TIM WONG previews with enthusiasm a winter savior, the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals programme, due out to much anticipation this week.


NEVER MIND the frigid climate and inane rugby obsession that comes with the following months: this July and August, winter plays host again to the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, a savior from the cold in its annual torrent of world and experimental cinema, documentaries, animation and retrospective offerings. The much-anticipated programme hits streets officially this week, although scouts will have already discovered the majority of titles announced online. Privy to the confirmed lineup, it’s with equal parts excitement and curiosity that we can reveal some of its potential highlights.

While the festival continues to forge ahead pragmatically as a roadshow for many future arthouse theatrical releases, what rarefies its programme every year are the elite imports and virtual one-offs: the films that due in part to New Zealand’s geographical isolation, modest populuation, and archaic censorship laws, will probably never see the light of day again. One only needs to examine past years to find examples of films gone missing in action: A New World and A Scanner Darkly, a dumbfounding instance of two big screen movies that bypassed general release; Werckmeister Harmonies, available on DVD abroad, yet cannot be rented locally due to its pairing with another unrated Bela Tarr film; anything by Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and so on.

Lamenting the numerous titles that fall through the cracks seems beside the point, however, when considering the exhilaration of being able to catch them for the first and only time. The two aforementioned directors’ new films, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Syndromes and a Century, won’t resurface again after their upcoming festival appearance, while not surprisingly, their back catalogue has only ever drawn moderate to low turnouts in the past – and yet, the privilege is always there, even when a screening of Goodbye, Dragon Inn dredges up less audience members than those seen occupying the empty theatre in the film itself. As easy as it is to berate the middling but popular arthouse fare that pads out the festival, it’s the endless box office procession of senior citizens to matinee screenings that those films undeniably attract. In turn, their patronage allow the latest Tsai or Apichatpong to screen uncontested, however poorly attended.


As a singular event movie, David Lynch’s new portal into the unknown, Inland Empire, must be seen at all costs: peddling three hours of nonsense in grimy digital video, a theatrical reprieve looks highly unlikely. Similarly, new films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Climates, following the sublime Uzak), Nobuhiro Yamashita (The Matsugane Potshot Affair, a more rooted deadpan excursion to last year’s breakout Linda Linda Linda), and Jia Zhang-ke (Still Life + Dong, together another eye-opening foray into the socio-economic surreal), stand out as notable entry points in another collosal programme that teases and ultimately defeats even the prolific festival goer. Our philosophy has been to negate its imposing size with discernment: check off the essentials, while leave the gaps to discovery, surprise or chance.

Other starry nights we recommend ticking: Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven, straight out of Cannes; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Retribution, a return to form for a filmmaker previously ignored by the festival until That’s Incredible Cinema programmer Ant Timpson made good; Werner Herzog’s Red Dawn, a dramatisation of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, still one of the director’s most humanly compelling documentaries (in large part because Herzog remains uncharacteristically out-of-frame); Old Joy and Red Road, two fine entries in the New Filmmakers section that excel; Paprika, a new brainteaser by the best animator working today, Satoshi Kon; further larger-than-life anime in Tekkonkinkreet and Tales from Earthsea (from Goro, son of Hayao Miyazaki); Jesus Camp, the most frightening documentary you’ll see all year; new life breathed into the turgid Korean gangster genre in No Mercy For the Rude and A Dirty Carnival; Manufacturing Dissent, a surprisingly reasoned and well-considered debunking of lard ass Michael Moore; several films on and from Andy Warhol’s Factory; the exploitation trade of Osaka male hosts in The Great Happiness Space, where women a no better off despite the reversal; and, rather outrageously as compensation for double-bill Grindhouse being no more, a back-to-back presentation of supernatural J-sensation Death Note + Death Note: The Last Name.


Most tantalizing at the festival though must be its retrospective programme, which revives ten American talismans from that decade under the influence: the fertile seventies. Not necessarily the screaming landmarks you might expect, the programmers have by and large eschewed more obvious wishlist material for an astute selection of forgotten silver: Electra Glide in Blue and The Hired Hand two overlooked minor masterpieces that yearn for new appreciation; Smile, a tiara-sharp satire that Little Miss Sunshine wishes is was; Killer of Sheep, rarely seen and not to be missed; and Two-Lane Blacktop, hardly forgotten, but a cult fixture deserving of cinema’s stretched canvas all the same.

Interspersed throughout are some heftier points of interest: an obligatory Robert Altman entry in The Long Goodbye; Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, aside from Nashville argubly the best film of the 1970s; Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail; and speaking of the decade’s pre-eminent film star, three collaborations between Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson in The King of Marvin Gardens, Five Easy Pieces and Head (the perfect candidate for a midnight screening). As a rather terrific footnote to all of this, the festival also unveils This is New Zealand, an out-of-sight Expo ’70 film that utilised a staggering three camera super-widescreen format to convey the country’s panoramic splendour to the world. Since recovered and restored, it is compiled together with two short documentaries, C’mon to New Zealand and This is Expo, as an essential time capsule of Kiwiana pride and nostalgia.