Thursday morning, I posted a comment on Facebook: “Preparing myself for the most stressful day of the year.” Film Festival tickets were going on sale, and remembering the last few years fighting with a website that was constantly crashing or failing in one way or another, I was resigned to another few hours of frustration as I tried to secure my tickets.
It wasn’t a promising start. As in the past few years, I broke my purchases up into smaller groups, in order to minimise the risk of the website crashing right as I was finishing a massive purchase. I selected my first group of films, went through to the page where I told them how many tickets I wanted for each film, went to progress, and... nothing. Just a screen with three dots cycling around. I was sitting there waiting for several minutes until I remembered that last year there had been some advice about not using Internet Explorer on the site. I pulled up the site on Chrome, and it actually worked. Yay!
That is, until I tried to select my seats, to avoid the automatic seat allocation (which is always rubbish). My first seat selection worked perfectly. But my second seat selection actually changed my first, so I was sitting in the same seat for both films, even though the second film was already selling well and my seat was much worse for that film than the first. I tried to fix the seat for the first film, but just got caught in a cycle where I would select a seat, click OK, and return to the same seat selection screen. I closed out of it, and went back in. Same result – getting the tickets was perfect, selecting the seats was non-functional. Then when I closed out, I found myself logged out of the festival website. Memories of past years, of the site logging me out and not letting me back in, flooded my memory. But I was surprised to be able to log back in quite easily. By now I could see the major setpiece screenings were already selling well, even though tickets had only been on sale for 10 or 15 minutes, so I decided to abandon the seat selection and just take what they give me. It worked; half an hour after tickets went on sale, I had all of my tickets purchased. I’m not happy with some of my seats, particularly in the smallest screens – I prefer to be centred to the screen, and most of my films in those smallest screens find me sitting quite sharply to one side or the other, making the angle to the screen quite bad – but I can live with it, especially since the purchasing experience was otherwise really smooth.
Good work, film festival website people. While there’s still work to allow people to decide for themselves where they would prefer to sit, the preparation for the peak demand when tickets went on sale was finally perfect. And for that I am grateful.
Anyway, the films I’ll be seeing are:* The Whistlers
* La Belle Époque
* Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
* Apollo 11
* Varda by Agnès
* Apocalypse Now: Final Cut
* Midnight Family
* The Farewell
* Meeting Gorbachev
* In Fabric
* Judy & Punch
* High Life
* Daguerréotypes
* Monos
* Amazing Grace
* Loro
* Maria by Callas
* What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
* The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
* We Are Little Zombies
* Andrei Rublev
* Vagabond
* Who You Think I Am
* The Nightingale
* Escher: Journey into Infinity
* Fly By Night
* The Day Shall Come
* Under the Silver Lake
* Vivarium
* The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil
* Koyaanisqatsi
* Ruben Brandt, Collector
* The Wild Goose Lake
* Les Misérables
* Jacquot de Nantes
* Kind Hearts and Coronets
* The Third Wife
[EDIT - And a week later they announced a screening of Midsommar, the new horror film from Ari Aster, director of Hereditary. Midsommar has been getting a lot of fantastic buzz, so I was very excited by the announcement. It should be a fun experience with a full Embassy crowd.]
Last week my favourite podcast, Battleship Pretention, released an episode covering the work of the late Agnes Varda. Listening to the episode, I realised I've never seen any of her films, so it was a wonderful surprise to open the festival programme two days later to find they had scheduled a retrospective of five of her films, including two films (Daguerreotypes and Le Bonheur) cited by one of the show's hosts as his favourite Varda films. (Add to that the film society's upcoming screening of Faces Places, and I'm going to rapidly become a Varda expert.)
The classic film selection this year is quite exciting.
* I rewatched Kind Hearts and Coronets only a few months ago, but it's such a gloriously fun and funny film, with an incredible performance by Alec Guinness, that I'm not going to complain about watching it again on the big screen.
* I'm also excited by the screening of Apocalypse Now: Final Cut. I saw Apocalypse Now Redux at the film festival in 2002, and while it's a wonderful cinematic experience, the Redux version is just too long and bloated, with the French Plantation scene in particular just feeling prolonged and aimless at exactly the wrong time in the film. Hopefully this Final Cut will be a good middle-ground between the too-short original cut and the too-long Redux edit.
* I've never seen the other two classic films showing. I've heard great things about Koyaanisqatsi, which pairs documentary footage from around the world with a legendary score by Philip Glass to form a film that abandons any type of storytelling and that is primarily about being an experience for the audience, so seeing this on the big screen should be ideal. And then there's Andrei Rublev. This will be my fifth film by Andrei Tarkovsky, and I haven't really cared for any of his other works that I've seen (including Stalker, which screened in the festival back in 2017), but I always live in hope of discovering something I've never seen before and understanding why a filmmaker like Tarkovsky is so revered.
Usually there are a few films that I was hoping the festival would be showing but that never make it onto the schedule. However this year, I can't think of anything missing; every film I looked for makes an appearance in the programme.
* I was most excited to see the Japanese film We Are Little Zombies listed, even if only for a single screening. It's supposed to be an utterly joyous experience about teen orphans forming a pop band, and was literally the first film I checked for when I got my programme.
* I was pleased when Under the Silver Lake was one of the first announcements. The reviews have mostly been mixed-to-negative, but some people really like it, and there's something appealing to me about a film that can be so divisive (plus I loved It Follows). I'm curious to see which way I fall.
* There's an Aretha Franklin concert film called Amazing Grace, with footage shot close to 50 years ago but unavailable for all this time because of technical problems that could only now be resolved. It's supposed to be an incredible experience, and I'm excited to hear it with a fantastic cinema sound system.
* I've been hearing great things about High Life, an introspective science-fiction film that is the first English-language movie from Claire Denis. It sounds like a strange, fragmented story that has been compared to 2001 (which I love) and Solaris (which I don't). Should be interesting.
* As a fan of both the Victor Hugo book and the musical, I'm curious about Les Misérables, a film that is apparently not a retelling of the original story, but that instead tells a wholly new story exploring the same themes as the original but in a modern context.
* I was fascinated by the previous films of Peter Strickland (the horror film Berberian Sound Studio, in which the gore was kept off screen while we watch the sound effects artist creating the sound of people being torn apart, and the lesbian BDSM-inflected chamber drama The Duke of Burgundy). Peter Strickland makes bizarre, fascinating, personal films; had any other filmmaker made a film about a demonic dress I probably would have dismissed it, but when Strickland makes In Fabric, I'm curious.
* I was a bit uncertain whether to add The Nightingale to my schedule. It's supposed to be really good, and I did love Jennifer Kent's previous film The Babadook, but the stories about walkouts due to the number of rape scenes gave me pause. I've decided to trust that the fact it was written and directed by a woman means that there's care and consideration in the inclusion of those scenes.
* I'm glad to finally see Apollo 11, a documentary about the moon landing compiled from footage that was shot at the time on large format 70mm film and was then misplaced and lost, kept in pristine condition. It's a shame I won't get to see it on the IMAX screen, since that was apparently an incredible experience, but it will still be exciting to see the film on the big screen.
* People seem to really love the Awkwafina comedy The Farewell. I'm yet to get the Awkwafina thing, since I've found her annoying when I've seen her in other films, but this film seems to call for more nuance and subtlety than her usual oversized characters, and I'm hoping she can deliver that.
It's going to be a rough film festival. After the Paramount closed 18 months ago, it seemed like the festival would be badly affected by the loss of one of its main central city venues, so it was fantastic when Reading Courtenay made itself available as a venue, significantly adding to the number of screens within walking distance of each other. But now Reading Courtenay is closed as an earthquake risk, and they've had to spread the festival out even wider to find venues. I was glad to see them add the Lighthouse Cuba as a centre city venue. I have no idea what the City Gallery is like as a movie theatre, but I'm going to find out. They're even having screenings in Porirua; I have a couple of days where I have to rush from work all the way out to Porirua (in rush hour) for an early evening screening, before driving back into town to catch my second film of the night. That will be stressful, and exhausting. But hopefully it will be worth it.
[EDIT - And sadly, something came up last minute that meant that I had to cancel one night's screenings. I didn't mind missing Le Bonheur too much, since it is an classic film and therefore easily accessible elsewhere. I was more disappointed about missing Long Day's Journey into Night, since it seems like a title unlikely to get a theatrical release, and since it's a 3D film watching it at home won't have the same effect without a 3D TV.]
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