Time to rewind

A leaner NZ International Film Festival programme still offers promising local debuts and some art cinema classics.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Looking through this year's New Zealand International Film Festival programme, long-time attendees might feel the event has wound the clock back. That's not just because of its restored classics, which this year features Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (see sidebar) from 1984, Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven from 1978 or Michael Powell's Peeping Tom from 1960.

The retrospective feel comes with a smaller programme offering something of the size it was a couple of decades back. That's because this year's festival is a much leaner offering as the event goes into austerity mode in an attempt to recover from the financial woes created since 2020. The disruption of Covid from 2020-22 - including a financially disastrous attempt at a hybrid streaming-and-cinema event in 2020, then an attempted return to normality in 2023 - left the trust behind the festival in precarious financial shape.

Last year's festival sold some 138,000 tickets. That was a marked improvement on the three previous lockdown-affected years, but still well below the 264,000 tickets sold in 2019.

With the festival's reserves depleted and government Covid cash injections no more, 2024 has become the lean, mean festival. It still has significant home-grown feature premieres plus imports and plenty of titles fresh from competition at last month's Cannes Film Festival.

And it's not as much of a cut-back as was first mooted. Originally, it was only returning to the four main centres but support from local exhibitors has helped bring cut-down versions of the festival to Hamilton, Nelson, Masterton, Napier, New Plymouth and Tauranga.

But the reduction is evident, especially in Auckland. There, the festival has retreated from some 400 screening sessions divided between 129 features across five cinemas in 2023 to 130 or so sessions of 80 features in three venues, including its traditional base at the Civic.