If films are like excursions into other people’s worlds, real or imagined, then the International Film Festival would have to be the safest, shortest, most inexpensive round-the-globe trip going. So, buckle up – and here are some suggestions for an itinerary.
Australia Two views of the neighbours: in Three Dollars, the excellent David Wenham and Frances O’Connor feature as a middle-class couple coping with a deregulated economy, while Three Indigenous Australian Shorts provide snapshots of present-day Aboriginal experience, including one by Ivan Sen (Beneath Clouds). Also intriguing is Sarah Watts’s use of animation and live action to illuminate human responses to a fatal accident (Look Both Ways). Watts and New Zealand-born producer Bridget Ikin will be in attendance.
Africa Moolaadé means protection, sought here by four West African girls who abscond from their circumcision ceremony. Given refuge by the stroppy second wife of a village elder, they precipitate a crisis in tradition and gender politics. Veteran film-maker Ousmane Sembene builds his story leisurely, circling it with seemingly simple and disparate sequences, but by the end of this beautiful, satisfying film you have a rich understanding of the colour, characters and complexity of contemporary village life.
A perfect companion piece to Hotel Rwanda, the documentary Shake Hands with the Devil gets up close and very personal to the Nick Nolte character in thatfilm, the Canadian UN commander Roméo Dallaire, as he returns to Rwanda 10 years after the genocide he feels he failed to halt. This is devastating stuff, not only for the revelations of the deep personal cost to Dallaire, or the unflinching images from that time, or even the West’s “moral default” that Dallaire so eloquently encapsulates in his speech at the University of Rwanda, but also for what could be the film’s most jolting moment for local audiences – the sight of New Zealand’s role in a crucial UN vote to withdraw peacekeepers.
Eastern Europe Emir Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies) is back with another of his mad, wonderful rollercoaster forays into Balkan life, Life Is a Miracle, a romantic comedy and, being Kusturica, much, much more. The Czech Republic features in three films: Czech Dream, a documentary of two film students perpetrating and filming a marketing hoax on a gullible populace, which recalls the balls of The Yes Men; Up and Down, by Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall), employing his customary mingling of comedy, drama and social commentary in the fortunes of two Prague families; and Faithless Games, gently compelling scenes from a rocky marriage between two musicians, with an economy of dialogue, lovely countryside and, fittingly, an appealing score. And staying with music, this year’s Live Cinema features Edmund Meisel’s “lost” score for Sergei Eisenstein’s classic story of mutiny, Battleship Potemkin.
Western Europe Proving that age has not tempered his political sensibility, Costa-Gavras returns with The Ax, a blackly funny and suspenseful take on downsizing, in which José Garcia (Après Vous) plays a redundant French executive who calculatingly disposes of his professional peers in order to position himself for a plum job. Thwarted and successful by turns, his encounters with his victims offer a pointed and sometimes poignant commentary on the downside of capitalism.
The latter gets another hit in The Edukators, in which a trio of young German activists escalate from relatively harmless japes against the anonymous rich to an unplanned hostage drama with one of them, who turns out to have had similar radical impulses in the 60s. It’s funny, surprising and keeps you on tenterhooks … and features Daniel Brühl, who stirred Judi Dench’s character’s hormones in Ladies in Lavender. Nice ending, too.
By contrast, A Common Thread is one to savour for its spare, quiet telling of two women – one younger, one older – bonding and healing each other through their common passion for embroidery. Sensuous as it is with colour, light and texture, its look also owes much to the screen presence of the two female leads, Lola Neymark and Ariane Ascaride (Marie-Jo and Her Two Lovers).
Besides the awarded (Oscar-winning The Sea Inside, Cannes Best Director Hidden, Palme d’Or The Child), there’s also the controversial. Michael Winter-bottom can always be relied on to surprise us with his next genre jump, but the most surprising thing about 9 Songs is not the explicitness of the sex, which some critics can’t seem to get past, but the way he, and his extraordinarily brave actors, capture its tenderness and eroticism. Think lovemaking, not sex. And the songs? Not my taste, but they punctuate the story as live performances, reflecting in mood the trajectory of the affair.
US If you’re not an aficionado of avant-garde music, the opening of Sorceress of the New Piano may have you checking the exits – but stay put, because director Evans Chan couldn’t have chosen a more perfect, non-threatening vehicle to disarm you with. Singapore-born, Juilliard-trained Margaret Leng Tan is the brilliant, ever-so-slightly eccentric interpreter of the music of John Cage, George Crumb and others, and the trip through her career is both enlightening and exhilarating, getting better at each turn in the story. See it – but note there is only one screening, and note, too, that Tan plays a brief toy piano recital before it. So what? Well, only after seeing the film will you realise why you will absolutely want to see her perform.
Asia Much to choose from this year, including the latest, and possibly – oh, no! – last Godzilla film, Godzilla Final Wars; Kim Ki-Duk’s Venice prizewinner 3-Iron, which is not about golf; Café Lumière, Taiwanese veteran director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s direct homage to the Japanese director we so often see inspiring his work, Ozu Yasujiro; Howl’s Moving Castle, the latest animated extravaganza from Spirited Away’s Miyazaki Hayao; and Delamu, a documentary by Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite) who travels the spectacular Tea Horse Road, the ancient route from southwest China to Europe that is now being opened up to the world. Not to mention the eagerly awaited 2046, Wong Kar-wai’s sequel to In the Mood for Love, which doesn’t disappoint. Its hypnotic evocation of emotional stasis, through performance, music and indelible images, is in complete contrast to the clash of American arrogance and Chinese values when two financiers, New York Jewish and Hong Kong Chinese, try to get some synergy going in The Men Who Would Conquer China.
New Zealand The Moving Image Centre’s strong Homegrown programme of short films includes Cannes entrant Nothing Special (Helena Brooks), Tama Tu (Taika Waititi of Two Cars, One Night fame) and AMP Young Achiever Reina Webster’s The Little Things. There are must-see documentaries from two veteran film-makers: a long overdue treatment of this country’s WWII conscientious objectors by Russell Campbell, Sedition, bound to be thorough and thought-provoking, and The Kaipara Affair by Barry Barclay, a study of a diverse community with a common goal.
And finally, Banana in a Nutshell, Roseanne Liang’s engaging documentary in which she and her white boyfriend seek her traditional Chinese parents’ permission to marry. It’s a lively mix of commentary, interview and reality TV, and though making it might be interpreted as an act of rebellion, it is just as much a love letter to her parents, using the way she knows best – her camera.
Auckland International Film Festival, July 8-24. Other centres to follow.