A spellbinding sci-fi, an illuminating doco, a bizarre biography, a searing satire and a punk meditation are heading to New Zealand's big screens.
Midnight Special, Tanna, Nuts!, High-Rise and Heart of a Dog have been announced as the first five selections of the New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF) 2016, each picked due to popular demand.
"We've chosen to reveal these five films first because audiences have been requesting them ever since they appeared overseas, or in the case of High-Rise, ever since the first trailer launched," says NZIFF director Bill Gosden.
"NZIFF July is still a while away, and programming is still underway, but we encourage you to start booking out your diary now for those winter weeks at the movies."
The full NZIFF 2016 programme will be released in late June, ahead of the festival's launch in Auckland on July 14.
More information on the five announced films follows:
Midnight SpecialFilmmaker Jeff Nichols blew NZIFF audiences away in 2011 with Take Shelter and was a crucial part of the McConaissance with follow-up Mud. Renowned for expertly working dramatic integrity and emotional depth into his films, his genre-defying sci-fi/chase movie Midnight Special won acclaim at the Berlin and SXSW film festivals.
Tanna Australian documentary filmmakers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler collaborated with villagers in the Vanuatu highlands who had never seen a movie to create this luminous tale of forbidden love and continuously evolving tradition. After winning acclaim at the Venice, Rotterdam and London film festivals, Tanna is described as a deeply moving tribute to the power of love.
Nuts! Loaded with wry humour and surprising rug-pulls, this biography of 1920s impotence-cure mogul J.R. Brinkley is described as supremely strange. "As illuminating as it is immensely entertaining," claims Rolling Stone's review. "[It] uses charming hand-crafted animation to trace how Brinkley ballooned a wacko epiphany into a vast media empire ... a chronicle of the American dream in action, and the fact that it's all true didn't stop Lane’s film from ending with the best twist of this year's Sundance."
High-Rise Filmmaker Ben Wheatley has featured in Ant Timpson's Incredibly Strange section of the NZIFF three times previously with Kill List, Sightseers and A Field in England. This year, his ambitious adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel is coming to the festival; a literal class war caper starring Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons and Elisabeth Moss.
Heart of a Dog Described as an enchanted cinematic essay, this punk meditation by performance artist Laurie Anderson centres on her beloved rat terrier Lolabelle, who died in 2011. Rogerebert.com calls the film "not a wake but a celebration, a call to people for acceptance of moments big and small, predictable and unexpected. In that sense, it is one of the most invigorating and alive films of the year."
More information is available on the NZIFF website.
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