| WORLD CINEMA SHOWCASE 2010... |
| Written by Shahlin Graves |
| Friday, 26 March 2010 09:08 |
 Some things, like birthdays, Christmas and the NZ Film Festival, never last long enough... and never quite happen often enough. Good thing then, that you can have your cake and eat it - at Auckland's Academy Cinema, Wellington's Paramount, Christchurch's Rialto and Dunedin's Regent - over the next months time. WORLD CINEMA SHOWCASE 2010
Academy Auckland: March 25 - April 14 Paramount Wellington: April 1 - 18 Rialto Christchurch: April 15 - 28 Regent Dunedin: April 22 - May 5 With thirty-two potential dates awaiting you, the decision-making process could really make you wish that a friend just told you their favourites. Even luckier for you then, that we've already decided what we want to see. See below, for what we're looking forward to... and what infinitely smarter people than myself, had to say about them.  A SINGLE MAN Actor Colin Firth provides one of the year’s great performances as an elegant, wry Englishman privately mourning the love of his life. Fashion designer Tom Ford makes his directorial debut with a ravishing adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s portrait of desire and loss in early 60s LA. Click HERE for more information and session times.  COCO CHANEL & IGOR STRAVINSKY Picking up where Coco avant Chanel left off, focusing on the period when Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) became Stravinsky’s (Mads Mikkelsen) artistic benefactor, this film offers a darker second chapter to the designer’s long biography. In 1920 she befriended the great revolutionary composer and his family, offering the penniless and homeless musician refuge in her country mansion. There have been rumours that Coco and Igor had an affair at this time. Director Jan Kounen has worked with writer Chris Greenhalgh to adapt his book Coco and Igor which takes this premise and spins it into an intimate portrait of a fearless modern woman attracted to an equally indomitable man. Click HERE for more information and session times.  THE HURT LOCKER With the possible exception of her ex-husband’s fantastical Avatar, no American film has been more admired in the last year than Kathryn Bigelow’s electrifyingly real The Hurt Locker. After 18 months of trying we’re pleased to say we have finally secured the first New Zealand sessions ahead of its long-awaited release. Click HERE for more information and session times. PICTURE ME: A MODEL'S DIARY Sara Ziff has been modelling since she was scouted in the street at 14. It was, she admits, a way to rebel against her academic background, and by the time she was 20 it had turned out to be an extremely well-paid alternative to college too. But the academic vantage point never quite deserted Ziff. She and her boyfriend, filmmaker Ole Schell, began shooting behind the scenes at Ziff’s shows. For five years, they recorded parties, castings, life on the road, and backstage finagling as she became the face of campaigns for Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana, The Gap... What emerged is an impressively even-handed portrait of her exhilarating rise – and of the darker side of the fashion world’s rabid appetite for beautiful young women. Click HERE for more information and session times. WILD GRASS At 86, French master Alain Resnais spins a tale of romantic obsession, knowingly accentuating the surreal possibilities of le cinema – and how perfectly it can be applied to the arbitrary, unfettering force of passion. Winner of the Special Jury Award at Cannes 2009. Click HERE for more information and session times. THE BOX Richmond, Virginia. The main business in town is the nearby NASA facility. It’s 1976 and the Viking photos from Mars have brought home the possibility of alien life. Elaborating on a classic Twilight Zone premise, Richard Kelly invests the time and place of his own birth with his patented blend of hyper-realism, sci-fi queasiness and Y-generation cultural overload (Kubrick, Revelation, Jean Paul Sartre). Click HERE for more information and session times. |
