2025 NZIFF Preview*

The Shrouds, The Ballad of Wallis Island, Workmates, Pavements and 2000 Meters to Andriivka are all playing in the New Zealand International Film Festival.

The first thing I’d note about this year’s festival programme is that it feels even more contemporary than last year. In recent years, I could avoid begging the festival for screeners by raiding my international streaming services but this year very few of the 100+ programme are so far into their lifecycle that they have made it online.

Indeed, most titles are fresh from this year’s big festivals like Sundance, Berlin and Cannes or are still making their way around the circuit. A few have received cinema releases overseas but most still have that to come – if they are lucky enough to have that in their future.

At the end of last year I did a survey of the films from many international ‘best of’ lists to see which had made it to screens here and was surprised to see how many were M.I.A. or had only screened at the festival. Looking at that newsletter again, I can tell you that Good One, Green Border, Sleep, Pictures of Ghosts, Eno¹, The Seed of the Sacred Fig², The Settlers, Totém³, Omen, The Delinquents and Samsara are still not available online here despite consistently featuring in ‘Best of 2024’ lists.

Another notable trend is the return of classic and retrospective films. I remember asking Bill Gosden why the festival wasn’t programming old movies and he told me bluntly that it was because they didn’t sell. Nowadays, audiences are responding strongly to vintage films being programmed by the Roxy and Embassy (in Wellington) and the Academy and Hollywood (in Auckland) and the festival is stepping up to meet that demand. Hard Boiled, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Werckmeister Harmonies and the surprise late addition of Forgotten Silver, all bode well for audiences who want to experience cinema history on the big screen with – hopefully – big audiences.

To prepare this preview, I managed to find a couple of titles on American streamers but the rest are courtesy of Madman (which suggests they will have a life after the festival, either theatrically or on their DocPlay service). Because the process of finding these five titles was pretty close to random, I was surprised at how many connections there were between them.

The Shrouds might be David Cronenberg’s most overtly personal film in an almost 60-year career. It contains many of his visual trademarks – the body horror moments are less plentiful but just as shocking when they arrive. Cronenberg avatar Vincent Cassel plays a grieving husband (Cronenberg lost his wife, Carolyn Zeifman, in 2017) who invents a kind of 3D scanning wrapper that can present an image of your deceased loved ones decaying body onto a headstone screen or, if you prefer, you can monitor it remotely using an app.

He’s a tech CEO now, planning a global expansion of these digitally enhanced burial grounds, but he’s also haunted by images of his late wife (Diane Kruger who also plays her twin sister) and the terrible deterioration as cancer spread throughout her body.

While grief is both text and subtext in The Shrouds, Cronenberg also gives us a modern thriller including both conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies, as well as satire about Chinese industrial espionage, digital surveillance, self-driving cars and AI assistants who can present themselves as wombats to make themselves less creepy.

Ultimately, The Shrouds is about what happens to someone when they can’t keep a promise to the dead and The Ballad of Wallis Island navigates similar territory, although shrouded in cringe comedy rather than body horror.

What would you do if you were Lotto millionaire several times over and also a huge fan of a once popular but now defunct pop-folk duo from an earlier decade? You’d throw money at them to come to your remote semi-private island to reunite and give a concert just for you, wouldn’t you? Human nature.

Tim Key (poet, writer and Alan Partridge’s “Sidekick Simon”) is Charles. Socially awkward but very wealthy, he brings musician Herb McGuire (Tom Basden who co-wrote the film and all the songs) to the island for a gig and, without telling him, also invites former musical and romantic partner Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan).

The first third of the film emphasises the cringe aspect thanks to Charles’ inability to either read the room or turn off his motormouth but that’s eventually replaced by something quite heartfelt, helped by all the performances but especially Key who turns out to be doing something quite subtle. There’s a final shot where you can see he is having to finally let the past go and face the future and the mixture of excitement, fear and regret on his face is quite priceless.

For a while I was wondering why a commercial comedy like Wallis Island was in a festival that’s full of much darker work but by the end I realised that it’s because it’s really good.

Another film that relies on taking the mickey out of the performing arts for its comedy is Workmates, made by Fantail’s Sophie Henderson and Curtis Vowell. As a former theatrician myself, I could see how accurate this portrayal of a tiny, underfunded, theatre in central Auckland was but also the glaring moments when that accuracy was sacrificed for (too) cheap laughs.

Henderson plays Lucy, former playwright now dedicated theatre worker Lucy and Matt Whelan is former actor and now dedicated theatre co-worker Tom. It’s not entirely clear why there’s no real demarcation between their roles except that we need them to be thrown together in the madcap running of this venue. Except that Tom’s girlfriend is pregnant and he needs to find a “proper job”.