From stirring coming-of-age tales to genre-bending thrillers and poignant romances, Thomas Giblin makes his picks for this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival.
The Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival is back, but it’s a smaller affair this time. With the festival looking to rebuild and ensure its future viability, this year’s programming is a slimmed-down offering of delectable cinematic treats. Under the keen eye of guest artistic director Paolo Bertolin, 86 films from all over the world will screen in 10 cities and towns across the motu.
This year’s festival opens in Te Whanganui-a-Tara on the 31st of July with Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu’s electric debut feature, We Were Dangerous. In Tāmaki Makaurau, the festival begins on the 7th of August and will close with The Substance, an uncompromising feminist body horror starring Demi Moore. If you’re in Ōtautahi, you’re in luck. The festival opens on August 15 with Head South, Jonathan Ogilvie’s nostalgic homage to the city’s post-punk scene of the 70s and 80s.
With both acclaimed auteurs and exciting new voices, the rest of this year’s programme is jam-packed with goodies. But how do you decide what to watch? Fortunately, I’ve been given a sneak peek and have been hunched over my laptop, watching the films set to premiere at the festival. From stirring coming-of-age tales to genre-bending thrillers and poignant romances, here are 10 of my must-see picks (in alphabetical order).
All We Imagine As Light
Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light won the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and is the first Indian film from a female director ever to screen in the competition. It is also no exaggeration to say that it awakened my soul. The film, set mostly after dark in the sprawling metropolis of modern-day Mumbai, is bathed in a melancholic blue, hazy fluorescent lighting and monsoon downpours.
The textured evocation of the city provides the setting for a story about three female nurses, Prabha, Anu and Parvaty. Two of them share a cramped apartment, and the other is being threatened with eviction by a big-money developer. With Kapadia’s delicate approach to storytelling, she crafts a film of transcendent beauty and a remarkably rich tapestry of love and friendship set against the shifting tides of culture.
The Beast
If you missed Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, one of the best films of the 2010s, you cannot ignore The Beast. Loosely inspired by the 1903 Henry James novella of the same name, The Beast is set in a dystopian France overtaken by AI. Léa Seydoux stars as a young woman and gives a career-best performance. Emotions have become a threat, and there’s mass unemployment. Seydoux’s character must purify her DNA to secure a better job. This surgical procedure means that she must relive the memories of her past lives.
Set across three time periods – 1910, 2014 and 2044 – The Beast is a radical piece of filmmaking. A cosmic blend of melodrama, slasher and sci-fi, submitting to its internal dreamlike logic feels like a one-of-a-kind viewing experience. “There must be beautiful things in this chaos”, Seydoux’s character utters at one point. A haunting odyssey overflowing with metaphors, there’s beauty to be found in every sumptuous frame and crackling pixel of The Beast.
Dìdi
Every year, there seems to be a breakout coming-of-age film. Last year, it was How to Have Sex. Now, it’s Dìdi. The title means “little brother” in Mandarin. The film, Sean Wang’s debut dramatic feature, is an endearing semi-autographical story. Chris, nicknamed Wang-Wang by friends, is a 13-year-old learning to skate, flirt over AOL, and navigate life as the son of Taiwanese immigrants. Set in the late noughties with a soundtrack to match, Dìdi is an authentic crowdpleaser, full of painfully accurate moments that will transport you back to your adolescence. Chris goes online to figure out how to kiss and practices on an inanimate object. If, like me, you did the same, Dìdi is the film for you.
Flow
It’s not often an animated film premieres in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, but Gints Zilbalodis’s astonishing sophomore feature is a worthy inclusion. Flow might be the best animated film since Pixar’s Toy Story 3, or Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises.
The film follows a solitary black cat in a dialogue-free story about ecological collapse and friendship. Humans have disappeared, and the wary cat must work with some unlikely companions in a dangerous new world to survive. A sleepy capybara, a lemur obsessed with shiny objects, a slobbering, overly-friendly Labrador, and a giant mystical crane. Together, as a biblical flood consumes the vestiges of human civilisation, they embark on a surreal journey. Like Noah’s Ark, Flow’s quartet of animals use a boat to traverse through this treacherous new world and its rising waters.
Although it is an animated film, Flow is not just for children. Zilbalodis, who directs, writes, and scores Flow, crafts a profoundly stirring story that will have many adults in tears. In one scene, the cat comes eye to eye with a beached animal. I was left sobbing. The 3D animation and attention to detail are extraordinary. Flow is a gorgeous film that audiences of all ages will adore – especially animal lovers.
Grafted
2023 was a killer year for Aotearoa-made horror. M3GAN, Evil Dead Rise, Pearl, The Tank and Loop Track. 2024 is no different. Billed as Mean Girls meets Face/Off, Grafted, the directorial debut of Sasha Rainbow, is not for the faint of heart.
There’s a reference to Amorphophallus titanum, the corpse flower, in the opening minutes. Like this flower, Grafted is a wonder to behold, despite the hints of rotten flesh. The film’s young protagonist, Wei, is witness to the gory death of her father, who attempts to cure himself of a hereditary facial disfigurement. Years later, the bright but awkward Wei, shunned by her family in China, moves to Aotearoa on a scholarship to study biology. Before long, and the film mutates into a contemporary take on Frankenstein. Grafted is a blood-soaked exploration of the obsession with beauty and how our bodies change, which will both delight and disgust.
The Haka Party Incident
Adapting her award-winning play of the same name, Katie Wolfe (Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) has brought the story of the now-infamous incident to the silver screen. Her film begins with the simple opening credit: “The last New Zealand war took place in 1979. It lasted three minutes.” Wolfe’s documentary details the day the activist group He Taua sought to stop Pākehā engineering students at the University of Auckland from performing a parody of the haka during capping week. The Haka Party Incident weaves archival and recent footage with those on either side of the confrontation, providing sharp insights into the history of Aotearoa. Whilst a film about the past, it exerts a startling immediacy. The Haka Party Incident is essential viewing for anyone who calls Aotearoa home.
I Saw the TV Glow
I Saw the TV Glow stars the revelatory Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine as two adolescents in the late 90s who bond over the TV show The Pink Opaque. The show is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like pastiche about Isabel and Tara, who meet at summer camp and realise they have an ancient, psychic connection. Whilst an ode to nostalgia, fandom, and pop-culture obsession, I Saw the TV Glow is also a haunting, flickering exploration of how we cling to pieces of media as a coping mechanism for a lack of real identity. The film transported me back to a time when the sanctum of YouTube and Minecraft was my only escape.
Director Jane Schoenbrun is quickly becoming the darling of indie cinema. We’re All Going To the World’s Fair, their other-wordly first feature, announced the arrival of a major talent. Now, with I Saw the TV Glow, a surreal coming-of-age tale produced by hit factory A24, Schoenbrun has rendered an instant modern classic. I Saw the TV Glow is a nocturnal trans allegory, a Lynchian egg-crack story so eerie and hypnotic it will linger in the recesses of your mind for aeons.
Kneecap
Like Aotearoa, the English language was forcefully imposed on Ireland as an act of linguistic imperialism. Now, Irish Gaelic only has around 78,000 native speakers. I was born to an Irish father, yet I cannot speak a word of the language and don’t know the meaning of Giblin, my last name. But as Frantz Fanon asserted, “to speak is to exist,” and Kneecap, the Irish hip-hop trio from Belfast, are on a crusade to preserve Irish Gaelic in this audacious docudrama.
In Kneecap, Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí play themselves in the story of their unlikely rise to fame. Although first-time actors, all three members of Kneecap carry an electric, unruly magnetism. Michael Fassbender also has a supporting role as a presumed dead IRA militant, but the star of Kneecap is its rip-roaring, drug-snorting madcap energy. There are comparisons to be made with Trainspotting – both films have a killer soundtrack, riotous humour, surreal flourishes and hyperactive editing – but Kneecap is one of a kind. They rap only in Irish Gaelic with a smattering of English. Aided by writer-director Rich Peppiatt, the language is at the forefront of this bold, anarchic story of identity, place and culture.
Viet and Nam
Truong Minh Quy’s debut feature, Viet and Nam, is the hidden gem of this year’s programme. Breathtakingly shot on 16mm, Viet and Nam are two young coal miners who share fleeting moments of romance in the bowels of the earth. They hide their love as specks of coal dust twinkle around them like stars in the sky. There’s one moment echoing the sensual provocation of “those” scenes from Call Me By Your Name and Saltburn that will delight lovers of carnal desire. Although an entrancing rumination on forbidden love, Viet and Nam is also an evocation of the lasting scars of the Vietnam War. This cinematic treasure is art-house filmmaking at its finest, from a director set to mature into one of the greats.
We Were Dangerous
We Were Dangerous, the feature film debut from director Josephine Stewart-Tewhiu (Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa) and cartoonist turned screenwriter Maddie Dai, shines a light on the dark, unknown history of eugenic sterilisation in Aotearoa. On the isolated and rugged Ōtamahua (Quail Island), three young girls, Nellie, Daisy, and Lou, attend a school for “Incorrigible and Delinquent Girls”.
The film took SXSW 2024 by storm and was awarded the Special Jury Award for Filmmaking in the Narrative Feature Competition. It’s clear to see why. We Were Dangerous is a deft debut balancing the serious subject matter at its heart with a joyous and wickedly hilarious story of female rebellion. Nellie, Daisy and Lou, the fierce trio played by Erana James, Manaia Hall and Nathalie Morris, stick their middle fingers in the air as they fight for control over their bodies. This feminist fable is an illuminating must-watch.
Click here for the entire Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival programme.