Over 100 of the most engaging, perplexing, confronting and comforting movies of the year are coming to Aotearoa for this year's NZ International Film Festival. General Manager Sally Woodfield talks Simon Morris through this year's lineup.
Over 100 of the most engaging, perplexing, confronting and comforting movies of the year are coming to Aotearoa for this year's NZ International Film Festival.
General Manager Sally Woodfield talks Simon Morris through this year's lineup.
Listen to the conversation
We all watch plenty of streamed entertainment but there's nothing better than seeing a really good film on the big screen, Sally says.
"When you're watching at home you're often distracted by other things, you're often looking up the actors or the films or getting the filmography on your phone... When you're in a cinema, you can't stop and do that."
Unfiltered reality is a central theme of this year's festival lineup, she says.
"These are real stories. These are real lives. These are real experiences that we're seeing up on the screen."
Sally's festival team think Kiwi audiences will love the opening night film - the English-French drama Anatomy Of A Fall, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year.
Other Cannes winners include the international horror film Tiger Stripes (which run won the Critics' Week Grand Prize) and the British coming-of-age story How To Have Sex (which won the Prize of Un Certain Regard).
Also screening are two Berlin Film Festival winners - the French documentary On the Adamant picked up the Golden Bear and the German comedy Afire won the Silver Bear.
Wes Anderson's star-studded new sci-fi film Asteroid City is one that Sally saw at the Sydney Film Festival recently.
"It's so classic Wes Anderson with those very vibrant colours. You look at it and you go 'this is madness'. And there really is madness in the little in-jokes ... It is kind of like star after star after star."
Other American films in the festival are Todd Haynes' dark comedy May December (starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore) and Riley Keough's War Pony, set on an Indian reservation in South Dakota.
Sally absolutely loves the Canadian-Korean coming-of-age film Riceboy Sleeps.
"It's a totally unknown cast because needed people who were Canadian and spoke fluent Korean. It's a brilliant film that talks to the diaspora and the idea of holding on to your culture when you're living outside of it…