the concentration camps and the attempted annihilation of Europe’s Jews. When war breaks out, convicted Jewish forger Salamon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch manages to walk a middle path, first as unofficial camp portraitist and propaganda artist, and then as the ringleader of the largest counterfeiting operation ever. (Apparently Himmler very nearly pulled off this radical plan to flood the Allied economies into collapse.)

A new take on old subject matter, The Counterfeiters breathes fresh life into many of the worn themes and clichés of the Second World War and the Holocaust, exposing ironies at every turn. For once the Nazis encourage Jewish people to make money and the captives are fed and shod well, yet many of these forgers actually deserved imprisonment for their crimes. When printer Adolf Burger – whose memoir The Devil’s Workshop inspired the screenplay – refuses to compromise his communist principles and prefers to sabotage the operation rather than collude with the German war machine, the boundary between Nazi and Jew is blurred as his colleagues desperately bully him to save their own skins.

Sturmbarnführer Herzog, the overseer of the operation, comes across as a canny manager when he attempts to goad the counterfeiters with admittedly ludicrous incentives – a carnival show and ping-pong table – before resorting to intimidation and blackmail. And Karl Markovics gives a commanding performance as the singular Sally – both petty crook and perfectionist, a streetwise survivor with artistic pretensions.

Of course it has long been de rigueur for filmmakers to communicate the horrific realities of war visually by focussing on the dirt, destruction and deprivation, but here the five senses are transformed into a key theme for the forgers, who overload on the purity of the soft, white bedsheets on their cots, and who need to identify every sound and smell around the camp. Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky stalks the prisoners with a blurry camera before leering claustrophobically into sharp focus, scrutinising everyone for contamination as keenly as Sally monitors the quality control of the banknotes through the lens of his own magnifying glass.

Sally and his band of criminals ultimately search for integrity – not in the ink-and-linen forgeries that fool even the Bank of England, but in their own moral fibre, as each prisoner comes to terms with the appalling consequences of their predicament. The same dilemma (Jewish self-preservation through Nazi collaboration) had been posed in the controversial German comedy Mein Führer, but here Ruzowitzky pulls no punches in presenting the full range of bleak options. There may be no honour among thieves and few jailbirds can afford to lose face, but there’s something universal and powerful about the camaraderie of these Kumpel or ‘mates’.

And speaking of the antipodean vernacular, Jane Campion represented the local neighbourhood in To Each His Own Cinema, thirty-six three-minute love letters to the movies by some of the festival circuit’s most celebrated auteurs. Campion was unfortunately the only exception to that glaring masculine pronoun in the title, and while other demographics were also under-represented – Wim Wenders, for example, had to provide the voice of Africa, and there was no animation to speak of – a barrage of idiosyncratic ideas showcased the range and scope of possible responses to the common international experience of going to the movies.

Three minutes is just enough for a tightly structured story, a dramatic monologue, an impressionist landscape or a political statement. For my money the films that worked best were the simple, whimsical sketches from the likes of Kitano Takeshi, Lars von Trier, Roman Polanski or Walter Salles. A few directors were probably guilty of taking it all a bit too seriously, but when the Cannes Festival commissions such a piece for the 60th anniversary celebrations, you can understand why people might wheel out The Big Guns.

Cleverly, the last word is left to Ken Loach, whose characters renounce the formulaic films and common crowd at the local multiplex in favour of the next bus to the football. Now there’s an idea – a sequel dedicated to the thirty-odd snapsnots of the beautiful game might be a way to bridge the continents once more with an equally male, visual flurry of brief representations about another of our more sublime pastimes.