New Zealand International Film Festivals

Films about sustainable living, eco-communities and environmental protection from around the world at the New Zealand International Film Festivals.
For more information go to our website. www.nzff.co.nz

Brief Overview of each film

1. Garbage Warrior
A film about environmentally sustainable housing, and community-owned projects. Building out of materials like beer cans, car tires and plastic water bottles as well as rammed earth, architect Michael Reynolds’ houses rely upon only the earth’s natural resources to heat, cool, water and power them. The film also shows Reynolds and his team’s work in building new housing and reconstruction projects in tsunami and earthquake struck parts of South Asia and Mexico.

2. Earth
The spectacular giant screen spin-off from the BBC's Planet Earth series, this film concentrates and expands on astoundingly close coverage of three creatures and their young offspring: polar bear, elephant and humpback whale. The hardships posed to their migratory existence by a changing planet are distressingly clear, but it’s the medium, not the sadly familiar message, that will amaze as this new apogee of nature cinematography floods the Civic screen. As you might expect of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, the high-definition imagery is simply matchless. Whether it’s a crisp aerial shot of a wolf taking down a caribou, night footage of lions tackling an elephant, or slow-mo film of a great white shark leaping out of the water, there isn’t a moment that doesn’t fill one with awe.

3. Pete Seeger; The Power Of Song
This rousing, affectionate biographical portrait of singer/activist Pete Seeger, now in his late 80s, is also an overview of 20th-century American folk music as a form of protest for civil rights and environmental movements across the US. In the 60s Seeger turned "We Shall Overcome" into the anthem of the civil rights movement. He was kept off American television for 17 years on account of his left-leaning views, but never lost his audience.

4. Sharkwater
Underwater videographer, eco-warrior and hunk, Rob Stewart is passionate about sharks. Years in the making, his spectacular film puts us within snorkels’ length of the ocean’s unjustly demonised predators, then plumbs the depths of the multi billion-dollar shark-fin trade to show how over-harvesting sharks destroys the food chain and puts the world’s ecosystems at risk. "This beautiful and urgent eco-doc takes a bite out of the shark mythology made indelible by Jaws. Sharkwater argues that these ancient creatures are as friendly as dolphins, and relatively safe.”

5. Up the Yangtze
This documentary observes life on the soon-to-be-flooded banks of the Yangtze from aboard a cruise ship taking English-speaking tourists up the river. We meet a handful of the people whose lives are being the most deeply affected, and we become especially well-acquainted with two of the ship’s young restaurant workers: a woman from a dirt-poor family whose shack close to the river will very soon be drowned, and the brash son of a middle-class family. Their very different responses to westernisation are subtly shaded and speak volumes about the price of China’s headlong rush into the future.

Social Interest films

6. La Zona
Issues of social and moral responsibility in urban environments: gated communities and social integration.

This expert thriller set in a wealthy walled community in Mexico City packs nail-biting suspense with a scathing broadside on class war. From the opening shot the anxiety underlying the kitset of plush suburban tranquillity is palpable. Surveillance cameras eye the fear. When a slum kid out stealing gets trapped within the walls, he’s caught in a lethal game of hide and seek with the town’s self-appointed guardians of law and order.

7. Trouble is My Business
Assistant Principal Mr Peach of Aorere College battles to keep his students in school and out of trouble. Aorere College is situated in the heart of Mangere. The school struggles to cope with widespread social issues inherent in the local community and has a history of street gangs within the school, high levels of truancy and low academic achievement. In an environment where the morale of both the students and teachers is at an all time low, Mr Peach single-handedly persists in his belief in the kids and their right to an education. He fights to keep them in school through a mixture of tough discipline, street knowledge, negotiation, support and encouragement – whatever it takes. As a life-long inhabitant of the area, Mr Peach has a profound empathy for the kids and an understanding of the complexity of their problems. Armed with this insight and convinced that his students have potential, Mr Peach adopts unconventional methods to reach out to the students and their families.

8. Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go
Mulberry Bush in Oxford is a boarding school that caters to children with behavioural problems so extreme no regular school can handle them. The film records a year in the life of this unique institution where the staff to student ratio stands at 108 to 40. When tempers flare, these kids punch, kick, spit and curse at the superhumanly patient teachers. These are all children whose lives have clearly been deeply messed up.

9. Let’s Say
What do kids think their parents do at work? This film asks kids from different areas of France and different ethnic backgrounds to act out their parents' work days. First asked to rank various professions in order of importance, the children are then invited individually to describe their parents' jobs. These include farmers, doctors, policemen and circus performers. Finally, provided with simple costumes and sets, they create skits based on those occupations. Some of the views expressed are whimsical, others show surprising sophistication. The farmers’ children, for example, would be much more competent at delivering a calf than 90% of their elders.

10. The Wave
A high school teacher's unusual experiment to show his students what life is like under a dictatorship spins horribly out of control when the movement takes on a life of its own. Within a few days, what began with harmless notions like discipline and community builds into a real movement: THE WAVE. When the students start ostracizing and threatening others the teacher decides to stop the experiment. But it's too late. THE WAVE is out of control...

11. River of No Return
Frances Daingangan is a Yolngu woman from North East Arnhemland, Australia. She is a 45-year old mother of three and grandmother of six. Her life has been tough, but despite every encouragement to do so, she’s never quite relinquished the powerful girlish fantasy of becoming a movie actress like Marilyn Monroe. When Rolf de Heer was casting Ten Canoes in Ramingining, he met the vivacious Frances working in a shop. He thought she would be perfect for the role of the second wife, ‘Nowalingu’ but he can have had little idea of the depth of experience or historical knowledge she would bring to the part. Two years later she was walking the red carpet at Cannes. This film shows Frances in her community where she discusses the stark circumstances of her life candidly and ponders her options. It’s a revealing encounter with a woman richly imbued with two cultures who receives scant visible support from either.

12. 100 Nails
Though it begins as an investigative thriller, the film is essentially the simple tale of a young Bologna professor who turns his back on the world of learning (dramatically, by driving nails through 100 leather-bound tomes) and finds his way into a small riverside community where traditional life is threatened by modernisation. Much of the film is an exquisitely photographed idyll of life on the banks of the Po. The benign picture of natural harmony, beatific humanity and divine mystery radiates a deep sense of tranquility and pleasure.

13. Frozen River
First-time director Courtney Hunt took the Grand Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Feature at this year's Sundance Festival for her nerve-wracking thriller. The finely etched anti-heroines are two matter-of-fact, desperate women who traffic illegal immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River into the US. One woman’s white, the other Native American and they have more in common than their ingrained mutual distrust will allow them to admit. The precariousness of their hard lives, bringing up young families without support, is sharply observed and compellingly played out in the mounting danger of their nightly excursions over thawing ice.

14. Hollow Men
The “stolen” insider emails that informed Nicky Hager’s best-selling account of National’s 2004 election campaign return in Alister Barry’s (Someone Else’s Country) new film – just in time to caution us against campaigning politicians in 2008. Whatever your political leanings, this makes for essential viewing.

15. Huloo
Huloo reveals the remarkable life-story of octogenarian T’ai Chi master Loo-Chi Hu (Huloo) based in Christchurch. His quiet modesty belies the chain of outstanding chapters and twists of fate that punctuate his life – from his 1970 rescue of explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra II near Barbados, to his numerous fishing inventions still used worldwide. As a feisty teenager in Shanghai, Huloo learned T’ai Chi from renowned master Chen Wei Ming in 1941.

16. It's a Free World
Veteran masters of social realism Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty (My Name Is Joe, The Wind that Shakes the Barley) return with one of their most involving character-centred dramas. Angie is a feisty East Ender, a solo mum who loses her job in a recruitment agency and sets up an agency of her own, placing semi-legal immigrants. A sexy blonde dynamo on a motorbike, she strikes deals and dishes out jobs to Polish, Ukrainian and Chilean workers for construction sites and clothing factories.The deeper she gets into this dodgy business, the more she is determined to prove her mettle, defying her old unionist dad, her nervous business partner, and her own generous nature. Loach and Laverty dramatise the human price of free market enterprise with every risk she takes and every choice she makes.

17. Munyurangbo
In this delicate, poignant film two young city men, one a Hutu, the other a Tutsi, are obliged to confront their ethnic difference for the first time when they visit the impoverished farm of the Hutu man’s family. Amazingly, this beautiful and most Afro-centric of recent African films grew from a young Korean American filmmaker’s observations while teaching at a Christian relief camp in Rwanda. The narrative and dialogue arose entirely out of the circumstances of people he and his script-writer knew. The performances unfold with unforced naturalism as though no camera were ever present.

18. The Not Dead
Brian Hill’s intense, poetic portrait of former soldiers afflicted by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The film is poetic in quite a literal way: one of its most striking innovations is that the soldiers’ stories have also been rendered as poems by Simon Armitage, which their subjects read back to camera. It is moving to see the men recognise themselves in Armitage’s articulation of their experiences, but it’s the raw emotion of the testimony, immediate and overwhelming even after 50 years, that really counts. The film focuses on three British soldiers, who served in different times and conflicts: Malaya in the 50s; Bosnia in the 90s; Iraq only a few years ago. Each has to relive his own specific trauma, and the stories embody the disabling emotions that continue to feed their nightmares: guilt, impotence, loneliness. It’s a resounding, deeply moving experience.

19. Terror's Advocate
Notorious for repeatedly defending the indefensible, Jacques Vergès may epitomise the lawyer you love to hate. An enigmatic figure whose clients have been some of the most repugnant mass killers modern times have known: Klaus Barbie (known as ‘The Butcher of Lyon’ during his Nazi years), Carlos the Jackal, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein among them. Why does Vergès play this role, and with such relish? And what was he up to when he completely disappeared between 1970 and 1978? The questions multiply once you understand that Vergès was a Communist and an ardent anti-colonialist in his younger days. Has he any moral consistency beyond his capacity for needling France's high opinion of itself as the bastion of freedom, equality and fraternity?

“I would even defend Bush.” - Jacques Vergès

20. The Visitor
A shy, disillusioned Economics professor returns to his New York apartment to find it occupied by a couple of illegal immigrants. Convivial Tarek is a talented drummer who encourages Walter out of his protective shell, while his girlfriend Zainab carries the burden of their perilous citizenship status. Each learns something new, but just when you have this film pinned, it takes off in an unexpectedly dramatic and moving direction.