Last year I commented that, after three years of interrupted, delayed, shortened film festivals, we were finally out of that period, and hopefully back to enjoying the full film festival that I love so much. We all knew the COVID years must have taken a real financial blow, but it seemed as though the festival was back.
Sadly, it seems my optimism may have been misplaced. The first hint to its ongoing issues came earlier in the year when we learned that the festival was ending its nearly-20-year-long relationships with both the Square Eyes Film Foundation and with Ant Timpson (who programmed the Incredibly Strange strand). This was explained when it was reported that the festival is in worse condition that we may have realised. And so this year once again it's a stripped-back festival, running over just 11 days, with a smaller selection of movies (just 87 titles) and a smaller number of cinema venues. (The number of regions getting festival screenings also have reduced, from 17 down to 10 - unfortunate for film lovers in those areas affected.)
And so we just have to do what we can to support the festival as it seeks to rebuild back to the position of strength it once had. I'm trying to play my part - it's not quite as crammed as it might usually be, since the limited number of films and of venues mean that it's much harder to have the options to fill gaps, but I'm still seeing 22 films. So the films I'll be seeing this year will be:
The first thing that strikes me about this year's schedule is just how great the retro screenings are. Days of Heaven, Heavenly Creatures, Peeping Tom, and Paris, Texas are all great films, and I am very excited to see them all - especially the first two, which I have never seen on the big screen before.
A couple of years ago, the festival screened two films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi - both films I was interested in seeing, but was unable to fit either into my schedule. But I got to see and love Drive My Car after it was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and then followed it up with the similarly great Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, so I'm definitely excited for his new work, Evil Does Not Exist.
I've been hearing how good The Teachers' Lounge is for close to a year at this point, and it was one of the first titles I looked for when the schedule came out, so I'm excited to finally see it. Similarly, in the past few months, I've been hearing raves about The Beast and Janet Planet, although I've managed to avoid knowing too much about those films, so I look forward to being able to engage with the conversation.
There's some good music documentaries here. I'm very excited about a 3 1/2 hour film about Paul Simon, since that should give enough time to get into some depth exploring his work. And while Ryuichi Sakamoto is a composer whose work I've never really sought out, whenever I'm watching a film he composed I tend to enjoy his work, so it will be interesting to see this documentary shot shortly before he passed away.
Sasquatch Sunset was a marginal call for me - it has built a reputation for being a challenging film to watch, and while some people love it, some people really hate it. Ultimately the thing that made my decision to see it was just timing - there was nothing else I could see at that time that held any interest to me. So I'll just hope to be in the "love it" camp.
And then there's just a bunch of films that sound intriguing and that will hopefully yield some real highlights.
The festival starts in a couple of days, and I am very excited.
As we get to the 2024 film festival in a couple of days, it's time I get around to posting my reflections on the films from the 2023 festival. Usual disclaimers - written in great haste shortly after the film, not a "review", just an attempt to capture my response and reflections, written primarily for myself to help me remember each film given the mass of movies I'll be seeing in a short space of time.
[Comments on the 39 films I saw during the 2023 film festival, after the jump]
The film festival starts tomorrow, and it seems weird to realise it's been four years since we had a proper traditional film festival. 2020 of course was the year of the deeply unsatisfying mostly online festival with just a handful of in-person sessions. In 2021 the festival left its traditional mid-winter positioning and moved to November, and then the screenings were all socially distanced due to a COVID outbreak, so the entire festival just felt empty. In 2022, we returned to our usual mid-winter timing, but it was a shorter festival - just 10 days rather than the traditional 17 days. But now, in 2023, we return to a complete 17-day festival, in its traditional time of year spanning July and August, with full screenings that are actually full. I cannot wait.
I've been enjoying this recent run of "Who, me? I'm not making movies!" documentary-style movies that Jafar Panahi has been making ever since Iran banned him from making movies, but the recent lifting of his travel ban is hopefully a sign that he can get back to making more traditional films if he wants to, and No Bears will be his last film that has to filmed in this way.
I'm bracing myself for the documentary filmed at a Paris hospital, De Humani Corporis Fabrica - I normally don't enjoy even the mildest of medical detail, so I'm nervous about what I'll see. But I've heard such a strong response to the film that I've decided to give it a shot.
Wim Wenders is clearly having a big year. A film about a toilet cleaner in Japan seems like a strange subject for a a German filmmaker, but Perfect Days is apparently pretty good. Meanwhile, remembering how effectively he used the extra dimension in his 3D documentary Pina makes me intrigued to see him working in that medium for another documentary about an artist in Anselm 3D.
You can usually rely on there being an interesting select of films about film. As a fan of both Hitchcock and the cinema documentaries by Mark Cousins, I'm interested to see what he does when approaching the Master of Suspense, while as a lover of film scores I'm excited to see a documentary celebrating the work of the maestro Ennio Morricone, arguably the greatest film composer of all time. And, as someone who is passionate about physical media, I'm intrigued by Kim's Video, telling the story of what happened to a massive collection of movies after the closure of the titular video store .
There's a mini-theme of people trapped and trying to escape, with Inside about a thief trapped in an apartment, and the annoyingly titled #Manhole about someone trapped in a manhole. Similarly, I'll be seeing two different dramas taking place within the French legal system(Anatomy of a Fall and Saint Omer). There's also a weird theme of films about teens being groomed into sexual relationships with adults - as someone who remembers the news in the mid-90s, I'm intrigued by the new Todd Haynes film May December apparently inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau case, while I've had Palm Trees and Power Lines noted as a film to look out for the past 18 months, ever since reading strong reviews when it premiered at Sundance last year.
The "classic" strand is interesting this year - it's almost entirely filled with films I've never even heard of, let along seen - The Munekata Sisters, Chocolat, as well as Detour (which I could not fit into my schedule. Only The Innocents was a title I was familiar with, and I'm excited to finally be crossing that one off my list.
Finally, I've heard great things about the new Kelly Reichardt film (Showing Up), the new adaptation of Judy Blume's most famous novel (Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.), and the heartwarming movie about the journey of an escaped donkey (EO). I also hear Past Lives, the first film from playwright Celene Song, apparently inspired by her own experience reflecting on what might have been with her childhood friend, is supposed to be quite something.
So that's this years festival. It's exciting to see it back to normal, where hopefully it will remain in place for many years.
About seven years ago, filmmaking duo the Daniels released their first film, Swiss Army Man. And there was a lot that I really liked in the film - it was a fascinating exploration of friendship, loneliness, love, and regret, anchored by a fantastic central performance by Daniel Radcliffe. But there was a lot in the film that I genuinely hated - after all, Daniel Radcliffe was playing a corpse that farts all the time and has an erection that works as a compass. The almost non-stop juvenile fascination with toilet humour made the film feel as though it was made by young teenagers rather than two adult men. So while there was a lot of potential in that film, if you had told me that the second film from that duo would be frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar, I think my brain might have broken at that idea.
[Thoughts on Everything Everywhere All At Once, and all nine other Best Picture nominees - The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, Triangle of Sadness, Tár, Women Talking, and All Quiet on the Western Front - after the jump]
As usual, I sought to keep track of my feelings of the films I saw during this year's film festival by posting some comments about each film on Facebook, before collecting those posts here. These were written pretty much within a day, maybe two, of the screenings so they really do record my immediate response, and they were written in a bit of a rush, with all the rough drafting that implies. And my usual disclaimer - these are not "reviews"; they are just reflections, an attempt to record how I felt about each film. They're mainly written for myself - they allow me to process my feelings about each movie, and also ensure that I don't finish the festival having forgotten about half the films I saw. That said, I'm also aware that other people may read these posts, and I would love if my comments would make someone want to see a film that I loved, so I do try to take this external audience into account when I'm writing.
Anyway, here are my initial responses to the films of this year's festival.
The last two years for the film festival were tough. Between the inevitable but anticlimactic shift to a largely online festival in 2020 and the frustration of cancelled legs and mandatory half-full cinemas in cities where the 2021 festival was able to take place, it's understandable that it's apparently not in strong health. Which is why they've described this year's festival as a "year of rebuilding", with a programme that is dramatically cut down - it's only a 10-day festival (rather than the usual 17 days), and whereas last year about 170 films screened, this year, it's only 70. And the number of venues is also reduced - last year we had seven venues, stretching all the way from Miramar out to Porirua, while this year we only have three venues (which does make the inter-film dashes much less stressful - I will not miss the mad 30km drives).
So tickets went on sale a couple of weeks ago on Monday, supposedly at 10am. Which is why I was surprised to find tickets already on sale when I went to the site at about 9am. I started the process of buying tickets, nervously remembering last year when tickets were briefly available and I actually made payment before the ticket sales were closed. But this time, no such issues. Sure, the seat selection still doesn't seem to work - the system freaked out and froze when I tried to select my first seat, so I decided to just accept whatever seat the system allocated me (sigh). But after that, I don't know whether it was the fact that there were fewer people buying tickets because of the early ticket open, or because there were fewer tickets being purchased because of the smaller number of films, or because they've got the system working with sufficient capacity for opening day, but it actually worked pretty smoothly.
It was a frustrating festival to schedule. The reduced number of films means that there wasn't as much opportunity to find unexpected intriguing options to plug gaps in my schedule. Meanwhile many of the films have only one screening outside of work hours, so if I had a clash in screening times I simply had to make the decision which to see and accept that there's just no way to catch the other. This means that my schedule is not quite as packed as it might normally be, even allowing for the shortened festival length.
But despite that, it's still a promising-looking festival. The official programme launch was held at a film society screening of Summer 1993, which reminded me just how much I was delighted by that film and which alerted me to Carla Simón's new film Alcarràs. My experience with David Cronenberg is sadly limited to a handful of films, but after Crimes of the Future, his return to body horror after two decades, received such acclaim at Cannes I'm interested to what he's doing. I'm intrigued to see Decision to Leave, the new film from Park Chan-Wook seemingly working in a less-extreme mode than I usually expect of from him. I hadn't heard that Peter Strickland (the man who gave us the gleeful "evil dress" film In Fabric) had made a new film, but when I saw his name connected to Flux Gourmet I had to see it. Having really enjoyed Ruben Östlund's twoprevious movies, his new satire, Triangle of Sadness, would have been a must-see even before it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. I was extremely impressed by Ana Lily Amirpour's debut film A Girl Walks Home At Night, a wonderfully stylish Iranian-set vampire film, so I was excited to discover she made Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon. And I've heard great things about Dual, Ali & Ava, Watcher, Fire of Love, My Old School, Speak No Evil, and The Humans.
The film festival opening night is tonight, but like last year, the opening night is dedicated to a single screening of a single film. For all intents and purposes, the film festival proper starts tomorrow. So for the next 10 days, I may be busy.
A few weeks ago, there was a small controversy in the film world after filmmaker and comic book fan Kevin Smith (who really should have known better) criticised the Academy Awards for not nominating Spider-Man: No Way Home for Best Picture.
They got 10 slots, they can’t give one to the biggest f***ing movie of, like, the last three years? ... Like f***ing make a populist choice, f***, man.
But I've seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, I've seen it twice even, I really enjoy the movie, and I really do love the way that film engages with the past 20 years of cinematic portrayals of that character. It's a lot of fun, but there is no way that film deserves an Oscar nomination.
But the thing that is particularly bizarre about that criticism is that, while the Academy may not have nominated the sixth-highest-grossing-film-of-all-time, the Academy actually did make the populist choice. See, as I write this post, I've just returned from a brief holiday in Australia, where I discovered the Melbourne IMAX cinema was still showing the Denis Villeneuve film Dune three months after that film was released. I obviously couldn't pass up that opportunity, which is why I spent the evening watching the film - for the third time in an IMAX cinema, and my sixth screening in total. And what was particularly exciting about the screening, other than the fact that I was once again watching Dune at an IMAX, was the fact that the movie was still really busy - close to half the seats had been sold (many more than were sold for the screening of Uncharted, the opening-weekend film which was #1 at the box office, that immediately followed). At a time when Spider-Man had been and gone from cinemas, people were still turning up to see Dune, and they wanted to see it on the biggest screen possible. Dune is a genuinely remarkable piece of filmmaking, one that is also incredibly popular, and it's the film I was most excited to see listed in the Best Picture nominees.
[Comments on Dune, and the other nine nominees - The Power of the Dog, CODA, Belfast, Drive My Car, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, West Side Story, King Richard, and Don't Look Up - after the jump.]
I genuinely did not think I'd be able to write this post. Even as I bought my film festival tickets, I was thinking what a pointless exercise it was, that there's almost certainly be a Covid outbreak and the festival would be cancelled. Every day, I'd look at the announcement of new infection numbers with anxiety over whether they would affect the festival. Auckland had already been cancelled, then Christchurch was postponed a week after a case emerged in that city, and then a couple of days into our festival the Hamilton leg was cancelled. But while we had a short scare with one case that had travelled to Wellington, we made it through the festival unaffected.
One of the defining elements of the film festival experience is the fact that it's in the middle of winter - you're used to walking out of a cinema in the late hours into a bitterly cold and miserable night - and so the idea of a festival in November, in late spring, just a handful of weeks away from the start of summer, seemed wrong. But apparently it's the festival that brings that weather out - as soon as the festival began, we started getting really harsh winds, we started getting frequent rain, and in the last few days it even started being stormy. And then the festival ended, and the weather went back to normal.
It was a weird festival experience - with social distancing requirements, I'd find myself sitting in the Embassy, a cinema that normally holds 700 people, in a "sold out" session of 270. But still, after the let-down of last year's mostly-online festival, which (except for the small number of cinema screenings) didn't feel any different to any other night watching streaming movies, it was exciting to get back to the cinema for a proper experience of 2 1/2 weeks of intense and engaging movie viewing.
So, as always, here are my reactions, my responses to the films I saw, taken from my Facebook posts. These are not reviews, these are just attempts to record my thoughts about the films, and sometimes even just to try to process what I feel about them, in the immediate aftermath of watching something. And that's a big part of why I write these - the festival is so overwhelming that otherwise it would be too easy to just forget about most of these films, so this is a way of capturing that initial response. That means they're written mainly for myself, although they're also written with an awareness that others may read them, so I generally try to avoid giving too many spoilers. They were all written within two days of watching a film, so the films were all still very fresh in my memory. But that also means they're written in a rush, so the writing is often quite rough; I also use voice recognition to prepare them (I speak faster than I type), and while I try to catch all of the misinterpreted text, it's very possible the odd word may have slipped through that voice recognition incorrectly identified.
With the 2021 film festival starting tonight (with a screening of The Power of the Dog that I couldn't get tickets for), I find myself reflecting on last year's festival, and how that was a strange anticlimax of a festival. While New Zealand was fully open by the time the 2020 festival took place (certainly much more so then we are now at the time of the 2021 festival), the festival organisers did not know that when they had to put in place the plans for a Covid-affected festival. Which is why, rather than the massive number of screenings in packed cinemas, we instead had a festival that was largely driven by online screenings at home, with only a small number of cinema screenings at (with one exception) a single cinema, the Roxy. And I love the Roxy, I'm there at least once every weekend, but there is something special about the big screen at the Embassy and sitting in a packed crowd of 700 people in that cinema. And so it was disappointing that I wouldn't be able to have that experience at last year's festival.
The thing is, I get excited about the festival as an event. I love spending the weekend before tickets go on sale constructing spreadsheets to track all of my films and figure out the best way to maximise my viewings. I get excited by the experience of buying tickets, whether it's queuing in the cold for hours on end (as I used to do), or the frustration of fighting with the festival website to get the tickets I want - that's all part of the thrill knowing that the festival is about to happen. It makes it feel like an event.
But there was no sense of the event in the festival last year. For those films that I was seeing in cinema, the screenings just dropped on the cinema's website like any other movie - no mad rush to get my seats. And even with the smaller cinema size (200 seats at the Roxy vs 700 at the Embassy), I don't think any of the films I attended were sold out, not even the "big event" films that always sell out quickly. And for those screenings that weren't in cinema and were only available online - well, there was no need for haste to secure tickets; I just rented the movies online as they became available. And my film numbers this year were well down on usual - only 21 films, when most festivals I'd be doing over 30, up to 40 films.
My waning enthusiasm even fed through to the usual Facebook posts where I reflect on each film. I found it a struggle motivating myself to write about each film, and indeed I eventually gave up without ever recording my responses to my final two films of the festival. But, for what it's worth, here are the posts that I wrote responding to almost all of the films I saw at last year's festival.
[Comments on a number of the 2020 film festival movies, after the jump.]
For as long as I've been going, the film festival has always been a fixture of the July calendar. So many of my memories of the festival are marked by walking out of a film into a bitterly cold Wellington winter wind. So it was a surprise when it was announced that this year the festival would be taking place in November. The theory was that the delay would allow time for the population to be vaccinated, in order to minimise the likelihood of the festival being affected by a lockdown. After the disappointment of last year's largely online festival, the hope was that this year we could enjoy a fully in-person festival with packed cinemas.
Yeah, that didn't happen.
Ironically, had the festival taken place at the normal time, it would have run unaffected - at least in the main centres. In July, the entire country was open, with no limitation on numbers (indeed, that month, I was in Auckland for a sold-out performance of The Lion King with thousands of other people). However, a few weeks later, a Covid outbreak in Auckland saw the entire country go into lockdown, and while most of the country is now open-ish, the continuing lockdown in Auckland has seen their film festival cancelled, while the festival for the rest of us is severely affected by number limitations and the need for social distancing. And frankly, I'm still skeptical that the festival will take place at all - we do still have a couple of weeks where things could change and force the cancellation of the festival. But at the moment, I'm hoping that won't happen - and so on that basis, on Wednesday I got ready as usual to buy my festival tickets.
They were due to go on sale at 10am, so at 9:30 I load up the webpage so that I can be ready. To my surprise tickets were already available for purchase. So, I hurriedly select all of my films, at which point the system tells me that it can't process my order because I'm purchasing more than 20 tickets. OK, that's fine, I break it up into two orders, using two different browsers. The browser purchasing the first half of my order got hung up on one title, sticking at "19 out of 20", but the browser processing the second half of my order went fine, and I even got past the stage of making payment, before the system told me that it had closed. OK, that's fine, I knew I was being a bit cheeky, and the tickets weren't supposed to be on sale yet; I'll need a refund, but they'll be busy right now, so I will talk to them about that later in the day.
Meanwhile, the clock ticks past 10, 10.15, and then finally they put a banner on the screen advising that there's been a delay, and tickets will be on sale as soon as possible. After a while, someone calls me about my refund, and happens to mention that tickets will go on sale at 11am.
Sure enough, tickets go on sale shortly after 11, and I started frantically ordering again. And the second half of my order went through seamlessly - although a big part of the seamlessness is probably due to my decision to not bother with using seat selection, since the number of seats was so limited that I decided I had to just accept what they gave me for fear of missing out. But once again, the front half of my order kept hanging on one film, and I didn't know which film. So I decide to divide the remaining films in half and go again. By this point, the opening night film, The Power of the Dog, was sold out - that was probably the cause of the problem. (The loss of that film wasn't a big deal for me - it is due to go on general release during the festival, so I'll get to see it elsewhere.) But once again, the back half of my order goes through, while the front half gets stuck on one film. By this point, I start ordering my remaining movies one day at a time, and once I discover the problem lies with one of the films on the opening Saturday, buying tickets movie-by-movie.
Which is how I realised that the cause of my ordering problems was a film called After Love. The system just would not let me purchase that ticket. (Indeed, its now been five days since tickets went on sale, and they've now simply shut off website bookings to that session because they cannot fix the issue.) The annoying thing is that that was one of my marginal titles to begin with, and had I not selected it, my ordering process would probably have been fairly smooth and straightforward. As it is, it probably stopped me from getting tickets to that opening night film, and definitely meant I got much worse seats to some of the more popular films then I would otherwise have had. Oh well; such is life.
It's a comparatively light festival for me this year, only 34 films - and that's assuming I gets tickets to the film I haven't yet been able to get tickets for - although as usual there were a lot of films I had to abandon any hope of seeing due to irreconcilable clashes with other screenings.
One of the first films announced for the festival was one of the titles I was most hoping for: Zola. the adaptation of a viral Twitter thread in which a stripper told the story of how her working trip to Florida went bad. After the film was announced, I read the thread out of curiosity, and it's quite a story, and given the high praise the film has elicited, I'm hoping for a great movie. And it has Riley Keough as one of the leads, which is always a plus.
In the same way that I didn't need to worry too much about missing out on The Power of the Dog, I probably didn't need to worry too much about catching The French Dispatch, since that is also due for release during the festival period. But I love Wes Anderson, and this is one title that has been delayed a year, so I just need to see it as soon as possible.
As I was looking through the programme, I saw a single image from About Endlessness, instantly realised "Oh, I guess Roy Andersson has a new film," and that made me excited. Andersson has aninstantlyrecognisablevisualstyle, possibly even more distinctive than Wes Anderson, so much so that a single frame can identify his work. But it's not that I'm excited by drab grey photography - I enjoy the way he sets up these little scenes that play out in front of the camera with a minimum of intervention, and them uses them for absurdist and melancholic humour.
I adored Julia Ducournau's first film Raw, an impressive horror film about a vegetarian veterinary student who develops a taste for human flesh, so was intrigued when her follow-up Titane won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Every time I heard anyone mention the film, they always started by saying to not know anything about the film, so I've deliberately avoided reading anything about it, not even the write-up in the programme. I have no idea what to expect from the film, but I am expecting it to be something.
I'm not expecting to enjoy Mass, a four-hander about a meeting between two sets of parents where one son killed the others', but it has an excellent cast, and the critical response has been strong, so I'm hoping for something thoughtful and challenging.
A number of critics I respect have heavily praised Censor, a horror film revolving around the UK video nasties of the 1980s, which does sound like a great idea for a film.
It's always a thrill to see a new Zhang Yimou film at the Embassy - the man is a master of visual artistry. I've been keeping an eye on the news of One Second ever since China pulled it just before its premiere, and while the film we'll be getting will no doubt have been subject to censorship by the country, any Yimou is exciting.
While I had issues with the most recent films of Christian Petzold and Paulo Sorrentino, they are significant cinematic figures, so I'm certainly excited to give Undine and The Hand of God a chance.
The work of Jafar Panahi is always a must-see, and so I was intrigued to hear Hit the Road, the first film from his son Panah Panahi, was so well received. Hopefully he's inherited some of his father's mastery.
The classic film selection allows me to tick off a number of titles I've heard about but have never seen and probably would never have got around to otherwise - Beau Trevail, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Flowers of Shanghai, and Written on the Wind.
And then there are just the titles that sound intriguing. I'm always a sucker for a Korean thriller, and the idea of a serial killer hunting a deaf girl (Midnight) seems fun. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, a one-take film with a guy getting video messages from two minutes in the future, sounds like a delight. A bunch of Iranian street children teaming together to steal from a charity (Sun Children); a revenge thriller starring Mads Mikkelsen (Riders of Justice); a world experiencing a pandemic of amnesia (Apples) - these all sound like fascinating films that I might otherwise never get to see.
All in all, despite my reduced number of movies this year compared to the past few years, it still looks like a very promising festival, and I'm excited for it.
