X-Files in New Zealand

Film Festival: The director's cut

04.07.2001 Film Festival director Bill Gosden has seen just about everything in this year's programme. We asked him what he would like to see again. Before recommending some, I have to cheat and say I got a big kick from the transgressive sassiness of Gillian Ashurst's Snakeskin, and that the Elvis concert movie - Elvis: That's The Way It Is - gave me goosebumps.

And that's not to mention several films programmed by my colleagues, which I am especially eager to see for the first time: the Inuit epic Atanarjuat, the French backstage comedy/drama Who Knows? and the famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons Intimacy. But here are some personal recommendations:

* The Circle. A revelation. The dramatic urgency with which this film depicts its outlaw women, caught on the fly, is electrifying. Banned in Iran. The question is how it ever got made there and sent abroad.

* Divided We Fall. Another beautiful balancing act from the director of Cosy Dens. A gentile couple reluctantly conceal a Jewish refugee in Nazi-occupied Prague and become embroiled in an anxious comedy of misunderstandings as friends and neighbours leap to very wrong conclusions.

* The Gleaners and I. The year's best use of digital video by a grandmother, or anyone else for that matter. Utterly engaging, Agnes Varda's documentary road movie considers society's attitudes to its "leftovers" - including the elderly.

* The House of Mirth. The title of Edith Wharton's American classic is ironic. Gillian Anderson's performance as her headstrong heroine is riveting as a treacherous turn-of-the-century New York manoeuvres her comeuppance.

* New Babylon. Once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this brazen extravaganza of anti-bourgeois agitation from the Soviet avant-garde, scored by a 23-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich. The Auckland Philharmonia is conducted by American silent film maestro Timothy Brock.

* The Shakedown. We're short of family entertainment this year, but this programme makes up for it with dash and panache. A highly entertaining 20s drama, preceded by a rare Buster Keaton short, accompanied to rousing effect by British piano virtuoso Neil Brand.

* Songs from the Second Floor. See something very weird. This vision of Y2K apocalypse, obsessively constructed over a four-year production period by its Swedish director, has a clammy, creepy brilliance. It's also pretty funny. The year's other recommended end-of-the-world experience, Werckmeister Harmonies is just as eye-poppingly strange - without the jokes.

* The Sorrow and the Pity. Why did this greatest of documentary films take 30 years to reach an Auckland cinema screen? The good news is that cinemas became more comfortable in the interim. Settle in, watch Marcel Ophuls' epic investigation of French wartime resistance and collaboration, and relish every minute of its four-hour-plus running time.

* Together. In a programme rich in comedy, 30-year-old Lukas Moodyson's affectionate, astute and very funny satire of his parents' generation is the most resonant and pleasingly rounded. A household of earnestly self-exploring commune-dwellers is seen through the eyes of sceptical children. Poet, writer and film-maker Moodyson is the wunderkind of a lively new wave of young Swedish directors.

* Yi Yi. Wonderful. A dramatic slice of middle-class family life is observed with great insight in this graceful, touching film. Taiwanese director Edward Yang displays extraordinary identification with each of the disparate members of an extended family, gathering for a wedding and a funeral, and going about their separate lives in between."

The Auckland International Film Festival runs from this Friday until Sunday, July 22.