Photo: NZIFF
A new director and refreshed programming team means a fresh start for a beleaguered New Zealand International Film Festival. Dan Slevin previews five feature films from their 2024 schedule.
The first thing one notices about this year's film festival programme is how contemporary it is. It's up to date. It's fresh.
Not long ago NZIFF would select their programme from the entire 12-month period between events, including plenty of picks from the big-name September festivals: Venice, Toronto and Telluride.
Now, though, most of the headline titles from those shows have already moved through the release cycle, meaning that many have already been, gone, and are out the other side, and only a handful feature this year in Aotearoa.
Most of the titles that make up this year's programme have 2024 as their release date, ink still wet on reviews from Berlin, Sundance and, of course, Cannes.
Turnaround times are short and some of these films are arriving before they've had a chance to really make their reputations. Every year I find myself reading about films I think should appear at NZIFF only to find that they already did, I just didn't realise it.
I've managed to track down five of this year's programme in advance, to hopefully add a little bit of noise in support of them when you are booking your tickets.
If you want thought-provoking quality drama: The Teachers' Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer)
Leonie Benesch plays Carla, a first-year middle school teacher whose idealism is confronted by the challenging reality of school politics. The school is suffering a spate of petty thefts and there's no sign of a culprit - neither the student body nor the faculty are offering up a suspect.
Carla sees plenty of examples of everyday dishonesty go unaddressed so naively takes matters into her own hands. Her problems are multiplied by a disastrous reaction from school leadership, a crusading student newspaper and a parents' WhatsApp group that's riddled with innuendo and sanctimony.
Anyone who has been involved in a workplace dispute where a complaints process gets weaponised, and the real issues are forgotten, will squirm in their seats throughout this superbly paced drama as characters take turns to make unwise decisions with the best of intentions.
If you want to be carried away by music: Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus
I had thought that the 2017 documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda was the swansong of the great Japanese composer who passed away in March last year. It turns out he had one last gift for us, a solo recital of his favourite compositions filmed by his son Neo Sora, a few months before his death.
As befits a family affair (his wife is also a producer), it is intimate but also a little distancing. There are no titles (until the end) to help us follow which pieces are being performed. I had a few "that sounds familiar" moments during his celebrated film scores but the acoustic re-conception of some of his earlier electronic music can sound a little bit samey after a while.
The same goes for Bill Kirstein's black and white camerawork which focuses a lot on the machine of the piano, while Sakamoto's struggles to find the energy to continue remind us that his own physical machine was breaking down.
Another music documentary that I can recommend is In Restless Dreams, Alex Gibney's epic (two movie length television episodes played together) portrait of Paul Simon. Fans won't find much that's new in the biographic material, but the presentation is flawless, and the extra length means that the music gets extended chances to shine.
Where the film really goes to new territory are the sections where we watch Simon producing his most recent album, Seven Psalms, the first time a set of songs has come to him - he says - in dreams and not wrestled out of his professional songwriting craft.
Simon is pushing 80 and his body is also failing him. To his great distress, his hearing is going, among other painful ailments, and that adds a sense of urgency to the making of the record - urgency that belies its understated beauty.
If you want to be challenged and bewildered in equal measure: The Beast (La Bête)
You'll either think this is the biggest load of pretentious tosh or you'll be moved by a bold vision of a post-emotional human future. A perfect film festival film, in other words, destined to be argued about in coffee shops for hours afterwards.
Léa Seydoux (Gabrielle) and George Mackay (Louis) play star-crossed lovers, versions of themselves destined to meet across history. Firstly, in pre-WWI Paris: she is a musician, married to a dollmaker and attracted to Louis, but their relationship is doomed to meet a tragic end.
In 2014, she is an aspiring actress in Los Angeles, and he is a desperate 'involuntary celibate' with anger issues. And in 2044, artificial intelligence has developed a procedure to remove human emotions because they make us so unhappy, but the treatment for Gabrielle does not stick.
Bertrand Bonello's film hops around between these time periods, laying clues like landmines, and for long periods it was only Seydoux at her very best that kept me interested. I was quite taken with his ending though, but my companion was not.
Like all good festival films, this one requires diligence and concentration, and therefore a large dark room, big screen, and no distractions.
If you want to feel optimistic about things: The Monk and the Gun
Much easier to follow - if only because the central premise is repeated often by various characters - is this delightful movie about the birth of democracy in Bhutan. In 2006, the king of this tiny Himalayan nation - realising that the modern world couldn't and shouldn't be kept at bay any longer - announced that he was stepping down as absolute ruler and introducing parliamentary democracy.
Pawo Choyning Dorji's film is set during those early days when the people of Bhutan had to be taught how to vote. And why to vote. In 2006, election officials are touring the country to run mock elections, where the newly enfranchised citizenry can practice posting ballots.
But not everyone is happy at these developments. Party politics starts dividing families and communities. A local lama asks one of his monks to go and find a gun from somewhere so that "things can be made right". The only firearm to be found is an antique American Civil War rifle but it turns out that there's also an American collector in town determined to secure it for himself.
Utterly charming, as slow moving as you might imagine, but still deftly constructed, it was a pleasure to see democracy not taken for granted for a change.
Famously, Bhutan prioritises a Gross National Happiness index rather than the economic Gross Domestic Product statistics we rely on, and I'm looking forward to the festival documentary Agent of Happiness which follows one of today's surveyors around the landlocked nation to find out whether Bhutan truly is the happiest place on Earth.
If you want to see something that you have never, ever, seen before: Sasquatch Sunset
Back before the unwitting programmer purge of early 2024, NZIFF would have an Incredibly Strange strand of films of which Sasquatch Sunset would have been this year's headliner. (There is a strand this year called Nocturnal which does a similar job of highlighting the weird, the wonderful and the 'midnight movies' destined to become cult hits.)
Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek and co-director Nathan Zellner play a family of sasquatches roaming the forests of North America. We watch as they groom, forage, shag and get stoned on nature's psychedelic bounty.
Over four seasons, we get to know them - the alpha, the carer, the seeker and the child who appears to talk to himself by puppeteering his own hand. We also get a sense of why there are so few of these mythical creatures left. Indeed, this family may be the very last.
The circle of life is never very far away for this family, with - fair warning - all of the viscera that involves.
The performances under all that prosthetic technology are a marvel, especially Keough who manages to project a deep sense of soulfulness through eyes that can see the world but don't understand it why it seems determined to cause them such pain.
This is one of those little cinematic miracles where the weirder it gets, the more profound it becomes, and is destined to become one of my favourite films of the year.
The New Zealand International Film Festival opens in Wellington on 31 July before moving to Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and - thanks to the campaigning of local film societies - Napier, Hamilton, New Plymouth, Tauranga, Masterton and Nelson.
