When considering your options for the New Zealand International Film Festival screening at Hamilton's Lido Theatre, don't book for anything; whatever you do, don't plan your life around any particular screening of any particular film.
Try this instead. Wake up on any given morning during the festival, feel like watching a movie, have a look through the festival calendar in the middle of the programme and pick a title you fancy. Or close your eyes and jab a finger at the page. Either way, step out of your comfort zone and try something new.
I'm a radio-head from my childhood. I love radio, listening to it, appearing on it, making it. Watching Nicolas Philibert's The House of Radio, I was a pig in pig-stuff. I don't think I've been as blissed out as this watching a film for ages. It's a single day in the life of Radio France, where dozens of stations share a giant Parisian cathedral dedicated to the wireless. News, talk, culture, music - classical, jazz and hip hop.
In Oh Boy, Tom Schilling's Berlin student drop-out Niko Fischer mooches around the city trying to find a cup of coffee, thwarted by friends, family and strangers across one long day. There's something about black and white that makes this sort of thing seem like it has more going on than it has.
Also winning, literally and figuratively, is The Rocket, an Australian film set in Laos. An indefatigable young boy, Sittiphon Disamoe, believes himself to be cursed with rotten luck and fate proves him right. He never gives up, though, and Kim Mordaunt's engaging film builds to an explosive and satisfying climax. Crowd-pleasing.