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NZ Herald
April 17, 2004
Warm up for midwinter film feast
by Peter Calder
The premiere
screenings of the controversial Larry Parr film Fracture, a revival of the
most famous of Sergio Leone's "spaghetti" Westerns and the first
local showing of this year's Oscar-winning documentary are highlights of the
World Cinema Showcase which opens in Auckland on Thursday. The autumn
mini-festivals have been something of a mixed bag over a couple of decades,
often serving as dumping grounds for big distributors' commercially dubious
product which didn't have the smarts to make the main festival programme.
But since the folks at Filmfest HQ took over the programming six years ago,
the Showcase has offered moviegoers a peek at some of the new year's best and
a chance to catch up with sleepers from the previous year's midwinter
festivals.
Prominent in the latter group this time are the heartrending Osama, the first
film made in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taleban and the ravishing
Photos To Send, a happy marriage between the moving and the still picture
which revisits, nearly 50 years on, the Irish subjects of a famed Life
photographer.
But the Showcase has plenty of new stuff too. Fracture, which started life as
Crime Story (the title of the Maurice Gee novel it adapts), was the largest
of four films caught up in the collapse of Parr's production company
Kahukura. Showcase director Bill Gosden says the much delayed film has a
"confident plainness" and a structure that recalls the Australian
hit Lantana.
The second of Nick Broomfield's two documentaries about the woman whose story
inspired Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning turn in Monster is a must-see for
fans of non-fiction film. Broomfield followed
Aileen Wuornos - dubbed America's
first female serial killer - from soon after her arrest and his 1992 film
documented the attempts of her lawyer, her mother and the police to sell her
story to the highest bidder. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer takes
the story through to the execution in October last year but, in exploring its
subject's early life, it puts flesh on the monster's bones.
The other standout documentary is Capturing the Friedmans, a nuanced rather
than polemical look at a family torn apart by allegations of sexual abuse.
Relying heavily on footage shot by family members it makes for chilling
viewing in a country apparently content to live with the injustice visited on
Peter Ellis.
Watch out too for The Fog Of War, Errol Morris' Oscar-winning doco based on
interviews with one of the architects of what the Vietnamese call the
American War. As the US
sinks deeper into the Iraqi quagmire, this will be chewy food for thought.
Meanwhile a new documentary about Fellini, based on a 1993 interview with the
director, is full of fascinating insights, not least that the title, I'm a
Born Liar, is something of an understatement.
Small American indies; revivals (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and a
Minnelli musical); new films from Brazil and France; and a programme of
classics and new releases from the prolific Indian film industry known as
Bollywood; round out the 30-film programme.
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