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In our preview of this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival programme, I pondered which director has had the most movies in the event and its forerunners.
The thought arose because this year’s fest includes many titles by hardy arthouse perennials including Wim Wenders, Aki Kaurismäki, Todd Haynes and Claire Denis. Locally, Bread and Roses by Gaylene Preston, long a festival fixture, is having screenings of a digitally restored version.
My best guesses were Wenders and Preston.
But surely someone would know? Or they might just have fun making an educated guess. Off went emails to festival folk past and present, staff and festival trust members, asking for their picks of most frequent screen visitor, exotic and domestic in the past five or so decades. Back came the replies – and eventually a definitive answer.
Festival godfather Lindsay Shelton, got in touch:
“The 10 years (1972-81) that I directed the Wellington Film Festival, long before it changed its name to NZIFF, was a glorious era of major European filmmakers. We were able to show all the new work of Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, Varda, Bresson, Tavernier, Fassbinder, Visconti, the Tavianis, Herzog, Wenders. Now more than 40 years later, Wenders is the only one still making films, with his newest in the 2023 NZIFF programme direct from Cannes.
“New Zealand directors? When I started the film festival, there were very few. Vincent Ward was the only local director represented in our first 10 festivals, with his first two films.”
Head of Programming Michael McDonnell shared his opinion:
“My guess for international filmmaker would be Claire Denis; we’ve shown all her films except for two. Now that her films have started to be restored, we’ve already shown one of them again, Beau Travail in 2021, while a restoration of her first film Chocolat will screen in this year’s festival. Other likely contenders would be Hong Sang-soo, based on his relentless productivity, which is impossible to keep up with; Eric Rohmer, who was similarly productive back in the early days of the festival, and also Werner Herzog with some great documentaries added in more recent years.
“For New Zealand filmmaker, my guess would be Gaylene Preston, as I think the festival has screened almost all of her films and she has made both features and documentaries. The other New Zealand documentary maker who has featured very prolifically in the festival would be Costa Botes.”
Trust chair Catherine Fitzgerald offered:
“My picks are Wim Wenders – I think I saw Kings of the Road and The American Friend at the film festival way back when (but it was much more likely 10 years later at the Film Society) and yet was lucky enough to see Perfect Days in Cannes this year; I am looking forward to Anselm in July. Wim Wenders is one of the most prolific independent directors – he just keeps enchanting us with sometimes the most unlikely of subjects.
“Of course, Charlie Chaplin has to be up there thanks to Live Cinema, where his wonderful films have been revived and relished afresh in the mighty Civic.
“But for New Zealanders, I’m guessing Shirley Horrocks who seemingly has a never-ending range of fascinating portraits to share, or Costa Botes. I do remember Costa’s first short film Stalin’s Sickle at the film festival and there have been many films, short, long, drama and documentary right up to the very fine and most unexpected When the Cows Come Home last year. I suspect that Tony Hiles with, I think, 10 films on Michael Smither, surely takes the prize for the most films on one subject screened at the NZIFF.
“Your question reminds me that the NZIFF has greatly enriched my life since I ‘discovered’ it as a teenager in Dunedin.”
Trustee Andrew Langridge said:
“If you’re looking for the longest unbroken string of features, we’ve programmed every film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien since A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985), making an unbroken string of 13 features. Claire Denis comes close, with 14 features programmed, but we missed a couple (S’en fout la mort and Bastards).”
Trustee Robin Laing observed:
“Eric Rohmer must be up there with his films programmed since the 70s … the thing is that we would not have seen any of these filmmakers in a cinema if it wasn’t for the festival.”
And finally, from trustee Chris Hormann:
“My guesses would be Aki Kaurismäki for foreign features and I suspect Andrew is on the ball with Shirley Horrocks (I was going to guess Gaylene Preston but I’m sure Shirley surpasses her).”
Having offered his earlier guess McDonnell picked up the ball and ran with it – or he headed to the cupboard where all the festival programmes from past years were kept, got out his torch and his notebook.
Here is the definitive list of most directorial appearances at the NZIFF and its Wellington and Auckland predecessors.
Take a bow, veteran German director and sometime actor Werner Herzog, wherever you are, for having had 26 films feature in past programmes.
And the NZ director with 12? Documentary maker and frequent profiler of Kiwi artists, Shirley Horrocks.
The full results of McDonnell’s survey and how many titles have featured under director’s names:
- 26 - Werner Herzog
- 18 - Hong Sang-soo
- 17 - Eric Rohmer
- 16 - Ken Loach, Krzysztof Kieślowski
- 15 - Frederick Wiseman, Les Blank
- 14 - Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-Hsien
- 12 - Jean-Luc Godard, Nick Broomfield, Shirley Horrocks, Kim Longinotto, Wim Wenders
- 11 - Jia Zhang-ke, Jim Jarmusch, Takeshi Kitano, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Sergei Loznitsa
- 10 - Abbas Kiarostami, Agnès Varda, Alfred Hitchcock, Costa Botes, Maurice Pialat, Olivier Assayas, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Richard Linklater, Zhang Yimou
- 9 - Alex Gibney, Bertrand Tavernier, Carlos Saura, Claude Chabrol, Guy Maddin, Gaylene Preston, Heddy Honigmann, Lars von Trier, Manoel de Oliveira, Michael Haneke, Michael Winterbottom, Nicholas Ray, Tony Hiles, Tsai Ming-liang
- 8 - Aki Kaurismäki, David Cronenberg, Jacques Rivette, John Sayles, Hayao Miyazaki, Orson Welles, Pedro Almodóvar, Stephen Frears, Wong Kar-wai
- 7 - Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Barry Barclay, Chantal Akerman, Christian Petzold, Dardenne Brothers, Edward Yang, Errol Morris, Florian Habicht, Hal Hartley, Ira Sachs, Jane Campion, Margarethe von Trotta, Martin Scorsese, Mike Leigh, Morgan Neville, Nikita Mikhalkov, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Otar Iosseliani, Peter Greenaway, Ross McElwee, Taviani Brothers, Victor Kosskovsky
- 6 - Alan Rudolph, Atom Egoyan, Bertrand Blier, Chen Kaige, D.A. Pennebaker, Derek Jarman, Gillian Armstrong, István Szabó, Jafar Panahi, Jan Hřebejk, Joel Coen, Kira Muratova, Max Ophüls, Miike Takashi, Robert Altman, Robin Greenberg
