Film Fest 97

Rip It Up, Issue 239, 1 July 1997, Page 14

Film Fest 97

yyil anticipation starts building up • JI UCabout the end of April. Just what might Bill Gosden and his team be offering us in this year’s International Film Festival? This year it all kicks off in the

City of Sails, and Gosden is most excited about the change of venue to the St • James, “with that wonderful sound and

screen which are so much better than the Civic”.

It seems we’re in for two weeks of pleasures and surprises, according to Gosden: “We’ve gone out of our way to identify the films that seem to us the purely pleasurable and the one that’s most likely to surprise people is Ulee’s Gold. It’s always been difficult to take Peter Fonda seriously as an actor and here he is playing a

grandfather and being incredibly moving”. Gosden’s cagey about predicting ‘hits’, but finally goes for Dream with the Fishes which is “fairly fresh and wild and funny.

It’s a not a film that resembles anything

else recently, whereas some other films are appallingly conscious of Scorsese and Tarantino. The only films I could think of that could have influenced it were all 70s ones. I found that particularly refreshing.

The British movie Small Time could be described in the same way, and its director Shane Meadows is going to be visiting us. He even sang the theme from Shortland Street over the phone — part of

his research for his New Zealand visit!” Bill Gosden is a man who effortlessly comes up with a snappy couple of words on the films he’s dealing with. He feels that, “French film in general catch the 90s very nicely”, and Diary of Seducer reminds him of, “the ambience of the DeLuxe Cafe in Wellington”. The Chinese film King of Masks is, “a family film for a family who can either understand mandarin or read subtitles”, and, best of all, it reminded him of being a kid at the movies. The Australian Kiss or Kill is, “pretty smart, and Matt Day looks good in a singlet”. Love’s Debris is, “probably the campest thing on the programme, with some wonderful anecdotage”, and Wednesday 19 July 1961 a, “surprisingly funny, upbeat picture of life in post-Soviet Russia”.

He’s particularly excited about Sunday, the Jonathan Nossiter film with Lisa Harrow which has been a last-minute

replacement for the Iranian Cannes winner, The Taste of Cherries. It’s a prizewinner in its own right — Best Screenplay and Best Film at the latest Sundance Festival.

Now that the marketing boundaries of fetishism have been extended, why not try Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. A New York writer

describes the film in the programme as ‘an elaborate pas de deux of dominance and

submission’; Gosden warns that it is, J “utterly graphic — he hammers his dick to

a board, but the worst thing is watching him take the nail out”.

It has long been physically impossible to see every single film in the Festival, and this year’s programme seems more generous than ever. Previews have been thin on the ground, but a few gems have surfaced: Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, a doco about Muhammed Ali’s 1974 bout with George Foreman in Zaire, is a riotous compendium of 70s style (including some electrifying footage of James Brown) with Ali rapping with the best of them. Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse is that rare doco that lets a wonderful person speak (and dance) for herself, and Joni Mitchell’s plea from the stage for respect and humanity will ring in your ears long after you leave Message to Love. And don’t forget that the MIC are staging a number of programmes of shorts. Mike Johnson’s The Devil Went Down to Georgia is a hoot, a stop-frame take on the Charlie Daniels song, complete with chooks strutting in formation. Local filmmaker Charlie de Salis’s seven-minute A Moment Passing is a poetic salute to the mysterious sea that surrounds us in this country and, fittingly for an International Festival, it’s up there with the best of them.

WILLIAM DART