Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival is back for its 56th year, lighting up the screens of Aotearoa.
The festival showcases the best of local and international cinema to some of the most revered venues across the country. Josephine Stewart Te-Whiu’s We Were Dangerous (2024) opens the Auckland leg at The Civic on Wednesday, 7 August, and the festival continues at Hollywood Avondale and ASB Waterfront Theatre with a special Aotearoa Film Focus Weekend, closing on Sunday, 18 August. For full information and screening schedule visit nziff.co.nz.
DAYS OF HEAVEN
(1978)
Reclusive auteur Terrence Malick’s sophomore effort, beautifully restored in 4K, is a bewitching, visually ravishing pre-World War I fable of passion and betrayal on the sun-drenched Texas prairie. The filmmaker’s impulse to make “every frame a painting” has perhaps never been more fully realised, or transcended, than in the rapturous imagery of Days of Heaven, a visual astonishment of the highest order.
ENO
2024
Director Gary Hustwit takes inspiration from Brian Eno’s experiments in generative music to create the world’s first AI-generative documentary, making every screening of Eno completely different to the last. Utilising a bespoke software system developed by Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes, the film has millions of possible variations drawing from original interviews and Eno’s archive of hundreds of hours of unreleased footage and music. Eno is literally a one-of-a-kind event designed to be experienced on the big screen.
MENUS-PLAISIRS – LES TROISGROIS
2023
Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgrois is made for lovers of all things culinary. This quiet yet diligent documentary invites you into a family-run three-star Michelin restaurant in France. The film becomes an examination of minute details of a sprawling ecosystem as it unobtrusively traverses kitchens, dining rooms, suppliers, markets, cheese caves, farms, vineyards, and apiaries. Viewers are invited to relax into its rhythm, figuring out the restaurant’s complex hierarchies, dynamics and familial tensions by observing the day-to-day.
THE BEAST
2023
Léa Seydoux and George MacKay are star-crossed lovers chasing and escaping each other in different times and with different levels of attraction in Bertrand Bonello’s mesmerising adaptation and expansion of Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle. Venturing in thematic and narrative territories close to Cronenberg and Lynch, Bonello forges a seductive triptych that is both elegant and edgy, cerebral and desperately romantic. An instant classic of auteur cinema hurling an unforgettable cry for love.
