Profiles of local filmmakers attending this year's Auckland International Film Festival.

This year's wide and varied New Zealand programme is a mix of features and documentaries by both respected directors from past Festivals and filmmakers making their Festival debuts.Profiles of local filmmakers attending this year's Auckland International Film Festival.

This year's wide and varied New Zealand programme is a mix of features and documentaries by both respected directors from past Festivals and filmmakers making their Festival debuts.ALISTER BARRY
Alister's film career started in 1973 when he filmed the voyage of a protest boat to Mururoa where the French were testing nuclear weapons. Edited in his bedroom, it resulted in Mururoa 1973, which screened on TVNZ.
Encouraged by this success, Alister has continued to make independent documentaries about power and democracy in New Zealand. Someone Else's Country (1996) told the story of the New Right revolution, and In a Land of Plenty (2002) argued that the mass employment of the 1980s was no accident, but a strategy of market reforms. 2007's A Civilised Society recounted the battles waged over public education in the 1980s and 1990s. All three films screened at the New Zealand Film Festivals.

Hollow Men
New Zealand 2008
98 minutes
Director: Alistair Barry
World Premiere
The "stolen" insider emails that informed Nicky Hager's best-selling account of National's 2004 election campaign return in Alister Barry's (Someone Else's Country) new film - just in time in time to caution us against campaigning politicians in 2008. Addressing each other like schoolboy Machiavellis, party leader Don Brash and his advisers spelled out how they'd copy the big boys in Australia and the US in order to win the votes of people who'd never support the kind of policies such men are widely presumed to represent. The dividing and conquering began at Orewa. Barry strings the emailed stage-directions through a chronology of public performances as Brash appears nightly on television, dispensing disharmony while espousing honesty, fair play and integrity. There can be fewer more telling images of the spiritual bankruptcy of mid-00s politics than Barry's footage of the man who intends to be PM evading journalists' basic questions about his intentions with the dogged, on-message politeness of a Mumbai call centre help desk. €” Bill Gosden
37th Wellington Film Festival
Paramount Sunday 20 July at 1.00 pm
Paramount Tuesday 22 July at 1.30 pm

40th Auckland International Film Festival
Sky City Theatre Thursday 24 July at 6.15 pm
Sky City Theatre Friday 25 July at 11.45 am

PIETRA BRETTKELLY
Pietra Brettkelly's documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins was the only feature-length work from New Zealand to be selected for this year's Sundance Film Festival. We are delighted that her film will have its first NZ screenings as part of the International Film Festivals.

Pietra's passion for filmmaking has led her to make documentaries about a variety of subjects, including Libya's first ever beauty pageant (Beauty Will Save the World). Her keen eye for a good story has taken to places as far afield as Afghanistan, the Amazon, Kazakhstan and the Artic Circle (Ends of the Earth). She was in South Sudan making a documentary about the clearance of land mines when she met artist Vanessa Beecroft, who then became the subject of Pietra's latest film.

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins
New Zealand 2008, 98m
Director: Pietra Brettkelly
Festivals: Sundance, Edinburgh 2008
Film Editing Award, Sundance Film Festival 2008
"New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly's Sundance-acclaimed documentary provides an intimate and revealing encounter with Vanessa Beecroft, a compulsively visible art-world performer and provocateur whose recent works frame western responses to the tragedy in Darfur. We meet her in South Sudan working on the now notorious portrait of herself as the Madonna breastfeeding baby Sudanese twins. She is also fighting a legal battle to adopt these supposed orphans. Brettkelly, who'd never heard of Beecroft until they met in Sudan, was chosen by the artist to make a film that would explore the concept of 'performance' as it might apply to her private life. Though we're privy to some awesome displays of egotism from Beecroft the tone of the film is one of intrepid curiosity, not expose. The portrait of an artist in whom life and art and privilege are indissolubly merged is fascinating, utterly of our time, and bound to provoke many arguments. €” Bill Gosden. "Provocative - Brettkelly lays the situation bare, but leaves judgments to us." €” Peter DeBruge, Variety

40th Auckland International Film Festival
Sky City Theatre Wednesday 23 July at 6.15 pm
Sky City Cinemas, Queen Street Thursday 24 July at 11.15 am

37th Wellington Film Festival
Soundings Theatre, Te Papa Thursday 31 July at 6.15 pm
Soundings Theatre, Te Papa Friday 1 August at 11.15 am

BRYN EVANS
Human interest, civil conflict, human rights and indigenous studies are the subjects that fuel Bryn Evans' desire to tell stories. For 12 years, his passion to expose injustice has formed the foundations of his work as a photographer and writer in Europe and India. More recently Bryn has turned his hand to documentary. His first 'solo' film, 'From Street To Sky' has produced some powerful and endearing moments, not only with the subject Tigilau Ness, but with the people who have been involved in making his story. It is a personal account of four decades of protest, and how a humble man of Niuean descent has helped shape the relationship between Maori and people of the Pacific, not only through his music, but also through his actions on the street.

From Street to Sky
New Zealand 2008, 62m
Director: Bryn Evans
World Premiere
Local roots musician Tigilau Ness has waited 27 years to release his first album, and in many ways, this warm, intimate documentary portrait is a tribute to his patience. But 52-year-old Ness has been far from idle. Born in Auckland to Niuean parents, he came of age during turbulent times and the early part of his life was dedicated to protest. At 20, he joined the Polynesian Panthers, insisting that Maori and Pacific Islanders present a united front on issues of Maori sovereignty. In 1981 he was imprisoned after a Springbok Tour protest. Being in jail changed Ness, and he became a devout Rastafarian. He is also father to a famous son: Che Fu. These days, he continues to deliver his message of unity among Pacific peoples, but he does so peacefully, through song. From Street to Sky delivers a fascinating history lesson as well as an inspiring story of one man's difficult journey towards a state of grace. €” Bianca Zander
40th Auckland International Film Festival
Sky City Theatre Saturday 26 July at 5.30 pm

37th Wellington Film Festival
New Zealand Film Archive Friday 1 August at 12.15 pm
New Zealand Film Archive Friday 1 August at 1.30 pm

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
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

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

GERARD SMYTH
Gerard Smyth lives in Christchurch where he has been working in various capacities on documentary production for over 30 years. He is a second generation meddler in film - his family before him worked as television directors, actors and media commentators.
In 1985 in Ethiopia, he filmed an aid response to the North African famine One Day for Africa. In 1995 he won the London Based CEVMA Best Documentary Award for Sonya Talking, his tale about the last days of a young woman with cancer. He spent a year documenting the lives of the residents of a home for the intellectually disabled, which resulted in Out of Sight and screened in our Festivals in 1997.
A common thread in Gerard's work is the life of the outsider. Barefoot Cinema wanders down the same road.

Barefoot Cinema: The Life and Art of Cinematographer Alun Bolinger
New Zealand 2008, 72m
Director: Gerard Smyth
World Premiere
Filmmaker Gerard Smyth turns his camera on Alun Bollinger whose own camera has been informing the way we New Zealanders see ourselves for almost 40 years. Geoff Murphy's Goodbye Pork Pie, Vincent Ward's Vigil, Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures and Gaylene Preston's Perfect Strangers, amongst his many credits, are superbly photographed films by any standard and each of them carries the distinctive signature of its director. All four auteurs express their admiration here and impart some flavour of the crucial collaborations involved, starting with the difficulty of ever luring the man they all call AlBol away from his South Island West Coast home. AlBol meanwhile discusses creativity as if it's a mere matter of practicality enlivened by the occasional flash of ingenuity. Smyth's portrait of the artist as unassuming alt-lifestyle Kiwi bloke is also a valentine to the four decades of marriage that began after AlBol and Helen - HelBol - had known each other exactly three days. Existing admirers should be delighted by Smyth's tribute, and the unfamiliar captivated. €” Bill Gosden

40th Auckland International Film Festival
Sky City Theatre Sunday 27 July at 2.00 pm

37th Wellington Film Festival
Soundings Theatre, Te Papa Sunday 20 July at 4.15 pm
New Zealand Film Archive Monday 21 July at 4.15 pm

ATHINA TSOULIS
Athina Tsoulis was born in a small village on the Peloponnese in Greece. She grew up in Adelaide, Australia before moving to Auckland in the 1980s. Athina has made several films, including the feature I'll Make You Happy and the shorts The Invisible Hand which has screened at film festivals around the world and sold to international television channels, Dissolution and A Bitter Song. She has also made two half-hour dramas for the True Life series (TVNZ). She is currently a lecturer at Unitec's School of Performing and Screen Arts, where she teaches Directing for Screen and is Programme Coordinator of Screen Projects. She is now working on her next feature film, a contemporary romantic comedy.

Jinx Sister
New Zealand 2008, 101m
Director: Athina Tsoulis
World Premiere
Estranged adult sisters peel back the family secrets and lies in Athina Tsoulis' engaging domestic drama. Sara Wiseman is Laura, who arrives in New Zealand after ten years in LA. Sporting an American accent and dressed for Rodeo Drive, she cuts an incongruous figure in laid-back South Auckland. She warily approaches the house of her sister Maree (Rachel Nash), happily married, heavily pregnant mother of two. Laura's hostility and thinly concealed self-loathing are too much even for this most grounded of earth mothers. While the two spar and reopen old wounds, new events force them into recognising the deceptive nature of the family myths that have shaped their enmity. Warm breezes waft through this psychodrama: there's an appealing ebullience to its picture of bicultural suburbia (lyrically photographed by Rewa Harre). And the Kiwi blokes who stand by these women exude unforced sexiness: they're sensual, good-humoured and kind. €” Bill Gosden

40th Auckland International Film Festival
Academy Saturday 19 July at 7.45 pm
Academy Monday 21 July at 12.00 pm

SIMA URALE
Apron Strings director, Sima Urale, was born in Savaii, Samoa, and immigrated with her family to New Zealand in 1974. She graduated from Toi Whakaari O Atearoa (New Zealand Drama School) in 1989 and, after pursuing an acting career, went on to study film and television at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. She embarked upon her filmmaking career with a short film O Tamaiti (1996), followed by another, Still Life (2001), which together reaped several international accolades. Sima has also directed documentaries, including Velvet Dreams, and music videos. Apron Strings is Sima's debut feature.

Apron Strings
New Zealand 2008
90 minutes
Director: Sima Urale
World Premiere
In her first feature Samoan-born Aucklander Sima Urale brings an ebullient light touch to a script by Shuchi Kothari and Diane Taylor which traces parallel, richly loaded domestic dramas in two families of cooks: one Sikh, the other dyed-in-the-wool Anglo. Both tales centre on mothers and their fatherless sons. Lorna (Jennifer Ludlum) is the proprietor of an old-fashioned cake shop, and mother of the listless, unemployed Barry (Scott Wills) who's 35, still living at home and complaining about her cooking. The glamorous Anita (Laila Rouass) hosts an Indian Cooking Show on TV. Her poise is shaken when her student son Michael (Nathan Whitaker), the apple of her eye, starts to "explore his Indian-ness" by getting a job in an Otahuhu curry-house.
The film's action illuminates the complex ways in which parents and children add weight to each other's burdens. It does so with a welcome lack of glibness about how the damage can be undone. In the plum role Jennifer Ludlum is riveting. Her Lorna may strike us at the outset as almost comical, a Roger Hall creation, in her sniffy disdain for the Asian and PI hordes crowding in on her pink frost island. By the end of the film we've understood how she's marooned herself in other, more devastating ways. Scott Wills is perfectly matched as her hapless son. €” Bill Gosden

40th Auckland International Film Festival
CIVIC Thursday 10 July at 7.15 pm
Lido Saturday 12 July at 6.15 pm
Bridgeway Sunday 13 July at 4.00 pm
CIVIC Wednesday 16 July at 10.45 am

37th Wellington Film Festival
Embassy Sunday 27 July at 6.15 pm
Embassy Tuesday 29 July at 11.00 am
Penthouse Wednesday 30 July at 8.15 pm

JULIETTE VEBER
Juliette has worked in the film industry for 12 years. She has produced two dramatic feature films: The Price of Milk as producer in 1997 and Toy Love as producer in 2002. She is based in Wellington and currently works at the New Zealand Film Commission as the Short Film Sales & Marketing Manager. Trouble is My Business is her first documentary.

Trouble Is My Business
New Zealand 2008, 82m
Director: Juliette Veber
World Premiere
Student management and discipline at predominantly Polynesian Aorere College in Mangere are the domain of Pakeha Assistant Principal Mr Peach. Working at the school herself, filmmaker Juliette Veber was intrigued by the man's almost comical assumption of authority as he marched about with a megaphone to round up students for class. Why did so many of them tolerate this? Focusing on his dealings with a handful of troubled students she sees how intuitive his methods are and how attuned to the community. He grew up in Otara himself and believes steadfastly in the value of education and self-respect. No stranger to the challenges the students face at home and on the streets, he has a way of to proving how intently interested he is in them as individuals while being completely intolerant of their truancy, drug taking or violence. However un-pc or inelegant his methods, his valiance is beyond question. The question that does hover over Trouble is whether the solutions to the problems these kids face must always be found within their community. €” Bill Gosden

40th Auckland International Film Festival
Sky City Theatre Sunday 13 at 1.15 pm
Sky City Theatre Tuesday 15 July at 11.00 am

37th Wellington Film Festival
Paramount Saturday 26 July at 3.15 pm

Image: VBSS South Sudan 2006. Photo: Matthu Placek. Copyright: Vanessa Beecroft.