Transit [2018] by Christian Petzold

TRANSIT is an involving drama, set during wartime but only concerned with a handful of characters. Like Casablanca, the characters are simply trying to obtain visas to get them out of occupied territory, and like Casablanca, it is full of love, passion, intrigue, big decisions and sudden unexpected shifts from the characters that make perfect sense as they reveal the undercurrents we didn't know were moving them. 

This film is not about the war, it is about relationships between people who just happen to encounter each other, who face the same predicament, and who choose whether or not to help, and whether or not to trust, each other.  It is convincingly performed, meticulously directed and a pleasure to experience. 

Ága [2018] by Milko Lazarov

In ÁGA, the old woman has a dream that she's walking with a polar bear who becomes a young man who takes her home with him, into a deep hole where all of the stars have been taken down from the sky into that bright dazzling hole where she forgets everything, who she is, where she came from and all the world outside. 

The daily life of this old Yakut couple in North Eastern Siberia is carefully documented, travelling via dogsled, fishing, trapping, making medicine, maintaining their yurt, as the world changes around them, helicopters pass overhead, their children have moved to the city, and yet they persist with calm resolution. 

The frozen landscape is exquisitely photographed and the tiny but complete world of these characters is a privilege to be invited into.  They live in a harsh environment, but they live their lives with sensitivity and patience.  The delicacy with which they communicate, tell stories and dream of the past is very moving.

This film really is spectacularly composed, the landscapes huge and cold and unforgiving, and movingly written and performed for the warmth and depth of the human element.

The Cleaners [2018] by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck

THE CLEANERS is a very serious documentary about a very complex and deeply problematic subject and it offers no solutions. What right do major social media sites have to censor our expressions? What responsibilities do they have when their sites are being used to promote violence?

The film merely lays out the dangerous parameters of the situation, the massive influence that Facebook, Twitter and Google have on the world and how we communicate, and suggests there is some responsibility there regarding how that technology is being utilised. It is critical of these companies using economically marginalised and untrained Filipinos to do their vast editorial work.

I left the film much more uncertain of my position on the subject than when I went in.

Leto [2018] by Kirill Serebrennikov

LETO is about the surprising influence of UK and US punk and rock music on a scene of young Soviet musicians. Living under the oppressive watch of the USSR, but deeply passionate about the expressive possibilities of music, a group of charming young Russians, revolving around a rock music club that requires government appointed bureaucrats to approve all lyrics, manage to live the lives they want to live, slipping through the cracks and making great music; often in fantasy segments of defying authority that turn into musicals. The film goes down very easily, especially if you're into the music, but if only because of the pleasure of seeing lives lived well in difficult circumstances.

Strangely, the cinema was almost empty. Are there any fans out there of T-Rex, Lou Reed, David Bowie or Blondie? Or fans of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, another film about punk rock's influence beyond the iron curtain? Or fans of Once, that sweet fictional film about real musicians making music together? Or just good Russian cinema? (I'm in the latter boat.)

Plays again in Auckland Friday 27 July and Sunday 5 August and continues around the country.

Maui's Hook [2018] by Paora Te Oti Takarangi Joseph

Maui's Hook is neither a documentary nor a drama, though it has elements of both.  In essence it is a conversation, and its intention is to provoke further conversation.  Suicide is epidemic in Aotearoa and it can damage families by sending shock waves through everyone involved.  The film is clear that it does not have all the answers, but there is one thing it can do: break the silence.  People don't talk about suicide because of shame and anger, but, as this film displays, talking openly with your loved ones is the first step towards healing from that trauma.

In the film, a group of whanau personally affected by suicide in their families embark on a hikoi together, a tour of marae from Taranaki, Whanganui, Rotorua, and Whangarei to Cape Reinga, to set the spirits free.  Meanwhile, a despairing young man contemplates suicide, without the support he needs.  Whanau are interviewed together as a group, and in one case this is the first time they have talked together about the suicide.

Aotearoa not only has the highest youth suicide rate in the world, but suicide is primary cause of death for Kiwis between ages 18-24.  The reasons for this are beyond the scope of the film, but it does make sense of one important element: the support of family and the openness to talk about what we are going through makes a significant difference to those affected by suicide who might be feeling isolated.

Hunger [1966] by Henning Carlsen

HUNGER is like a Charlie Chaplin film slowly descending into disconcerting disassociated distress. If you finds the predicament of the protagonist funny early, it may sink, along with any hope that he will raise himself from his poverty and alienation. 

The streets of 1890 Christiania are depicted as busy with sympathetic but confused onlookers to protag's increasingly unconvincing performance of proud and serious success. 

A bleak view of mental illness. 

Our New President [2018] by Maxim Pozdorovkin

OUR NEW PRESIDENT is satire as collage. We are now in an age when global politics is so ludicrous and out of control that satire has become superfluous. The filmmaker needs merely to compile a sequence of the regime's own propaganda and it reveals itself for the bright, funny, corrupt and manipulative charade that it is. 

As the film shows, news is also superfluous. The masses don't need to be informed so they can make considered choices, they just need to know who the heroes are, and who the villains are.  It's not the petty facts that are important, but the larger truths.  We watch as the spectrum of Russian news channels are amalgamated into one government run organisation, Russia Today, and the most revealing moment in the film is certainly when the boss addresses his staff with an inspiring speech, “The time of detached, unbiased journalism is over… Editorial policy will be based on love of Russia.”  When a staff member asks for clarification he is accused of planning subversive activities.

It is all fairly funny and charming, as long as you don't consider the implication of such a successfully sterile bubble of propaganda.  It makes me wonder what it would look like if such a carefully constructed satirical collage was made of our own national news, what invisible ubiquitous propaganda we are exposed to.

Birds of Passage [2018] by Cristina Gallego, Ciro Guerra

Opening night at the New Zealand International Film Festival in Auckland offered Birds of Passage, a complex juxtaposition of the traditional ways of the Wayuu people with the rising drug trade.

In Colombia 1968, in the land of the Wayuu people, the land of dust and goats, they have survived centuries of colonisation with their traditional culture intact.  The matriarch of the family speaks with the spirits through her dreams and protects her family with her precious talisman, which she always carries with her.  But a budding capitalist takes an interest in her daughter, they marry and the family is drawn into the full implications of large-scale trafficking of cannabis.

This film is a spectacular and ambitious encounter with a small world, that of the Wayuu people, encountering not the exploitation of the larger world, as one would expect, but simply its ideology and its practices: making as much money for your clan as possible, building your tiny empire and destroying all opposition.  The film is like an alegory for capitalism itself, the history of civilisation condensed down to the narrative of a single indigenous clan's "successfull" encounter with the ways of the modern world.

The world of the film is rich and reverberates on all levels.  It does not compromise for its genre, but rather the gangster genre itself is manipulated for the sake of the coherency of the film's world.  A magnificent, concise epic.

The Image Book [2018] by Jean-Luc Godard

Less of a film, more of an anti-film, with a total commitment to not being entertaining and to disassembling our naïve and uncritical absorption of cinematic images. The pleasure of watching beautiful sequences of film is interrupted with over-exposure, sudden cuts and images being separated from their soundtracks. Coherency is interrupted with inexplicable juxtapositions, little continuity in even the commentary and even the English subtitles failing to translate all the spoken and textual French.

The first sound we receive from the filmmaker, before any image appears, is a loud and obnoxious high-pitched noise, somewhat of a “fuck you” to the audience. Was it just me, of did the commentary become more coherent a significant way through the film, when everyone who was going to walk out had already walked out in boredom or confusion? Romantic and chivalrous films and images of war are equally violated in the filmmaker's attempt to destroy both our sentimental attachment to the films and our ability to unconsciously suspend disbelief and allow the film to entertainingly indoctrinate us with its implicit ideology, either pernicious or superficial.

Jean-Luc Godard, whose moody black and white films from the 1960s are remember with such affection, is disgusted with what he sees in the world. I found, when I moved through my boredom and irritation and engaged with the language of the film, a satirical humour present only when the dissolution of the grammar and glamour of film is complete, exemplified by over-exposed old footage of can-can dancing that is the final and most sustained excerpt in the film.

The Image Book screens as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival.