Florian Habicht' (the director of Kaikohe Demolition) brings us Rubbings From a Live Man at the NZ International Film Festival. It is a new take on documentary films as the subject, artist Warwick Broadhead, performs the highs and lows of his not so ordinary life.

Florian Habicht' (the director of Kaikohe Demolition) brings us Rubbings From a Live Man at the NZ International Film Festival. It is a new take on documentary films as the subject, artist Warwick Broadhead, performs the highs and lows of his not so ordinary life.

Warwick Broadhead, veteran performer of arch, cracked "theatricals" seems unlikely ever to share a joint in a hot pool with the Demolition Derby racers of Florian Habicht's previous Kaikohe Demolition. What they do have in common is the reckless, self-exposing flamboyance that excites Habicht's eager eye for revelry in the face of restriction. Broadhead has been performing on stages as big as the Botanic Gardens and as intimate as private parties for years, but he's never allowed his work to be recorded.

He has now been induced by Habicht and his cinematographer/editor Chris Pryor, to re-enact some of the key moments in his far from ordinary life for this film. Calling on a cast of talkative alter-egos, not least a vile and shrewish God, he revisits his straitened childhood in 50s Kiwi suburbia, his ecstatic 60s in San Francisco and a heap of trauma, exaltation and grief ever since. He claims he never feels more disguised than when naked and silently cruising a sauna.

The converse seems just as true: decked in a ceremonial costume so cumbersome that he needs the rugby team thoughtfully recruited by the filmmaker to lift him, he flaunts his infirmity.

There are many documentaries that might be said to be performed by their subjects. Few push that element of performance so far or confront it with such intense curiosity as Habicht has here. The combination of rawness and artifice with which Broadhead re-enacts grave personal trauma is disconcerting, and there's no guessing where it's taking him.

Tidy emotion is the last thing you should be seeking from Habicht and Broadhead's exhilarating carnival of laughter, tears and death-cheating stunts. €” Bill Gosden

FLORIAN HABICHT

Since graduating from the Elam School of Fine Arts, Rubbings From a Live Man director and producer Florian Habicht has become an inventive underground filmmaker whose films have been embraced by the New Zealand mainstream.

Florian's films combine an unique sense of humour and odd-ball narratives with seductive and lush imagery. His digital no-budget feature Woodenhead, a surreal grimm musical fairytale, premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festivals and went on to screen in festivals around the world. He followed this with Kaikohe Demolition a documentary, which also enjoyed its premiere screenings at our Festivals.

While at the Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam, Florian began developing his latest feature script Permissive Paradise, a project he continues to develop, along with a new documentary Land of the Long White Cloud which he plans to shoot in 2008.

Rubbings from a Live Man
New Zealand 2008
75 minutes
Director/Producer: Florian Habicht
World Premiere

40th Auckland International Film Festival
Sky City Theatre - Sunday 20 July at 3.45 pm
Sky City Theatre - Monday 21 July at 4.30 pm

37th Wellington Film Festival
Paramount - Saturday 2 August at 7.00 pm

NZ International Film Festival

28/06/08