Film festival ready to hit town, minus a blockbuster

Without a big-name drawcard which helped produce record attendances last year, Bill Gosden could be excused if he felt a little anxious as the 2005 New Zealand Film Festival series draws near.

Sitting on a cosy-looking couch in his Wellington office while the huge sound of Batman Begins rumbles through from the Embassy theatre next door, the festival director is in a relaxed mood, confident he has a programme which will interest anyone whose interests are wider than Hollywood fare.

Last year's coup of getting Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 on the programme had a huge spin-off for the festival. Moore's award-winning attack on George W Bush only played in three festival venues last year, but the publicity generated from its appearance seemed to rub off on the entire festival.

Attendance was a record 261,000 nationwide, and only one of the 15 venues -- Nelson -- recorded a fall, and that was attributed in part to having to move the dates it was held.

Even Gosden isn't expecting to match those figures this year.

"Last year is a hard act to follow , and in terms of attendances I would be quite surprised if we were able to do that. There aren't the huge films that everybody feels that they have to see now this year but a number of other popular films should emerge."

This year's lack of a big-name festival film reflects a year in which Hollywood blockbusters such as Batman Begins, War Of The Worlds and Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith have dominated attention -- ironic in a year that the blockbusters were not able to save Hollywood from a massive slump in box office takings.

Perhaps filmgoers want more esoteric fare -- and with 150-plus films, the festival provides plenty of opportunity.

Gosden says one of the most interesting trends in the past 12 months is the number of films focusing on children, something this year's programme reflects.

Included among these is The Child, one of the festival's most notable acquisitions. The Belgian film, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Festival in May -- the same award Fahrenheit 9/11 won last year -- is about a young couple who sell their child on the black market. It is likely to show in Auckland and Wellington only.

Another film set around children is one of Gosden's personal favourites, Duck Season, which focuses on two 14-year-old boys in Mexico and their encounters with a pizza delivery boy and a slightly older girl.

"There are so many films that concern children that we were motivated to include children on our poster this year," Gosden said.

"A number of them look at kids in peril, while some look at childhood sexuality, which is a very delicate issue."

Delicate issues are of course part of film festivals, and it seems we would not have a film festival without controversy about films that some people think should not be screened at all.

This year only one film -- 9 Songs, a sexually explicit film directed by award-winning British director Michael Winterbottom -- was challenged by the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards. The festival won the right to show the film last week when an appeal authority upheld the censor's R18 certificate.

"I'm surprised there weren't more challenged, though I think (the society's secretary) David Lane is out of the country," Gosden says.

"But it was still draining. At a time when I'd rather have been negotiating for Cannes winners to get here I had to trudge down to Internal Affairs."

The festival has a solid collection of dramas from around the world, while documentaries play a strong part and this year there is a high number of sports films in particular, including Murderball, about wheelchair rugby.

The major retrospective is of 1950s American director Nicholas Ray, best-known for his James Dean vehicle Rebel Without A Cause, a new print of which screens at the festival. There are also silent movies with musical accompaniment; in Auckland it's the 1926 Russian silent The Battleship Potemkin, complete with the Auckland Sinfonia, while in Wellington it's the 1926 dinosaur film The Lost World, featuring the animator who would later work on the original King Kong.

Plus, of course, there's the totally weird, perhaps highlighted by 4, a Russian film which the festival programme says "among other things, purports to reveal the meaninglessness of the number four".

There's no New Zealand film with the profile as last year's In My Father's Den, which went on to make an impact around the world. Most of the major New Zealand-financed films are about two to three months away from completion.

More notable locally are the documentaries; perhaps the most interesting is The Kaipara Affair, in which director Barry Barclay examines efforts to look after the Kaipara Harbour environment.

What Gosden is confident about is that the quality of films the festival is offering is as good as it's ever been.

"We are turning down good work because there's not enough room for them," he said.

"A couple of months ago we took delivery of a very good local film about land mines but we had to reject it because a couple of days beforehand we'd invited (Australian documentary maker) Dennis O'Rourke's land mines film set in Afghanistan.

"It was a shame but we don't have the theatres available to accommodate everything we want. It is encouraging, however, that there are so many good films out there that we have to turn down."

* Programme

The New Zealand Film Festival begins in Auckland (July 8-24). From there it heads to Wellington (July 15-31), Dunedin (July 22-August 7) and Christchurch (July 28-August 14).

Afterwards it plays in Palmerston North (August 4-21), Hamilton (August 11-28), Napier (August 17-September 4), Tauranga (August 25-September 7), New Plymouth (September 1-14), Nelson (September 8-21), Masterton (October 12-26), Queenstown (October 27-November 9), Levin (November 3-16), Gisborne (November 10-23), Whangarei (November 17-30) and Greymouth.

- NZPA