Moving images
Posted 30 July 2008 // Jock Phillips
Film Festival programme and tickets
It’s been raining for about six weeks – not the weather for walking in the hills, but just perfect for the 37th annual Wellington film festival. The high points for me have been two New Zealand films.
Vincent Ward’s incredibly powerful Rain of the children is a return to his early film, In spring one plants alone, which told the story of an old Tūhoe woman, bent double, and her handicapped son. In his new film, Ward brilliantly uncovers layers of history that go to the very heart of Tūhoe culture. Inevitably Rua Kenana, that fascinating millennial prophet, looms large. If you go, look at Te Ara’s entry on Ngāi Tūhoe first for a bit of helpful background.
You might also like to read our entry on New Zealand’s Indian community before going to Sima Urale’s Apron strings. This is a beautifully polished drama – or rather double-drama, as it follows two families, one Pākehā and one Indian, as they sort through their family crises. It’s all told around scenes of preparing food. Worth seeing, but it will make you hungry.
It’s obviously hard to compete with the full-screen spectacular on a website. We are confined to about 30 seconds of film on Te Ara, so that people can download clips relatively easily. Yet, it is interesting how a really well-chosen 30 seconds can make for particularly intense viewing.
There are now over 170 video clips on Te Ara, with many great ones among them. Natural History New Zealand provided some wonderful footage of our birds and animals, such as the breaching whales or the scrapping gannets. Television New Zealand has given us a classic example of Robert Muldoon in all his glory, and a couple of comic masterpieces by Fred Dagg and Lyn of Tawa. From Archives New Zealand we have sourced some nice clips from the Film Unit,complete with that fruity voice-over accent. They include an amusing piece on waka-racing and a clip of Kiwi blokes heading off into the hills to build a hut.
In November we launch the next theme – The Settled Landscape – and you will be able to enjoy two particularly nice examples: a sonata played on no. 8 fencing wire, and a lovely clip from TV3 of a cyclist trying to ward off attacks from magpies with a large face stuck to the back of his helmet.
Te Ara is not a film festival – but at least you can watch it at home without having to brave that awful weather!
