Week one of Whānau Marama: The New Zealand International Film Festival had it all, including a local body horror and two and a half hours in the Himalayas.
The House Within
Take your tissues. I got a sneaky preview of this homegrown documentary about one of our most remarkable writers, Dame Fiona Kidman, and wrote about it here. A snippet: “After seeing The House Within I wouldn’t say Kidman displays ruthlessness, but a wily tendency to subvert expectations. Kidman also talks about anger. How the world of her earlier life was defined by the suppression of emotions: her war-traumatised father’s teaching that it was never OK to cry in public (even if you have been stood up by the boy you fancy), and the frustrating restrictions placed around women by class, by patriarchy, by colonisers and their religions. What is made clear in the film is that Kidman has had to go inwards from a very early age and find resource and inspiration there: in her own self, her own thoughts and instincts.” / Claire Mabey
We Were Dangerous
Like any human with a beating heart, I’m a sucker for a coming-of-age film, and there were many parts of local debut We Were Dangerous that felt on par with some of the best of the genre. Set in 1950s Aotearoa on Te Motu, an island school for “incorrigible and delinquent girls”, it follows a trio of rebel pals as they find ways to break free from the institutional cages in which they’ve been trapped. Directed by Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu and written by Maddie Dai, the film deals with complex and prescient issues like colonisation, patriarchy and abuse in state care, but all with an impressively deft lightness of touch that means it never feels too gloomy or overwhelming. In fact, parts of it are extremely funny, other parts are very moving and there’s a scene that rivals the likes of Girlhood and How to Have Sex in its depiction young girls dancing like nobody is watching. Also, you simply gotta see Rima Te Wiata as The Matron. / Alex Casey
Grafted
Set in contemporary Tāmaki Makaurau, mostly across an unfinished McMansion in west Auckland and the science wing of a university, this gore comedy is hot. It follows Wei, a Chinese immigrant with a facial deformity obsessed with continuing her father’s scientific work, a method to graft skin, repairing imperfections like her own. This, along with Mean-Girls-esque tensions, set the stage for blood and body horror. Even if you close your eyes for almost all of the gore, it’s a good watch! Wei is a funny little nerd, who finds herself at war with her cool cousin and trendy hot friends. New Zealand born director Sasha Rainbow tells the story about beauty, kindness, rejection, and family with care, humour and of-the-moment aesthetics and archetypes. The score is a thing of strange beauty, by Lachlan Anderson of Die! Die! Die! Some of my favourite scenes are the point of view shots of the main character walking down the uni hallway. And possibly the stupid little dog with a diamante collar that never stops barking. Hilarious. / Gabi Lardies
Shambhala
This epic 2.5 hour long film leans heavily on its exquisite setting in the Nepali Himalaya: wherever the camera goes, it catches glimpses of wide glacier valleys, fluffy yak, exquisitely woven textiles and the bright teeth of snowy mountains. Being firmly of the belief that the inner reaches of the Himalayas are the most gorgeous landscape in the world (it helps that I spent some of my formative years in valleys where occasionally, you’d find the footprints of bears in the snow), I was there for the setting alone. In terms of what actually happens in the story, there are at best 45 minutes of plot: Pema, a beautiful and quiet young woman, has married three brothers, as is tradition in her Buddhist-Nepali culture. Dawa is 11 – their relationship is more like a mother or aunty caring for a child – and Karma is a monk dedicated to Rinpoche, a local holy man who keeps making obscure statements about his reincarnation. She is deeply in love with Tashi, a playful trader, but he leaves shortly after their marriage to trade goods in Lhasa. Pema is pregnant, and rumours start to circulate that the father is actually Ram, a teacher from lowland Nepal who stands out for his Hindu name, stumbling Tibetan language, and choice to wear puffer jackets when the rest of the villagers are in wool and yak garments. Pema, getting pregnanter by the day, sets out to find Tashi and assert her innocence.
It’s an epic, if unfocused journey, with the plot dawdling on horses getting lost, multiple encounters with Pema’s mother, Pema learning to play dramnyen (a sort of plucked erhu), knitting, and another woman being punished by her village in an archery ritual. While the plot is slow, I decided to embrace it as a more Buddhist, non-Western approach to a film, and grew to love Pema for her determination and resilience. / Shanti Mathias
The Outrun
Saorsie Ronan and The Orkney islands star in this book-to-film adaptation. I loved The Outrun by Amy Liptrott, the memoir upon which this film was based, and this film translation was beautifully done. Ronan’s wonderful face traces the pains of addiction and sobriety; and the slow pleasures of finding your own skin and living in it again. The imagery throughout the film is absolutely breathtaking, as is the magnificent soundtrack of both human and nature’s making. A warning though: this movie may make you want to rent a cottage on a far flung island and look closely at seaweed, and swim in freezing water, and call to the melancholy heads of watching seals. / CM
When the Light Breaks
This tender Icelandic film focuses on a group of young adults – they’re maybe 20 or 21 – coming together after one of them, Diddi, dies in an accident. Una (Elín Hall), an arts student living in Reykjavík, is absolutely in love with Diddi, who is about to go back to his remote community in western Iceland to break up with his long-term girlfriend Klara. After his death, no-one knows that she’s mourning just as much as Klara is, and the hovering question of whether she is going to tell the other mourning girl the truth lends a tension to the movie. Really though, the film is interested in documenting how young people respond to grief – blurry disbelief, lots of hugs, anger, tears and even laughter. Hall, elfin and expressive, is very much the protagonist but director Rúnar Rúnarsson spares lots of camera time to demonstrate Icelandic architecture, from magnificent church façades to glossy glass and concrete houses to mirrored, angled hospital buildings to skungy blocks filled with students. The light of an Icelandic summers days scatters through the film, despite the grief: at the end, I felt touched and grateful. / SM
Days of Heaven
I’m not sure I have words for what I experienced just now. Days of Heaven was a sublime cinematic experience, like nothing I’ve seen before. The colours! The score! The locusts! The cast! The scenery! Every frame really was a painting. The story of troubled romance and working class lives in pre-World War I America held so much tension; the landscape sweeping, magnificent and aching and spooky with the encroachment of colonisers. The shifting soundscapes are layered, alive. This was my first time seeing Terrence Malick’s 1978 film and this version is remastered in 4K (I honestly don’t know what that means but it looked astonishing). Sam Shepard is killingly beautiful; and young Richard Gere, phew those bones! But it was Brooke Adams and Linda Manz who stole the show for me. Manz’s voiceovers in her smokey voice are poetry. Just go see it. / CM
A Mistake
In an uncanny turn of events, two audience members had medical incidents in the first 15 mins of the premiere of this New Zealand film directed by Christine Jeffs, and based on the novel by Carl Shuker. The incidents may or may not have had anything to do with the tell-all surgical scene that opens the film (and the book). So, be warned. Use that “peep through the fingers” trick if you’re squeamish about blood, and scalpels, and lots more blood. The scene is essential to the story, though, as we follow top surgeon Elizabeth Taylor (played magnificently by Elizabeth Banks) as she navigates middle-management bureaucracy, doctor-patient relationships, surgeon-registrar responsibilities, and her relationship with herself. It’s always incredibly satisfying to see New Zealand stories treated so well: Auckland is the landscape upon which all the tension plays out and it’s wonderful (the novel is actually set mostly in Wellington so maybe if there’s a TV adaptation it could be filmed there). All up this film, like the book, raises questions about the medical system and the inordinate stress that medical experts are under, and by proxy, the public. Also the two audience members, we were told at the end of the film, were treated by the ambulance and are doing fine. / CM
Click here to see the full programme from Whānau Marama: The New Zealand International Film Festival