NZ Film Festival 2012 look revealed - plus more titles

NZ Film Festival 2012 look revealed - plus a couple more titles

With the New Zealand International Film Festival drawing ever closer, it's time for the Festival to unveil the poster for the 2012 event which kicks off in July.

We've already had details of the Short films finalists at the festival, as well as details of Bully hitting the NZ film Festival, plus a raft of details of upcoming film fest titles - and news of when Cabin in the Woods will play in New Zealand, you'd think there was little left to reveal!

Well, you'd be wrong. There's still heaps to go - but first up, here's the poster.

Here's what artist Tom Simpson has to say about the 2012 effort.

The style of this year’s poster artwork may seem somewhat familiar to those of you who have followed us for a long time. In fact, Wellington artist/illustrator Tom Simpson has been creating posters for us since 2009, although he's been a festival fan for much longer.

“It all started with monsters,” says Tom, “Following a monster-themed art exhibition I got a call from Ocean Design asking if I would be interested in working on the poster art for that year’s festival. Like many New Zealanders the Film Festival is the one event that I look forward to during the cold winter months.  I guess I got that feeling that aspiring actors feel when they get ‘the call’ – the one letting them know they’ve landed their dream role.”

Even four years on Tom still feels that the work he does on the Festival’s poster is the most challenging, yet exhilarating, task of his career, and we think he's nailed it. The good looking character in this year’s poster has been a hit so far – a handsome guy, caught in a triangle of meaningful eye contact, and advancing down a mall lined with several of New Zealand’s most fabulous cinemas – which just happen to be NZIFF venues.

“Each year’s poster becomes a movie set of sorts, a contained adventure in which the intangible qualities of visual storytelling – mood, lighting, visual rhythms and characters’ gestures – need to come together to reflect all that the Film Festival embodies: an event meant for everyone to enjoy.”


And there's been a couple more titles unveiled too...

Chasing Ice

Science and art confront awesome nature in this stunning giant screen account of National Geographic photographer James Balog’s painstaking (and dangerous) Extreme Ice Survey project. Capturing time-lapse photographs of numerous glaciers over several years, Balog assembles all the evidence anyone should ever need of the radical worldwide impact of climate change. — Bill Gosden
“A documentary so stuffed with eye-soothing images one prays it can seduce a climate-change sceptic or two.” — John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter

The Flight of the Airship 'Norge' over the Arctic Ocean

In 1926 Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile flew with 13 others in the airship Norge from Ny-Ålesund at Svalbard over the North Pole to Teller in Alaska. Theirs was the first undisputed crossing of the North Pole by air. It was also the most intensely photographed of polar expeditions, with movie cameras taking in the views from the ground and from above.

This visually stunning record has been little seen in the 85 years since it first thrilled adventure-loving audiences with its still awe-inspiring images of technological triumph and spectacular vistas of the frozen North. A perfectly preserved nitrate print in the Cinémathèque Suisse provided the material for this magnificent restoration by the Norwegian Film Museum. NZIFF and the New Zealand Film Archive are delighted that they have entrusted us with a 35mm print so gleamingly fresh that you might be caught up in the wonderful modernity of it all and applaud the final uplifting title card: “The Future belongs to the Airship!”. — Bill Gosden

The New Zealand International Film Festival kicks off 19th July in Auckland before heading around the country.