Looking through this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival programme, long-time attendees might feel the event has wound the clock back. That’s not just because of its restored classics, which this year features Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (see below) from 1984, Terrence Malclick’s Days of Heaven from 1979, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom from 1960, and a 30th anniversary screening of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures.
The retrospective feel comes with a smaller programme offering something of the size it was a couple of decades back. That’s because this year’s festival is a much leaner offering as the event goes into austerity mode in an attempt to recover from the financial woes created since 2020. The disruption of Covid from 2020-22 – including a financially disastrous attempt at a hybrid streaming-and-cinema event in 2020, then an attempted return to normality in 2023 – left the trust behind the festival in precarious financial shape.
Last year’s festival sold some 138,000 tickets. That was a marked improvement on the three previous lockdown-affected years, but still well below the 264,000 tickets sold in 2019.
With the festival’s reserves depleted and government Covid cash injections no more, 2024 has become the lean, mean festival. It still has significant home-grown feature premieres plus imports and plenty of titles fresh from competition at last month’s Cannes Film Festival.
And it’s not as much of a cut-back as was first mooted. Originally, it was only returning to the four main centres but support from local exhibitors has helped bring cut-down versions of the festival to Hamilton, Nelson, Masterton, Napier, New Plymouth and Tauranga.
But the reduction is evident, especially in Auckland. There, the festival has retreated from some 400 screening sessions divided between 129 features across five cinemas in 2023 to 130 or so sessions of 80 features in three venues, including its traditional base at the Civic.
Nationally, the programme has dropped the past children’s, animation and “Incredibly Strange” categories. The last came with the departure of its long-time programmer Ant Timpson, whose stand-alone festival of weird and wacky films was absorbed into the NZIFF 20 years ago.
“The festival at times feels like a shadow of its former self, and like many others around the world, it will need to adapt in a major way to survive in the future,” Timpson said earlier this year.
“An outrageously pricey programmer like myself would be a burden to any festival, let alone one that needs major restructuring from top to bottom.”
The programme strand “Nocturnal” has the arty horror films that once would have been in the Incredibly Strange pages. Elsewhere are new categories that the festival publicity says “provide audiences with clear insight of the cinematic experiences they can expect and of the artistic identity of the selected films”.
It’s arguable whether the sections entitled “fresh competition”, “frames competition”, “portraits” or “visions” do that. Care to pick the documentary category from the above? (A: It’s “frames competition”). But if the programme has fewer films overall and it’s bit of a jumble to navigate, it has some obvious strengths.
The raft of local features is the strongest the festival has had in years. We Were Dangerous, the feature debut of director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, about a group of delinquent girls in a 1950s reform institution on an island in Lyttelton Harbour, has already won a special jury award at the South by Southwest film & TV festival in Texas.
It has been selected as the opening-night film in most centres – some 30 years since Heavenly Creatures, another film about errant Cantabrian female teens, opened the festival. But in Christchurch itself, opening-night honours go to Head South, expatriate director Jonathan Ogilvie’s valentine to the city’s punk years, of which he was a part. Among others, the coming-of-age drama stars pop star Benee, who also duets on the soundtrack with the film’s score composer Shayne Carter.
Head South already has the endorsement of one man who was there at the time. “The characters are spot on, and it oozes the weirdness of the Christchurch I remember,” says Roger Shepherd, who founded the Flying Nun label in the era.
Another much-anticipated local feature getting a NZ premiere is A Mistake, the adaptation of Wellington writer Carl Shuker’s acclaimed 2019 medical novel. It marks the return of director Christine Jeffs (Rain, Sylvia) to feature directing after a long absence – and possibly the fastest book-to-screen adaptation in NZ lit history. American actress Elizabeth Banks stars in the lead role.
Another Wellington writer getting a close-up is Dame Fiona Kidman, who is the subject of the documentary The House Within. Other local documentaries include Lucy Lawless’s directorial debut Never Look Away, about fearless Kiwi CNN photojournalist Margaret Moth, and Alien Weaponry: Kua Tupu Te Ara, about the te reo metal band.
The festival’s other music titles include In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, a three hour-plus study of the American songwriting great by American documentary great Alex Gibney. Eno, about big-brained producer-to-the-stars Brian Eno, comes with its own software that generates a different cut of the film on every screening in an attempt to parallel Eno’s own creative approach. And there are also Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line, about the political Oz rockers, and Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, about the Japanese electronic music pioneer and soundtrack composer who died last year.
This year may mark the first time in quite a few years the NZIFF hasn’t had the Cannes Palme d’Or winner in its line-up but it does have plenty of titles with that festival’s endorsement. That includes the best screenplay winner and closing-night film The Substance, by French director Coralie Fargeat, which, despite starring the seemingly safe Hollywood vets Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid, delivers “a wildly entertaining feminist body-horror feast” and is possibly the maddest thing in the programme.
Also from Cannes is the winner of the Grand Prix (effectively the Palme d’Or runner-up), Indian film All We Imagine As Light. The festival also has Grand Tour, by Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, which won the Cannes’ best director prize, Chinese film Black Dog, which won the best screenplay for director writer Guan Hu, and Norwegian drama Armand, which won director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel the Camera d’Or for best first feature.
NZIFF dates: Wellington, July 31-August 11; Auckland, August 7-18; Dunedin, August 14-25; Christchurch, August 15-September 1; Nelson, August 14-25; Tauranga, August 15-28; Napier, August 21-September 1; Hamilton, August 21- September 4; New Plymouth, August 21-September 4; Masterton, August 21-September 4.
Paris revisited
Wim Wenders on Paris, Texas
Earlier this year, while talking to the Listener, veteran German director Wim Wenders reflected on his 1984 Palme d’Or-winning film, which is appearing in the NZ International Film Festival in a digital 4K restoration.
“It changed my life. It exploded all over the world. In Russia alone, they made 3000 prints of it. It propelled me into another kind of world of film-makers and it was very hard in the end to overcome the success of Paris, Texas and remain myself and continue making what I was doing and not being tempted to just make something like that again. It took me three years to make another movie – the longest ever between my films – and then I made what I could only imagine was the most opposite film to Paris, Texas – Wings of Desire in black and white. Luckily, that risk paid off in the end.”
The film made long-time bit player Harry Dean Stanton a leading man.
“Harry was one of a kind and he had been in a hundred small parts in Hollywood. He was the best supporting actor you can imagine. But he never played a really leading part until Paris, Texas. It was almost tragic that it happened a bit too late in his life.
“Because, after the success of Paris, Texas, Harry decided to not play anything else but leading romantic parts. The problem was he didn’t get any. For years afterwards, Harry just toured as a musician. He had his own van and said, ‘I’d rather play music than go back to playing little bit parts.’ So, it was a little tragic in his life. Then again, he was a glorious actor, and he was proud that Paris, Texas showed his potential and showed what he was capable of.”
