NZIFF Preview: 2026 edition

I’d like to thank every­one for their patience while posts and news­let­ters have been so sporad­ic recently. Since mov­ing everything back here from Substack, I’ve had a tend­ency to want to fix things that are annoy­ing me here rather than do the hard stuff which is writ­ing. You might say that it’s a bit like wash­ing the car every Sunday and then nev­er tak­ing it for a drive and you may be right, but some of the recent changes have meant that the site actu­ally crashes every night and the serv­er has to be restar­ted. Not a prob­lem I ever had with Substack but at least I can vouch for the absence of Nazis in my bar.

I’d like to apo­lo­gise espe­cially to Auckland read­ers who are now sev­en days in to a 12-day Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival that I’m only just get­ting around to pre­view­ing. As I said to RNZ Culture 101’s host Anna Thomas the Sunday before last, I’m not sure that pre­view­ing about five per­cent of the titles in the pro­gramme allows me to com­ment on the qual­ity of the whole event, but that’s nev­er stopped me before.

Anyway, here are some cap­sules of the films I have man­aged to beg, steal or bor­row before kick-off.

Every gen­er­a­tion needs an anim­ated movie that makes them cry and the cur­rent one is a bet­ter can­did­ate than most. Ugo Bienvenu’s (bril­liant name, by the way) Arco man­ages to tug on the heartstrings pretty effect­ively while also hav­ing a fun­da­ment­ally optim­ist­ic view of the far-off future. (The near future, less so.)

Ten-year-old Arco lives in the late 30^th cen­tury where people use time travel suits to vis­it the flora and fauna of the past and pre­serve it for the future. Pissed off that he is too young to go and see some dino­saurs, Arco bor­rows his sis­ter­’s out­fit and stumbles back as far as 2075 – a recog­nis­able future of our own that at first seems like it ain’t too bad but we soon dis­cov­er the dark side of it. Arco makes friends with Iris who is being raised by a com­bin­a­tion of a domest­ic robot called Mikki and holo­grams of her actu­al par­ents who are busy work­ing in the city.

The film is essen­tially about Arco’s attempts to return home before a) his par­ents find that he is gone and b) civil­isa­tion col­lapses due to cli­mate devastation.

Incidentally, the list­ing on the NZIFF web­site has Arco down as in French with English sub­titles but the prin­ted book says that most of the ses­sions are actu­ally of the English dub fea­tur­ing pro­du­cer Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo, Will Ferrell and America Ferrera. I pre­viewed that ver­sion and can vouch for it as suit­able for most kids.

Arco’s time trav­el­ling power comes from a dia­mond that attaches to his fore­head and coin­cid­ent­ally, an identic­ally shaped piece of cos­tume jew­ellery is the totem that run­away orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini) car­ries with her in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s chilly mys­tery, The Ice Tower. Stumbling into rein­ven­tion, Jeanne becomes Bianca when she takes shel­ter for a night in a build­ing that turns out to be a film stu­dio where an unenthu­si­ast­ic crew is shoot­ing a ver­sion of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen.

The crew are unenthu­si­ast­ic because the Queen is being played by a tyr­an­nic­al movie star (Marion Cotillard) but also because there is a dream­like qual­ity to the entire exer­cise – as if this is fantasy, or faded memory or, you know, dreams. Cotillard’s Cristina takes a shine to Jeanne/Bianca as the pair real­ise how many par­al­lels they share with each oth­er­’s life.

As chilly as it sounds, The Ice Tower also feels like a passing of the torch between Cotillard and the star-on-the-rise Pacini. Also of note, the fic­tion­al film’s dir­ect­or is played by Hadžihalilović’s life part­ner and reg­u­lar col­lab­or­at­or, Gaspar Noé (in case you’ve ever wondered what he looked like).

Every year under the dir­ect­or­ship of Paolo Bertolin, the NZIFF gets more up-to-date and the dinkum Aussie com­edy The Fox is so new that there isn’t even a prop­er poster image for it yet.

A bunch of tal­en­ted Australian comedi­ans (and Jai Courtney) have been gathered togeth­er by Dario Russo for a deli­ciously dark romantic fable. Courtney plays boof­head Nick, who does­n’t know that his fiancé Kori (Emily Browning) is cheat­ing on him with the loc­al vet (Damon Herriman) who is, in the pro­cess, cheat­ing on his wife (Claudia Doumit).

When he dis­cov­ers the betray­al, Nick is per­suaded by a talk­ing fox with the voice of Olivia Colman that there is a solu­tion – push­ing Kori into a magic pit where she will re-emerge as a much more com­pli­ant par­ti­cipant in the rela­tion­ship. The foul-mouthed mag­pie who is watch­ing on (Sam Neill) isn’t so sure.

Vulgar, sexy and very, very Australian, The Fox is a grown-up crowd-pleaser and gets delight­fully weirder the longer it goes on.

National Geographic bought the doc­u­ment­ary The Tale of Silyan right out of Venice last year and it’s also going to be a crowd-pleaser (although of a very dif­fer­ent kind). As the North Macedonian eco­nomy founders – no European Union to be an export mar­ket – farm­ers like Nikola struggle and the young people seek bet­ter oppor­tun­it­ies in the West. When his chil­dren – and even­tu­ally his wife – leave for Germany, Nikola is left alone to either sell the farm and join them or slowly with­er away.

In Disney fash­ion, he instead dis­cov­ers a wounded stork – a bird that is not only sym­bol­ic­ally import­ant in Macedonia, their fer­til­ising of the crops is vital to the con­tin­ued health of the soil – and nurses it back to fit­ness, and get this, heal­ing him­self in the process.

A very pleas­ant 90-or-so minutes, I did find myself won­der­ing how much manip­u­la­tion there might have been behind the scenes and how much was actu­ally organic.

Another doc­u­ment­ary from the National Geographic fam­ily, Time and Water is a horse of a dif­fer­ent col­our. A kind of psy­cho­geo­graph­ic por­trait of Iceland through the lens of poet Andri Snær Magnason and his remark­able family.

What hap­pens when the gla­ciers that define the Icelandic cul­ture and char­ac­ter recede at the same time as the memor­ies of his grand­par­ents, among the first people to unlock the remark­able secrets that those gla­ciers contain?

As Magnason goes back and forth between his fad­ing grand­par­ents and the dis­ap­pear­ing gla­ciers, we get to under­stand the fra­gil­ity of memory and of how it makes us who we are, wheth­er we are people or a nation.

Understated but quietly dev­ast­at­ing at the same time.

The German power­house Sandra Hüller reaches even great­er heights as Rose, a female vet­er­an of the Thirty Years War who has gone through life as a man. Somehow in pos­ses­sion of a doc­u­ment that entitles them to some prop­erty as an inher­it­ance, they per­suade the vil­lage eld­ers to author­ise the trans­fer and start her new life.

It’s not all that simple, how­ever, as she is expec­ted to take full part in vil­lage life, includ­ing mar­ry­ing one of the loc­al daugh­ters and pro­du­cing an heir. This is under­stand­ably chal­len­ging for Rose but before she can solve it, a child is actu­ally born mean­ing that both Rose and her wife (Caro Braun) have secrets that they don’t want to have revealed.

Shot in strik­ing black and white by Gerald Kerkletz, Markus Schleinzer’s film is form­ally sat­is­fy­ing and emo­tion­ally grip­ping. I think we are going to be hear­ing a lot about it when awards are handed out next year.

After Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie rocked my world a few weeks ago, it’s good to know that the Canadian freak flag con­tin­ues to be flown by the crazy gang behind Buffet Infinity, a horror-satire told entirely using the media of cheap 90s late-night loc­al TV commercials.

The battle between com­pet­ing res­taur­ants in the Westridge, Alberta, mall soon pales into insig­ni­fic­ance when a giant sink­hole opens up in the car park. Except, it does­n’t. The mys­ter­i­ous hole is soon for­got­ten even though evid­ence sug­gests that it may be a demon­ic portal of some kind, but the battle between one café’s homemade spe­cial sauces and the con­stantly grow­ing all-you-can-eat offer­ing next door spills out into the com­munity and every small busi­ness own­er who fronts their own hand­held com­mer­cials is now a tar­get. Or a per­pet­rat­or. Or a ves­sel for the deliv­ery of an unspeak­able evil. Or something.

It loses its com­mit­ment to the bit at the end, in favour of some­thing more explan­at­ory, but it’s an extra fun ride while it lasts.

The New Zealand International Film Festival has already star­ted in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland (until 9 August) and also plays:

Ōtautahi Christchurch – 6 August to 23 August
Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington – 12 August to 23 August
Ōtepoti Dunedin – 14 August to 30 August
Ahuriri Napier – 27 August to 6 September
Kirikiriroa Hamilton, Matakana, Ngāmotu New Plymouth, Tauranga-Moana Tauranga, Whakaoriori Masterton, Whatū Nelson – 27 August to 9 September

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Further reading

I man­aged to get myself quoted in Rolling Stone Australia’s pre­view of the anniversary NZIFF screen­ings of Duncan Sarkie’s Out of the Blue. My quote comes from this appre­ci­ation I wrote for NZ On Screen back in 2024. Out of the Blue was also a recom­mend­a­tion here in 2023 as well as an ori­gin­al review when it hit cinemas in October 2006.

It has just struck me that I am com­ing up to the 20^th anniversary of my first reviews here (and at Capital Times). Blimey.