Judge blocks controversial film

By CATHERINE MASTERS

The High Court has pulled the plug on the planned screening of controversial French film Baise-Moi.

An interim injunction has prevented it from being shown at the Incredible Film Festival tomorrow night.

Another sexually violent film, the Japanese-made Visitor Q, has also had to be withdrawn by organisers because of a last-minute decision by the Film and Literature Board of Review.

Both films' R18 classifications are to be reviewed.

Festival director Anthony Timpson said the decisions could have been scripted by Monty Python "if it wasn't so unfunny".

He condemned the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards, which had pushed for the films to be banned, as "a group of narrow-minded fundamentalists" who had been allowed to decide what was fit for the entire population to see.

In the High Court in Wellington today, Justice Grant Hammond issued a temporary restraining order on Baise-Moi until an appeal by the society against its R18 classification had been heard.

Mr Timpson, who stands to lose more than $50,000 from the decision, said the judge's decision "makes a mockery of the entire classification system and his comment that we can play the film next year is of no consequence to me".

It was unlikely the appeal would be heard quickly and the decision overturned in time for Baise-Moi. to be shown by the end of the festival next month.

But if the board of review "pulled finger", it was possible Visitor Q could still screen for some of the festival.

David Lane, secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards, said the High Court decision had broken new ground because it was the first time anyone had achieved an interim restriction order on any publication pending a High Court review under the Films Act 1993.

He objected to Mr Timpson calling his group fundamentalists, saying the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act set out clear guidelines as to what was objectionable.

"There's a level of hypocrisy in society where people are tut-tutting about young men using broomsticks [on another student], yet we can all go and sit and hold hands in a theatre and watch women get raped and men get guns shoved up their rear ends and blown away, all of it done in a very graphic way."

Mr Timpson's lawyer, John Cox, said the court decision was a serious inroad into the Bill of Rights and freedom of expression, especially given that the film had been through the classification system and then the review board.

Baise-Moi will be replaced by a new print of In the Realm of the Senses, a Japanese erotic classic that Mr Timpson says caused a "huge commotion" in the 1970s, pushing censorship to the boundaries.

Visitor Q will be replaced with additional screenings of Gonin, a Japanese gangster film containing sex and violence.