Brief applause, catcalls for N.Z. film

Press, 18 May 1984, Page 11

Brief applause, catcalls for N.Z. film

NZPA Cannes “Vigil,” New Zealand’s first entry in the Cannes Film Festival competition, had a lukewarm welcome yesterday, the French Press Agency reported. Screened for the international press, the film

received only brief applause, with one or two catcalls, at its conclusion, and a press conference immediately afterwards was sparsely attended. “Vigil,” directed by Vincent Ward, aged 27, a former art student, depicts life on a New Zealand sheep farm through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl (Fiona Kay), who observes the relationship between her grandfather, widowed mother, and the farm’s hired man.

The girl is on the verge of puberty, and its onset provides the film with whatever climax it may be said to have.

Ward, who also wrote the screenplay, obtains uniformly capable performances from his actors, and Alun Bollinger’s cinematography of blue-hazed mountain landscape is impressive even by Cannes standards.

But some critics, at least, felt that the film was a case of a good deal of collective talent being expended on a subject too slight to warrant the effort. Ward, who himself had an isolated childhood on a farm, told the press conference that his ideas for the film began to gel while he was living among Maoris and making a documentary. He spent two years visiting schools to find the right child for his film. He avoided casting agencies: “I didn’t want a child that was precocious or cute.”

Diana Dekker reports from Cannes that Mr Lindsay Shelton, of the New Zealand Film Commission, said that “Vigil” would undoubtedly follow “Utu” in being given a theatrical release in France, quite soon. He said there had been

> tremendous interest in “The' Silent One,” a Gibson’s film, ; especially from the United , States and Germany. Mr Shelton said that there i had been real interest in almost all of the other movies that New Zealand i had brought to Cannes.