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This year, our screenings will be held at Christchurch's only remaining independent cinema, the Hollywood 3 in Sumner!
We reluctantly reserve the right to change the programme if a film
does not arrive. Late changes will be advised on the home page of this
website.
Opening Night
Monday 12 March
6:30 pmMILDRED PIERCE
Michael Curtiz, USA 1945, 35mm & DV. PG low level violence
Joan Crawford won her only Oscar for the title role, as a single mother who toils her way from waitress to successful businesswoman to provide for her spoilt and ungrateful daughter. Director Michael Curtiz followed up the success of Casablanca with this melodramatic noir adaptation of James M Cain’s notoriously racy novel.
Monday 19 March
6:30 pmWALKABOUT
Nicolas Roeg, Australia 1971, 35mm & DV. PG cert
A fable-like story of a teenage girl and her young brother stranded in the Australian outback. “It’s that rare thing, the intellectually haunting film – the movie that doesn't shock with its gore or stun with its violence so much as work its way beneath your senses to terrify with a realization about our species and ourselves that we'd rather not admit is true.” – New York Sun
Monday 26 March
6:30 pmTHE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
Tay Garnett, USA 1946, 35mm & DV. PG adult themes
Another classic James M Cain adaptation. “More film blanc than noir, as screencombusting lovers John Garfield and Lana Turner – dressed more for Park Avenue than the greasy spoon she slings hash in – plot to do away with her nice but old husband.” – Film Forum
Monday 2 April
6:30 pmWAKE IN FRIGHT
Ted Kotcheff, Australia 1971, 35mm & DV. R16 cert
“This gritty classic follows the increasingly off-kilter journey of a very proper and uptight teacher whose one night in the outback turns into a shattering hallucination of gambling, drinking and brutality… Controversial and groundbreaking… One of the great beacons of Australian cinema.” – ACMI
Monday 16 April
6:30 pmA MAO E A LUVA: THE STORY OF A BOOK TRAFFICKER
Roberto Orazi, Brazil/Italy 2010, DV
The story of poet and musician Ricardo Gomes Ferraz, better known as Kcal, who has turned his house in the favela Pina in Recife, Brazil into a library for the children of his community by scrounging and collecting books for over 15 years.
Monday 23 April
6:30 pmTHE FLIGHT
Stepan Skalsky, Czechoslovakia 1967, 16mm, GY cert
This impressive little film from the golden age of Czech cinema is impossibly and undeservingly obscure. In the first section the life of boy Sasha is sketched with expert economy. He is insecure because of his small size, his home life is not happy… He compensates for this by escaping into a fantasy world of avenging crimefighters and it is this inclination that tempts him to follow the young man he meets.
Monday 30 April
6:30 pmTHE ASPHALT JUNGLE
John Huston, USA 1950, 35mm. PG low level violence
The big daddy of big caper movies, this brilliant, chilling thriller revolves around a million-dollar jewel heist. "A taut, unsentimental study in character and relative morality… It has spawned countless imitations, few of which even remotely approach the intelligence and detail of the original.” – Time Out
Monday 7 May
6:30 pmWOODENHEAD
Florian Habicht, New Zealand 2003, DV. M sex scenes
A subversive musical fairy-tale, Habicht’s carnivalesque oddity follows dump hand Gert on his quest to deliver the dump owner’s beautiful mute daughter Princess Plum to her wedding. “A truly unsettling, visually inventive, stylistically thrilling and quite marvellous diamond in the rough.” – Melbourne IFF
Monday 14 May
6:30 pm start LAST TRAIN HOME
Gui tu lie chie, Fan Lixin, Canada/China 2009, DV
“The mind-boggling notion of 130 million Chinese migrant workers making their way home from inhospitable industrial cities to impoverished villages once each year gets a human face in Lixin Fan’s extraordinary, vital documentary… Essential viewing.” – Entertainment Weekly
Monday 21 May
6:30 pm startASHES OF TIME REDUX
Dung che sai duk, Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong 1994/2008, HD & DV. M violence
A new, streamlined version of the hugely costly and ambitious martial arts epic released to widespread incomprehension in 1994. “The changes – a reworked score, less murky colouring – serve to bring out more lustrously than ever the yearning wondrousness of this star-laden treasure.” – Daily Telegraph
Monday 28 May
6:30 pm startTHE GARDEN OF FINZI-CONTINIS
Il giardino dei Finzi Contini, Vittorio De Sica, Italy 1970, 35mm & DV. PG cert
This late-career triumph from Bicycle Thieves director Vittorio De Sica follows the lives of two Jewish families in the years leading up to World War II. “An autumnal work in two senses – the subject is the last golden flash of freedom before one of history's major tragedies… De Sica’ s final great work.” – Bright Lights Film Journal
Monday 11 June
6:30 pm startILSA NEGRA, ILLA BLANCA & GOD IS WANTED
Isla negra, isla blanca, Ventura Durall, Chile/Spain 2004, DV
This documentary explores the collaboration between the Nobel-prizewinning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his friend, the Catalan architect Germà Rodriguez Arias, to build and renovate four unique houses in Chile and France. The collaboration produced two very different aesthetic styles: the irrational Nerudan world on one side and Bauhaus lines and rationalism on the other.
Procura-se Déus, Marcel Cordiero, Brazil 2006, DV
While the rest of the world struggles with religious conflict, this documentary portrays Brazil as a model of peaceful coexistence: a religious democracy, where everyone is free to follow as many gods as they like. "God is a Brazilian!"
Monday 18 June
6:30 pm startNENETTE
Nicolas Philibert, France 2010, DV
Born in the jungles of Borneo, Nénette is a 40-year-old orangutan – and the oldest (and most beloved) inhabitant at the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Documentarian Philibert’s film is a captivating study of an enigmatic animal and our relationship to her. “Remarkable.” – Sight & Sound
Monday 25 June
6:30 pm startLA STRADA
Federico Fellini, Italy 1954, 35mm & DV. M adult themes
The film that made Fellini a household name. Anthony Quinn is a force of nature as the itinerant circus strongman who buys an affection-starved waif (Fellini’s muse Giulietta Masina) from her poverty-stricken family. “The cornerstone of Fellini’ s work.” – Martin Scorsese
Best Foreign Film, Academy Awards 1956
Monday 2 July
6:30 pm startTHE THIRD KIND
Jaroslav Balik, Czechoslovakia 1968, 16mm, R16 cert
A swinging Prague film from the late sixties (and boy, is it from the late sixties) featuring the Czech equivalents of Dirk Bogarde (circa now) and Julie Christie (circa then) in a familiar mismatched 'look at the size of my generation gap' romance. Full of camp laughs at standard clichés of the era viewed through the distorting lens of the Iron Curtain. There's a bunch of 'wild young things' flouncing around through much of the film, going to crazy discothèques that look like your school ball and throwing crazy parties that look like parentally sponsored get-togethers before or after your school ball. The Third Kind may offer your only chance to scream hysterically at the 'Czech Beatles'.
Monday 9 July
6:30 pm startKAMRAN SHIRDEL RETROSPECTIVE
Kamran Shirdel, Iran 1965-2002, DV
A retrospective programme of five short films from Kamran Shirdel, one of the pioneers of the social-documentary in Iranian cinema. Programme features the shorts Tehran Is the Capital of Iran, Women’s Prison, The Women’s Quarter, The Night it Rained and Solitude Opus.
Monday 16 July
6:30 pm startBUDDHA'S LOST CHILDREN
Mark Verkerk, The Netherlands 2006, DV. PG violence
“An exquisite and tranquil documentary about a Thai monk and the homeless boys to whom he gives a brand new life, Buddha’s Lost Children is richly affecting on many levels… This is a beautiful and uplifting film that leaves us with a genuine sense of harmony.” – Urban Cinefile
Monday 23 July
6:30 pm startBLERTA REVISITED
Geoff Murphy, New Zealand 2001, DV. M adult themes
Bruno Lawrence’s Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition was a changing line-up of musicians, filmmakers, lovers and hangers-on who between 1971 and 1976 toured New Zealand in a flower-powered bus. Murphy’s documentary on the group is structured to resemble one of their crazy vaudeville shows.
Monday 30 July
6:30 pm startTWO GREAT SHEEP
Hao da yei dui yang, Liu Hao, China 2004, DV. PG cert
This gentle satire of hierarchal life in rural China sees a dutiful peasant and his wife entrusted with the raising of two expensive foreign sheep, temperamental animals that refuse to breed even after they are moved into the couple’s bedroom.
Monday 6 August
6:30 pm startAFTERNOON
Nachmittag, Angela Schanelec, Germany 2007, 35mm. censors rating tbc
Schanelec taps into the existentialism of Antonioni and the post-modernism of Godard to present an acutely original take on Anton Chekov’s The Seagull. Here, the setting is modern Germany, in a lakeside holiday house where actress Irene, her son and her brother have withdrawn from the outside world.
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