What to do in Auckland this weekend: Film festivals, dining deals, musicals and more
Restaurants, reading and films aplenty; if you're looking for something to do this weekend in Auckland, there's no shortage of festivals and events to keep you entertained. August welcomes the New Zealand International Film Festival, Auckland Restaurant Month, Auckland Council Libraries' We Read festival, as well as Chicago the Musical,
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The Spinoff
2 days ago
- The Spinoff
What we saw at Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival: week one
A Palme d'Or winner, the Jacinda Ardern documentary, cage fighting in Kaikohe and more – reviewed. It Was Just an Accident The Civic was buzzing on opening night of the New Zealand International Film Festival and few films could've justified the packed house like It Was Just an Accident. Hailed by festival director Paolo Bertolin as the first truly deserving Palme d'Or winner in years, the Iranian drama delivers a taut and affecting meditation on justice, memory, and the price of survival. When a group of former political prisoners encounter the man who once tortured them, the film becomes a quiet reckoning – not just with the past, but with the uncertain line between forgiveness and vengeance. Director Jafar Panahi, long a master of subversive Iranian cinema, handles the material with precision and grace. The cinematography is luminous, but never distracts from the film's emotional core, which is often laced with unexpected moments of humour – the kind that briefly disarms before plunging deeper. Though rooted in Iran's political landscape, It Was Just an Accident speaks to universal dilemmas of power and reconciliation. It's a film of rare weight and restraint – one that lingers long after the credits roll. / Liam Rātana Prime Minister I assume no other film festival film has started 30 minutes late because a protest outside and beefed up security meant a very slow entry into the Civic for 2,400 viewers. A documentary about Jacinda Ardern, even two years after she's resigned as prime minister and left the country, will do that. Once it got started, my heart sank – an opening shot both 'observational' but clearly orchestrated of Ardern dropping Neve to the school bus in Chicago before strolling peacefully to Harvard. Would this be a long wellness ad for working at Harvard? Thankfully, it quickly jumped back to 2017, with Ardern about to become Labour leader. There's familiar footage of press conferences and newslines intersected with genuinely enthralling snippets of Ardern's phone calls at the time with the Alexander Turnbull Oral History Project, which are not supposed to be released until after Ardern's death. They're incredibly candid – more candid even than Ardern was in her own book – and give the film that extra emotional weight. It's very hard to properly review a film that covers events most New Zealanders experienced, through one very powerful person's perspective. But if I watched something like this about any other world leader, that had this much access and candour, I would love it. Clarke Gayford has a cinematography credit as the person who filmed a lot of the more intimate moments (Ardern drafting her resignation press release in bed; stressfully reading updates on the mosque shootings). If I left with one impression it's that I can't believe she didn't break up with him through all of that. / Madeleine Chapman Fiume o Morte! The footnotes of history often make the best documentary subjects, and this is very much the case for this documentary by Igor Bezinović, who trains a lens on his hometown, Rijeka in Croatia, and the 18-month period when it was ruled by a proto-fascist Italian aristocrat, army general (and poet!) Gabriele D'Annunzio, and called Fiume. Bezinović's enlisting of the citizens to reenact historical events is a genius format; doing more than just humanising and placing the history in a present context, each brings their own memories, cultural identity and role in the community to the character. D'Annunzio, fuelled by hubris and cocaine, is played by numerous bald men, including a dustman and someone in a punk band. Taking over the city was farcical (though not without very real pain and loss of life) and there's a level of absurdism to the retelling – his loyal, strapping foot soldiers must know how to fight and jump over things but also dance and sing – and it all happens as modern life goes on around it. It's a darkly funny film – there were lots of laughs to be heard at The Academy – and though hyper specific to a region of complex cultures and identities, the broader story is one of the shifting identities of a city, how pasts and presents that often coexist in one place, what we decide to forget and how we chose to remember. See it if you can. / Emma Gleason Kaikohe Blood and Fire Yes this is about an MMA club in a small Far North town — a simple premise on paper — but what Simon Ogsten's documentary really delivers is a gut-punch about the community men crave and where they go to find it. We see the members of Team Alpha find a sense of brotherhood and support alongside the physical rewards (and risks) of the sport, the outsized role the club plays in Kaikohe, we get a sense of where they came from and what hole this fills for them. Ogsten captures the violence, of course, but also the desire for it. At the start of the film, one subject explains how he loves a war and wants a 'wild, mongrel fight', a shocking declaration for some viewers, but one that comes from a deep place and a long, expansive history of martial culture. What that looks like now, how we satisfy such desires and the place they're given in society, puts the sport in context. Contemporarily, violence is both frowned upon and rewarded, depending on where and who's doing it. MMA is booming, in the big leagues and small towns like Kaikohe. After watching this I 'got it', that primal why and modern need, and it makes you think. / Emma Gleason Dreams (Sex Love) A bit of a risky choice from me, knowing nothing about the trilogy(!) of films from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud. Dreams is the final release (after Sex and Love, also showing at the festival) and follows 17-year-old Johanne as she falls head over heels in love with one of her teachers. She writes evocatively of her feelings and interactions with the teacher and eventually shows her writing to her mother and poet grandmother, who debate the ethics of the situation as well as the quality of her writing. Haugerud's greatest achievement in Dreams is accurately, and without condescension, conveying the brutality of a first love and the sense that nothing else in the world is more important or more painful. We view Johanne's relationship with her teacher first through her infatuated lens, then through her guardians' protective lens, then through a subjective, analytical lens as her teacher responds. As is often the case in life, there are no clear villains or heroes, just women of different generations trying to navigate a teenager's powerful crush. Despite a heavy use of voiceover (which is not my preferred narrative technique) I found myself engrossed in Johanne's emotional processing and maturation. Near the start of the film, Johanne describes wanting to tell her teacher how she feels. She's terrified that her teacher will either get mad or, even worse, 'laugh condescendingly, like when a child says something adorable'. It's a relatable and brutal feeling, made all the more ironic throughout the rest of the film as viewers around us laughed at her romantic despair over and over. May we all never forget the agony of a first love. / Madeleine Chapman The Ballad of Wallis Island I turned up to The Ballad of Wallis Island 15 minutes late and stressed to high heaven, scurrying into a seat in the back row as Tim Key was giving a sopping wet Tom Basden a tour of his big old house on what I knew from reading the blurb to be a remote Welsh island. Within literal seconds a smile had involuntarily spread across my face and not a minute had passed before I was full-on chuckling along with the rest of the Civic crowd, which I think tells you everything you really need to know about this film. Story wise, Key plays Charles, a lonely widower and 2x Lotto winner who basically Parent Traps his favourite folk duo, McGwyer Mortimer (Basden and Carey Mulligan), into reuniting to play a one-off gig for him on the island, unwittingly forcing them to confront the pasts they've been simultaneously stuck in and running from. A huge part of this movie's appeal lies in the chemistry: Key and Basden have been friends and comedic collaborators for years (Wallis Island started life as a short film they made together in 2007), and Mulligan slots into the dynamic seamlessly.
Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Aloud and in full colour
It might sound like Carol Hirschfeld but it's Shayne Carter's story, film-maker Margaret Gordon tells Tom McKinlay. In the opening frames of a new documentary, Shayne Carter walks along the Aramoana mole as if it were a runway. He's coming in to land, returning to Ōtepoti, back from the world. There he immediately meets the rough acclaim of the mole's resident seagulls - and curses right back. But it's an uneven contest, even for as practised a crowd wrangler as the Dunedin musician. No problem though, because the film jumps straight to Carter unleashed, wringing rawk high in feedback's most seaside registers from his leftie six string. Take that, you gulls. It's emblematic. As Life in One Chord chronicles, Carter seems to have had an answer always, to circumstance, to distance, to tragedy, to success. Life in One Chord is the work of journalist and documentary-maker Margaret Gordon - formerly of Christchurch, now of Melbourne - its title taken from the first vinyl release of Carter's very nearly all-conquering band Straitjacket Fits, a squalling '80s four-track EP that carried the propulsive She Speeds. This past week Gordon was applying the final touches to her film - crucially, making sure the sound mix does the material justice - ahead of its New Zealand International Film Festival release. The film's a musical biography, tracing Carter's trajectory from the hard-knock playgrounds of 1970s Brockville to the world stage and back again. It charts a course of approximate parallel to Carter's Ockham-winning memoir Dead People I Have Known, but welcomes in the perspectives of others involved in the various milieu that set him on his way or who travelled with him. And indeed, the book was part of her motivation for the film, Gordon says. "It really spoke to me, and I was like, it really needs to be painted in with all the bright colours, so when he talks about the bands or the people or the places that you can hear it and you can see it." So, alongside weaving in essential servings of Carter's rich songwriting catalogue - including some rare live footage - the film makes room for voices from his early life, home and school, and an extended cast of Dunedin Sound musicians. "The key people there would be John Collie, the drummer from Straitjacket Fits ... and also Natasha, Shayne's sister, which is important, because, you know, Shayne talks a lot about family," Gordon says. The film-maker's rule was that the people included had to be directly related to the story. The film follows Gordon's well received 2014 documentary Into the Void as another entry in the musical history of Te Waipounamu - the earlier documentary focused on the Christchurch band of the title. Music, bands, people interest her. "I think being in a band, it's a really ephemeral thing, isn't it?" she muses. "Like, it's very hard to exactly pinpoint what it is that makes it so special, but there is a certain kind of magic there that happens within that group of people and it's really the transmission of that through to the audience ... just that spark, in that moment, when that happens, where this group of people is doing something and this other group of people is there and they witness it and they feel it and they get engaged." So, not a straightforward phenomenon to distill, to capture, away from a gig's pulsing cacophony, but in her film, Gordon has a great ally. "Shayne's such a good talker," she says. "That was one of the things that I was really drawn to about him in terms of a documentary subject, you know, he has really great reflections on everything, really, and he has a lot of really great things to say, so that's really important. "He's a performer, too, and so that's really good. Like, it's not necessary, but it helps when you're making a documentary to be working with someone who's not afraid of a camera, someone who's OK to gather themselves together and put on a little bit of a show, which is most certainly what he did." Carter's on foot, in his own footsteps, through much of the film, from the mole to Brockville Rd, from his old high school to tracking down Straitjacket Fits' original broom cupboard George St practice room. It's a story of making your own fun. And Carter's created a lot of it. Still is in new and reinventing ways - he's now composing for the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Gordon wasn't familiar with all of it when she started into the doco. She'd joined the Carter fandom from about the Straitjacket Fits, following it on to Dimmer, but was learning about his earlier output with Bored Games and Double Happys. The formative story of the former plays out at what was Kaikorai Valley High School, Carter trooping back despite some misgivings. But as Gordon tells it, his reception there also pushes out the margins of the story to include a community's pride in the boy who did good. "You know, he said before we went back, he was like, 'oh, I didn't really like high school that much. I don't know how this is going to go'. "We came in and then before we'd even got into the office, you know, the deputy principal, John Downes, came out ... and then a couple of other people came out and everybody came out welcoming Shayne - really loved to see him back there." That sort of slightly revisionist remembering - back in the day the school's then principal stormed out of Bored Games' abrasive punk-inspired school hall performances - is joined in conspiracy by a Dunedin caught at its blue sky best. There's no sense here of the cold, suffocating grey that those Dunedin bands of the 1980s were trying to mitigate. Gordon admits to being a little bit disappointed Dunedin didn't deliver on its meteorological reputation. "I was like, 'oh, OK, this is making it look really good. Is this true? Are we really telling a true story here with all the sunshine?'." There is, though, plenty of shade in the story. Grim reality foreshadowed in the title of Carter's memoir. Gordon had some difficult material to cover, requiring sensitive handling. A striking element in the film is the tight knit nature of the community involved in Carter's shared story. Among the most prominent players is his Double Happys partner in crime, Wayne Elsey - another preternaturally talented friend from school, who was there for the pre-teen hijinks that became teenage kicks and rock and roll. The Carter-Elsey chemistry meant the Double Happys seemed destined for the sort of success Straitjacket Fits later achieved, but Elsey died in a touring accident. Gordon says they thought long and hard about how to handle that tragedy, integrate it into the story arc. "Because his passing was so tragic, it's still felt very strongly, it's still very raw within that Dunedin community. So, whatever we did, we had to be really careful about it and respectful." She knew Carter was not going to talk about it in an interview so that responsibility was picked up by Collie - drummer in both Double Happys and Straitjacket Fits - who grew up a stone's throw from Elsey's childhood home. And if anything more was needed from Carter, he'd addressed that responsibility already in his song Randolph's Going Home, a rawly heartfelt remembering that is afforded generous space in the film. For all Carter's showman inclinations, Gordon says she knew he was not going to be offering unlimited access to his inner workings. "He has a lot of self-protection, and I think that, you know, I always knew that he wasn't going to do a big interview where he would reveal all. "That's really not what he's like, and I did know that going in." That contributed to her decision to use passages from Dead People I Have Known in the film. "It's all there. All of that stuff is very, very real and very raw in Shayne's own words." However, in a genius twist, those words are read into the documentary by Carol Hirschfeld, the broadcaster's honeyed tones mixing equal measures of her straight-faced professionalism with the double-take comedy of delivering the punk rocker protagonist's own words in the first person. There's more pathos to come, beyond Elsey's passing, as of the original four members of Straitjacket Fits there's only two still standing, Carter and Collie. Bassist David Wood died in 2010, followed 10 years later by the band's other songwriter, Andrew Brough. Brough left the band abruptly in the early '90s just as they were about to go stratospheric and, while he found further critical success with his band Bike, had largely retreated from the world by the time he died. As a result, Gordon's interview with him is particularly affecting, as the bitterness previously reported about his departure from the band appeared to have receded. "It was interesting, because he was a lot warmer about his time in the band and a lot more circumspect about the band's demise than I thought he would be," Gordon says. "I feel like he'd come to a point where he still had a bit of grievance, but overall he was pretty much, you know, had accepted that it was what it was. "I wouldn't want to say that he'd moved on, but he wasn't fretting about it any more, that's for sure." As the documentary does at various other points, Brough's story acknowledges the well-observed tensions at the heart of the music industry and the price to be paid. "The music industry is always a strange one because it's got this unhappy marriage between creativity and money," Gordon says. "And those two things just don't really work well together." A lot of Dunedin bands would have been through the same grinder, she says, having been identified by the industry as bankable propositions. "And then, you know, all of that kind of influence starts creeping in and things become very difficult. And I actually think that's an underlying theme of the film." Adversity, character and resilience are foregrounded again in a chapter on Carter's role in supporting Dunedin Sound progenitor Chris Knox, following his debilitating stroke, in which the Enemy and Toy Love frontman delivers his own lesson in gritty defiance. Knox's determination seems to hold up another mirror to Carter's doggedness. Gordon confirms that was the story she found, but it was also the story she chose to tell. "You could have made a documentary and not talked about that, but for me one of the big things about Shayne that's really important and that is potentially unusual is that he really is resilient and that he just keeps getting back up and getting back to work again. And even though he's had to deal with some of the most difficult things that you could possibly imagine, including, being in a band and touring the world and then coming back to Dunedin - I mean, that's going to be tough. "It'd be tough for anyone. Especially because, you know, I don't think New Zealand is very good at having much empathy for people in that situation." The standard antipodean advice to such vicissitudes, absent of much empathy, would be to "get over it". Yep, true, Gordon says. "But, you know, that's exactly actually what he does. And so, yes, that theme of resilience, it really was something that we wanted to tell because I think it's very central to Shayne's story. "He's a resilient guy and amongst all of this difficulty and tragedy, he just continues on. He's an artist. He stays on the path." While Gordon's film will initially screen at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and perhaps beyond that in a conventional cinema format, she has other plans for it. "We're going to regroup and create, like, a different version of the film that has more music in it and that will have live incidental music and that will tour more like a band." Music documentaries aren't always huge box office draws at the cinema, she says, and, in a lot of ways, Life in One Chord is quite niche. It is, to a significant extent, one for New Zealand about New Zealanders. "So, we always wanted to have another plan so the film could have a second life where it could travel to, like, music festivals and arts festivals and things like that." It would be a longer show, incorporating live music. It would be doing things differently, appropriately enough. "One of the things about Shayne, he was, is and remains a punk and likes to do things his own way," Gordon says in summary. "And that was the way we did the film - 'this is how it is and we're going to do it the way that we want to do it, we are going to do it ourselves, we're going to do it our own way'. And that's how it ended up." Life in One Chord screens as part of the NZ International Film Festival at the Regent Theatre, Dunedin on August 16 and 19.
NZ Herald
6 days ago
- NZ Herald
What to do in Auckland this weekend: Film festivals, dining deals, musicals and more
The Burnt Butter Table's Emilie Pullar (left) is joining forces with chef Sean Connolly's team at Esther for an Auckland Restaurant Month event. Restaurants, reading and films aplenty; if you're looking for something to do this weekend in Auckland, there's no shortage of festivals and events to keep you entertained. August welcomes the New Zealand International Film Festival, Auckland Restaurant Month, Auckland Council Libraries' We Read festival, as well as Chicago the Musical,
