The New Zealand International Film Festival is facing an uncertain future. Photo / 123RF
The New Zealand International Film Festival is facing an uncertain future. Photo / 123RF
The New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF), long a highlight of cinephile calendars, faces an uncertain future as it grapples with redefining itself in the wake of Covid-related disruptions that burned through reserves and left it teetering on the edge of insolvency.
The NZIFF announced its 2024 programme last month,limiting itself to four major centres (it has previously operated on a national level and last year screened in 17 regions) and announced staff cuts that saw its small team lose half a dozen programmers.
The downsizing follows a torrid post-Covid period in which the NZIFF burned through 40 years of accumulated reserves, auditors flagged concerns over whether it remained a going concern, and its short-term survival was only secured with an $850,000 bailout from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage (MCH).
Up until 2019 the festival, under the long-term leadership of director Bill Gosden, had consistent surpluses and growth in revenues. Ticket sales made up 90 per cent of revenue, making it almost independent of government and charitable support, and it built up $1.3 million in reserves over 40 years of operation.
Despite the festival’s outsized impact in popular culture, it was and remains a small organisation with volunteer trustees and its five most senior staff paid an average of only $93,000 per year, according to the most recent filed accounts.
Bill Gosden, late director of the New Zealand International Film Festival.
Gosden retired due to ill health in 2019, and died the following year. At the same time, pandemic restrictions either shuttered or severely limited cinema attendance and saw ticket sales sharply decline.
The NZIFF was forced to pivot to an online-only event in 2020 and its ticketing revenue declined more than 60 per cent. The following year, its major market of Auckland was subjected to crippling lockdowns and audience restrictions.
And, according to figures provided by the NZIFF, the bounce-back since has fallen far short of the pre-pandemic period, with ticket sales in the past three years combined equivalent to its last golden year in 2019.
Despite the partial recovery in 2023, last year’s festival sold only 137,995 tickets - around half the 264,322 sold four years prior.
NZIFF trustee Kaine Thompson said of the recent past: “You’re really dealing with a three-year period where we’re having to lean in pretty heavily into the reserves that the trust had built up over a long period of time through careful management to get to a place where it did have reserves for a rainy day. You just don’t expect that rainy day to be three years.”
NZIFF accounts filed with the Charities Register showed losses of $601,293 in 2020, followed by a further $622,791 in losses in 2021, leaving equity levels at just $55,928.
That led to auditors Deloitte flagging that “material uncertainty exists that may cast significant doubts on the trust’s ability to continue as a going concern”.
NZIFF general manager Sally Woodfield said the provision in late 2022 of $850,000 in MCH “regenerative” funding was a direct response to the looming prospect of insolvency.
“To receive emergency relief funding, you needed to be very close to the wall. And that’s reflected there in black and white in the accounts,” she said.
While the NZIFF was late in filing 2022 accounts to the Charities Register, said to be due to auditors experiencing backlogs, it released unaudited accounts to the Herald and provided some bottom-line financial and attendance figures for the 2023 year.
It reported a small ($113,804) surplus for 2022 and what is said to be further stabilisation (a $140,000 surplus, trustees said) in 2023.
But these recent years were cushioned by the MCH funding, of which $650,000 was booked in 2023 (suggesting without such support the NZIFF would have faced another $500,000 loss last year), with the remaining $200,000 allocated to support this year’s festival.
With reserves depleted, and the Ministry of Culture and Heritage tap now trickling off, NZIFF trustees said they had no choice but to retrench, with the option of hibernation considered not materially different from winding up.
“But in order to protect its future, we had to make some changes ... we need to get to the end of this year with a profit,” Thompson said.
“We really do have to make sure that we create - and I hate using these words - but we do create a minimum viable product going into this year, and then next year we can build on it a little bit.”
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism - including twice being named Reporter of the Year - and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting from business newspapers and national magazines.
