Catherine Breillat subverts a classic Charles Perrault fairytale. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM. (contains spoilers)

CATHERINE BREILLAT is one of contemporary cinema’s greatest directors, and unfortunately a director whose reputation is more renowned for her unflinching images than the provocative ideas which accompany them. Half the audience walked out of the tampon scene in Anatomy of Hell a few film festivals ago, and most of that group wouldn’t have considered why they considered it disgusting in the first place. After all, it’s just blood isn’t it? Bluebeard (La Barbe Bleue) is another piece of brilliance, as she takes an oft-filmed Charles Perrault fairytale and adds her own vision on the proceedings. Her underrated visual sense is as gorgeous as ever; her thematic concepts as challenging as ever.

The everlasting regret of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s pensive family drama. By STEVE GARDEN.

THE TITLE of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film reflects the formal qualities of the work as much as the thematic and philosophic ones. With its natural rhythms and locked-off static cinematography (apart from one telling shot near the end), Still Walking is indeed very still, with the pace of a gentle summer stroll. Kore-eda paints with delicate brushstrokes, but beneath the surface serenity lies unresolved grief (a common theme in Kore-eda’s work), which is of course accompanied by a poisonous concoction of disappointment, betrayal, contempt, unfulfilled expectations, lack of self-worth, bitterness and anger. As one character desperately puts it, it’s just normal family life!

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Goethe Institut selects, round two.

SOME OF THE most interesting films of all-time came out of the socialist countries in the late 60s. But while East Germany’s film industry lacked the sheer inventiveness of places like Czechoslovakia or even Russia, some fascinating films were still made. I Was Nineteen is some kind of masterpiece, a dark brooding depiction of the last days of World War Two. We see the film through the eyes of Gregor Hecker (Jaecki Schwarz), an ex-pat German who fought with the Soviets. He’s only nineteen, a boy who rushed into life forgetting that the door was still open behind him. He’s forced to re-engage with his German-ness, and acknowledge the fact the Germans did some rather horrific things, despite fighting on the side of the ‘good’. He mirrors the conflict of East Germany too – despite being on the ‘good’ side, it had these dark, dark roots.

ALEXANDER BISLEY picks the ten films he’s most tickled about seeing at this year’s film festival.

A Christmas Tale: Arnaud Desplechin’s masterpiece was my favourite film of 2008. Diabolically elegant and incisive, it audaciously, addictively explores life’s sprawl. Catherine Deneuve’s mighty matriach Junon’s cancer demands a dysfunctional French family get together for Christmas’ ceremony. Jean-Paul Rousillon (patriarch Abel), Matthieu Amalric (enfant terrible Henri) and Emmanuelle Devos (Henri’s girlfriend Faunia) are similarly terrific. Desplechin is Dylanesque!

A new section dedicated to ‘slow cinema’ champions four mesmerizing, must-see films. By STEVE GARDEN.

AMERICAN independent filmmaking has been a rich source of cinematic substance for cinephiles in recent years – Lance Hammer’s Ballast, Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble, and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, to mention only a few. Reichardt’s new film, Wendy and Lucy is every bit as subtle and perceptive as its predecessor, only much darker. This time the political implications are more to the fore, but without a hint of didacticism or finger-pointing. Reichardt leaves all interpretive possibilities completely open to the viewer. While her intention may have been to consider what it feels like at the bottom of the social order in present-day America, the film’s depiction of the consequences of economic rationalism has an implicit global reach.

Remembering the legendary soul explosion of Zaire 1974. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

ONE OF THE key aspects of Black Consciousness in the States in the late 60s and early 70s was harking back to Africa. A cultural shift occurred in trying to re-establish ties back to what was taken away through slavery and colonialism. This process occurred within popular music – and the seismic shifts can still be felt within contemporary music. Genres like funk, soul, disco, jazz and the soon-to-become hip-hop scenes, and superstars like Miles Davis and James Brown were throwing in African (pardon the gross simplification) polyrhythms, instrumentation, and harmonies into their music. But that’s only part of the story. Within the African continent, considerable musical development was occurring. New outrageously brilliant genres like high-life, mbalax, afrobeat, Afrofunk, etc. were making a mockery of conceptions of a unified “African” sound. So it was inevitable that one day these would collide. Soul Power captures such a moment, when talent from the United States and around the African continent met in Kinshasa, the capital of then-Zaire for a three day music festival known as “Zaire 1974”. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s documentary includes some incredible music, and though it’s a little light on the “African” musicians, it’s still an excellent account of a great show.

The outrageous theatre of Brillante Mendoza. By STEVE GARDEN.

IT APPEARS that Brillante Mendoza is the hot new name in world cinema. The 49-year old Filipino took out the Best Director prize at Cannes in May for his most recent film, Kinatay, his eighth feature in just four years! His 2008 film Serbis (Service) is nothing if not challenging – it almost dares you to fault it. One might be tempted to cite Mendoza’s liberal use of art-film clichés (agitated and prowling hand-held camera work; long close-to-the-shoulder travelling shots; unsimulated sex scenes;) as evidence of a calculated appeal to the art-house and festival circuits, if it wasn’t for the fact that the film is so palpably convincing.

Two takes on French families. By TIM WONG.

IMPROBABLY French, Summer Hours and A Christmas Tale mine a delicate commercial sensibility without ever compromising the authorship of their ace filmmakers. Strongly in favour of narrative and good looks, both are also bright, handsome examples of art cinema, tailor-made for a film festival determined to fight its way through economic gloom. The programme notes will shamelessly flog the attractions of Juliette Binoche, Catherine Deneuve, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly alumni (Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny), but who gives? Last year’s sublime Flight of the Red Balloon drew numbers (and big venues) on the back of Binoche’s ubiquity alone, even if many in attendance seemed oblivious to the greatness of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Audiences are unlikely to miss the point this time around though, given the universal experience in which each film magically engages.

Two by Agnès Varda, cinematic poet. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM and STEVE GARDEN.

IT’S NOT HARD when you’ve got a beautiful person in Paris to make a beautiful film. But when that’s all you’ve got, it takes a special director to make something that’s not only resonant but a classic. But then Agnès Varda is one of those directors. She’s a director of moments, of the little pieces that people tend to forget, a gleaner who can become entranced with an accidental jiggling of a camera lens, a director who has been confronting mortality since this, her first feature. I am a little biased – her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse) is one of the most emotionally wonderful pieces of cinema ever made. And a film like Cléo from 5 to 7 shows just how important these themes of mortality, of wringing beauty out of the discarded, of being a hopeless dreamer in an otherwise cruel world, have been throughout her career.

Another manic film creation from the scavanging Craig Baldwin. By STEVE GARDEN.

THOSE familiar with the found-footage creations of Craig Baldwin (O No Coronado, 1991; Tribulation 99, 1992; Spectres of the Spectrum, 1999) will have some idea what to expect from his latest excursion into cut-and-paste retro-chic, Mock Up On Mu. Baldwin’s inventive concoctions have always been more than mere film-geek indulgences. He is obviously a fan of industrial-films, government-films, and all grades of pop and pulp culture from B to Z, but he is also very adept at subverting the original intent of the material to ironic and pointedly critical effect. In Mock Up, Baldwin takes his iconoclasm further by enlisting the services of fellow cult-film connoisseur, Damon Packard (creator of the infamous Reflections of Evil, 2002). Packard turns in a suitably over-the-top caricature of L Ron Hubbard (one-time sci-fi author and founder of the Church of Scientology), now based on the Moon where he plots all manner of nefarious bits of business that involve a tattooed femme-fatale called “Agent C” and a dubious defence contractor by the name of... Mr Lockheed Martin.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Goethe Institut selects, round one.

ONE OF THE best parts of the Film Society year is when the Goethe Institut provide a few of the more obscure German films for viewing. This year, to commemorate twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Film Society is screening four East German films. Each was made by the state sponsored studio DEFA (which took over from the hugely influential UFA studios of inter-war and WWII Germany). The first film programmed, Berlin-Schonhauser Corner, is a 1950s teen melodrama set in East Berlin. The conceits of Hollywood teen movies like Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild Ones – the angst, the awkward rebellion, the acknowledgement of the adult world – are transplanted onto the Eastern German adolescents, and the result is a rather gritty and compelling film.

Albert Serra sublimely re-imagines the nativity; documentarian Mark Peranson watches in awe. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

THE NATIVITY TALE is one of Western Civilization’s most potent stories, and it’s rare for anyone to have grown up in the West and not have been associated with it (Christian or not). Despite being so familiar, the remarkable achievement of Birdsong (El Cant Dels Ocells) is that it manages to re-flavour the Magi narrative with new spices. Focusing squarely on the three wise men (or kings depending on how the tale is told), and portraying their blind faith as a secular, almost everyday one, Serra demystifies the characters. Instead, they are argumentative, confused, even jolly chaps, not exactly sure of what they’re searching for, but desperate for something.

Olivier Assayas’s wise, wistful film about moving forward. By STEVE GARDEN.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS’s new film, Summer Hours (L’heure d’été) starts with a celebration. Frederic (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) converge on the art-filled family home with their partners and children to celebrate the 75th birthday of their mother, Helene (Edith Scob). Once the home of Helene’s uncle (a respected artist long departed, for whom she was a muse – and possibly more besides), the house is one of many ‘possessions’ that become virtual characters in this intriguing meditation on values and dissolution (aesthetic, moral, economic, and ultimately life itself). Just as summer gives way to autumn, Summer Hours slowly reveals the world as a place that Helene’s uncle could never have imagined. The opening shot of young people running carefree around the family home is returned to at the end of the film to poignant effect.

Life and love in Juraj Lehotský’s vision of blindness. By STEVE GARDEN.

LOVE IS FAR from blind in Juraj Lehotský’s assured feature debut, Blind Loves (Slepé lásky). The film is ostensibly a documentary about a small number of visually impaired people grappling with life and love. But Lehotský seamlessly incorporates a fictional layer into the mix that results in a work of rare honesty, intimacy and poetry. The cast (who are either completely or partially blind) essentially play themselves, and the clarity with which they ‘see’ things leaves no room for the pleading sentimentalism that can often mar films about disability. The teasing uncertainty as to what is and isn’t staged is only one aspect of the film’s thought-provoking appeal. Differences between sighted and unsighted perceptions are beautifully conveyed throughout the film, as in one particular (and quite unexpected) sequence involving a giant squid. That Lehotský manages to pull this scene off without disturbing the naturalistic restraint of the work testifies to his impressive directorial skill.

Should we care about Vogue magazine and its devotion to the fashion world? DANYL MCLAUCHLAN and BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM offer contrasting opinions.

DM: Some of the best documentaries only find their true subject while they’re making a film about something else and so it is with The September Issue, R J Cutler’s film that is ostensibly about Vogue magazine editor-in-chief Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour and the creation of the September Issue, the upcoming year’s style bible for the $500 billion dollar fashion industry. (“In fashion, September is January”, one fashion editor explains helpfully.)

High fashion and subdued festivities at the 2009 programme launch. By JACOB POWELL.

THE BAR AREA outside the main theatre of Auckland’s Lido Cinema was well packed; replete with a blazing wood fire, tasty nibbles, complementary wine, Phoenix Organics drinks, and plenty of eager, expectant cinephiles. A visibly tired Bill Gosden fulfilled his ‘host’ duties as admirably as ever exchanging conversation with many of the guests, but the whole affair seemed a little pared back compared with previous years. I think this may be a flow on result of the depressed economic environment which sees our festival without a principal sponsor for the second year running. It is impressive that Bill and his team continue to create vibrant and vital festivals under such constraints.

ANNUALLY in June through to August, The Lumière Reader reports from the New Zealand International Film Festival in earnest. Our dispatches will include the ongoing review of films, daily columns filed during the festival by Auckland and Wellington correspondents, interviews with visiting filmmakers, and our concluding post-festival wrap. This year’s full line-up is now available online at nzff.co.nz. A guide to this year’s coverage in progress continues below.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Van Sant on drugs.

IN MANY WAYS, Drugstore Cowboy might be Van Sant’s most satisfying film. And in terms of his ‘arty’ films, it might also be his most accessible. A downbeat film about drugs, the film seeks to neither glamorise nor heavy-handedly moralise about its protagonists. Instead, the characters just live, dreams cocooned away, knowing that a drug hit has the comfort of routine. Van Sant manages to turn a reasonably clichéd story into something fresh, raw and above all, moving.

ADDOLEY DZEGEDE reviews (and illustrates) JJ Abrams’s new Star Trek extravaganza.

AS I WRITE THIS, white petals floating on gusts of warm air swirl by the window. Birds are literally chirping, and the sun has cast an orange glow on the otherwise dull concrete of the building adjacent to my apartment. I say all this because it is nearly summer, and summer in the US, when our brains have melted into an icecream and entertainment-craving mess, is primetime for big, blockbusting action movies. It was such a day when, loosely familiar with Star Trek from a childhood spent with a sci-fi geek of a mom, but not much of a fan, I was dragged in from the sweet lethargy of a warm afternoon and thrust into the darkness of a cinema to watch the prolific JJ Abrams’s Star Trek.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Van Sant debuts.

IT’S A LONG-HELD, creaky theory of mine that the 1980s were the golden age of popular music – when indie artists managed to transcend the financial limitations of recording music of previous decades and make stunning music from hip-hop to metal (no other decade was arguably as diverse). The 1980s was also the time when a number of filmmakers replicate the no-fi, lo-fi movements in music – filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee (by no means novel given figures like Charles Burnett and John Waters before them) gained huge success on low-budget, self-produced films. Gus Van Sant was another well-known auteur who started in a similar fashion. His debut film, Mala Noche, didn’t have the same resonance that his later Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho had, but it broadcast a director who has proven remarkably hard to pin down (after all, he’s made everything from Finding Forrester to the Psycho remake to Elephant). In fact, this effervescent, if slight film basically sets up Van Sant’s career – and it’s easy to see his subsequent eclecticism resulting from it.

Joel Stern, co-founder of Brisbane-based arts collective OtherFilm, talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about bringing the avant-garde collection Isolationist Eye Openers: Historic Australian Film Art 1962-1998 to the Film Archive in Wellington.

In this special feature, The Lumière Reader hosts the following rally for support: ANDREW ARMITAGE, proprietor of AroVideo in Wellington, presents his case for reform of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act, outdated legislation that is currently stifling the sale, rental and trade of filmed entertainment within New Zealand.

AroVideo’s ANDREW ARMITAGE suggests a “three-point plan” to initiate discussion on how to move forward on the problems outlined in his Campaign for Censorship Reform.

ALEXANDER BISLEY reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: West Iceland’s Donnie.

“LAUGH or cry at the stupidity of the world; you will regret both,” Noi Albinoi’s bookshop owner quotes Kierkegaard. Like Jar City, Dagur Kari’s imaginatively composed film taps into Icelandic unease. Fusing Donnie Darko’s spirit with Aki Kaurismaki’s comic minimalism, Noi Albinoi taps into a rich vein of teen angst.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: ugly war.

ONE THING Bruno Dumont will never be accused of being is subtle. So one’s predilection for his work will be dependent on one’s tolerance for his heavy-handedness. This means he’s one of contemporary art cinema’s most polarising figures: a film like Flandres can take away the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, while also having a high walk-out rate at Film Festivals. His previous, much-maligned film Twentynine Palms featured a European couple travelling through a Theorem-like wasteland (ahem, the United States), like an Adam and Eve being kicked out of paradise to commute with the rest of the animal kingdom. Flandres, Dumont’s fourth film, continues his exploration of base humanity, our inability to rise above our evolutionary roots, our pretence that life is nothing more than nasty, brutish and short.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: eco-ploitation.

TANZANIA’s Lake Victoria is a stunning expanse of water and is the world’s largest tropical lake and Africa’s largest lake. It is also near to where humans first populated the world, lying in the Great Rift Valley between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Darwin’s Nightmare uses this ecological significance as a platform to explore how this place where humankind developed is still nasty, brutish and short. The lake, and specifically a Tanzanian city on the lake-front, Mwanza, becomes a microcosm to show the brutal toll wrecked by neo-colonialism, globalisation and human greed. This is a scathing and pointed documentary, indicting the West’s casual destruction of poorer nations in their quest for more and more resources. Sauper wrings some heart-breaking imagery (not without their own agenda), but the film’s overall ambition make this one of the more devastating pieces of filmmaking of recent years.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: a cold war tale.

THE COLD WAR has just ended and Mathias ends up with a head in his bag when he tries to go back to France to study forensic medicine. Yes, this is an oblique and frequently odd thriller, which looks at the rootlessness of a recently post-Cold War France, a kind of liminal no-man’s land where young people roam around trying to find some purpose in the world. Characters’ emotions are schizophrenic, and narrative matches the chaotic, unhinged nature of the protagonists. La Sentinelle is perhaps too oblique for its own good and whether it thrills or has any sort of emotional centre with its cast of attractive pouting French people is a moot point. But the film is like a slightly less intricate Pynchon novel, and has a fascinating mix of conspiracy theories, science, historical ruminations, ‘post-modern’ blending, and quests for identity.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: shifting nature.

IT WOULD be stating the bleeding obvious to say that humans have an impact on the environment. And given the massive economic explosion that’s occurred over the last few hundred years, it’s easy to see that there are consequences from our behaviour. While the nineteenth century literature and art was full of depictions of the sometimes traumatic shift through industrialisation, it’s been rare to see a society in flux being captured in film in contemporary times. China’s economic development has been no secret, and it’s proving a fertile ground for artists. Part of the reason it appeals for artists is the sheer scale of the development – the eight minute long tracking shot that sets up Manufactured Landscapes through a factory is just a small reminder of what is going on in China.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: cinéma du look.

A RIDICULOUS film made by a film lover can sometimes be the best hug in the world. Freewheeling through genres, visual styles, homages, narratives, Diva is an oh-so stylish paean to cinema. While Beineix became more famous for his later Betty Blue, Diva was a wonderful debut for a director who has languished in obscurity for the last couple of decades. Breaking free from the angst and experimentalism of the later Nouvelle Vague films, and capturing the anarchic spirit of the early Godard/Truffaut work, Diva helped kick-start a new era in French filmmaking (which was carried on by films such as Mauvais Sang). The so-called cinéma du look movement (if it can be called that) touched on more contemporary concerns while also pitting a punk kind of aesthetic onto its protagonists.

At the World Cinema Showcase, Jean-Claude Van Damme. By JACOB POWELL.

FIRST UP, I just need to get something off my chest: JCVD is awesome! If you don’t read any further I want you to know that.

So why? You might think that I’m indulging some romanticism for action flicks watched in my teens? Yeah okay, I’ll buy that. The allure of seeing the eponymous Jean-Claude Van Damme in a film, seemingly possessed of depth we wouldn’t expect from him, paid off with probably the most satisfying and interesting performance we might ever get from him. Who knows, maybe he’ll find his third act resurgence a la Bill Murray? Whatever the case this self-reflexive film from Belgian filmmaker Mabrouk El Mechri captures the long since faded glow of celebrity with keenly ironic eye whilst retaining considerable warmth for its beaten down protagonist.