NZIFF 2018 - Talking the film festival with director Bill Gosden

NZIFF 2018 - Talking the film festival with director Bill Gosden

You've hit 50, how does that feel?
It’s the new 35.

Give me some recollections of your very first festival
My first involvement with the AIFF, as it was, was in 1979 and the first recollections are of a strained relationship. I was the administrator of the Wellington Film Festival, which sourced and supplied a substantial number of films every year to Auckland. Search the brochure of the 11th AIFF for any evidence of that contribution, and you won’t find it. That’s pretty much the way it was. After an impressive first decade guided by Wynne Colgan and a committee of cinephiles, the AIFF had dispensed with their services and become an adjunct of the Auckland Festival Society, primarily a live arts events (no relation to the current Auckland Festival). Ironically they still depended on a Film Society further south for much of the programme.
AIFF at that point enjoyed much better relationships with the theatre chains than we bolshie Wellingtonians, and Auckland festivalgoers were treated to the latest of studio-distributed auteur cinema, Days of Heaven, Diner,  great films by Robert Altman and Louis Malle, for example, that Wellingtonians would have to wait months to see. That rankled too.
Before censor Arthur Everard began passing explicit sex videos around 1985, there was money to be had from exhibiting highly restricted movies. In the early 1980s the AIFF was famous for doing just that.  Zeitgeisty films like Rosier the Riveter or My Dinner with André were relegated to weekday matinee sessions, while films carrying the RFF20 certificate – classified as fit only for festival sophisticates -  took headline slots. In AIFF publicity the Canadian anti-porn polemic, Not a Love Story sounded like the very thing it set out to abolish.
Such provocations did not always land well, and there was a mood for change, ushering the return of the Film Society to the fold from 1984.

What are you doing to mark 50 - many remember the celebration booklets, the wonderful poster work - will we get to see them again?
There will be a show of posters and other memorabilia at the ASB Waterfront.
We’ve received some great stories of Festivals past which you can find here. All contributions welcome at 50@nziff.co.nz.
https://www.nziff.co.nz/about/history/celebrating-50-years-in-auckland/

What can we expect from your pre-film messaging boards this year - they've become quite the art form, telling people to shush?
We are working on it. Now that some of our best lines grace other cinema screens there’s a challenge to come up with new ones.

It seems like there have been some excellent catches this year from Cannes - you must be happy?
Totally. Shoplifters, Leto, Climax, Girl, 3 Faces, Border, Mirai, Woman at War, the utterly dazzling Cold War, the lovely Grand Bal, the nutso Diamantino… The 30 Cannes films this year have brought enormous variety. Most were secured in the two weeks before deadline. It was an exciting rush to the finish.

What are the themes for this year's festival - has there been an upsurge in any kind of film-making / any reaction to what's going on in the world?
The themes come to us, we don’t go looking for them.
It’s a big year for Canine Cinema. Parenting is a recurrent theme.
There are more gay women on screen than ever before. Some of the strongest films engage with contemporary social injustice with disarming stealth and grace. It’s a bonanza year for music films, and dance animates every section of the programme, Incredibly Strange included.

The Retro selection which you've curated more than makes up for the lack of an Autumn Events this year - what's the one film which we should bust a gut to see and why?
There are compelling reasons in 2018 to see every one of these films, imho.
They are not ‘Best of’, but were chosen to reflect something of the range of experiences NZIFF has always offered. The flavours of the times that shaped these films remain sharp in each one of them. The world may have moved on but these films still speak their truth vividly and directly.
 Cria Cuervos and The General are two all-time favourites (and not just of mine), so I was especially delighted that both are newly available in superb restorations. Wim Wenders himself says that Wings of Desire looks better than ever in 4K, that the digital processing of B&W takes you much closer to master cinematographer Henri Alekan’s original vision than 1980s printing on 35mm colour film stock ever could.

I'm intrigued by Good Manners, Eldorado, and Custody - tell me more about these.
Good Manners really is one of those less-you-know deals. It slides craftily from genre to genre, incorporating social satire, romance and the Gothic compulsion of an Angela Carter novel. Eldorado struck me as the most informative of the many documentaries on offer about the refugee crisis that impacts so directly on Italy and thereby so alarmingly on the future of Europe. Custody is visceral cinema, an amazingly powerful debut about a ferocious child custody battle.

Leave No Trace looks like it signals the advent of a homegrown talent - do you expect this combination of Winter's Bone and Thomasin Harcourt Mackenzie to be big?
It certainly deserves to be. It’s a spellbinding film, incredibly wise and generous in spirit. We are delighted that Debra Granik will join us in Auckland and Wellington.

A farewell to Harry Dean Stanton as well - seems like something poignant for the 50th?
Lucky was perfect for him. RIP, Repo Man.

Skate Kitchen

I'm hearing very good things about Skate Kitchen....
When these young women take to the streets of Manhattan on their boards, you want to be them.

Equally, The Guilty....
The Danish flair for crime and detection distilled into a more gripping one-man-and-a-phone thriller than Tom Hardy’s Locke.

Tell me about your opening night film Birds of Passage.
A visionary blend of genre filmmaking and indigenous fable.  A knock-out on the giant screen.

Honestly, there seems to be so much diversity this year, has it been hard to fit all the pieces together?
It’s not like a jigsaw (see Puzzle) where there’s an actual solution. We know we will always be posing some hard choices for the most avid festival-goers.

What's the one film you reckon the audiences shouldn't miss?
No film is for everyone, but The General surely comes close.

The General

The one film you want to be a big hit with festival-goers.
The one? Are you kidding?

The one film you think everyone will be talking about.
The fashion films are amazing this year. Yellow is Forbidden and McQueen offer all the visual extravagance you could want, but both talk about so much more than clothes. The Vivienne Westwood film is a hoot: she really is the inveterate punk, present but uncooperative throughout the film. She has subsequently disowned it. Do NOT let that put you off.

The one film you think everyone should be talking about.
Holiday is the most provocative outside Ant’s programme. But once again ‘one’ is an intolerable limitation. Capharnaum promises to be the word-of-mouth hit in the way Call Me by Your Name was last year, though for quite different reasons. And nothing made me laugh more in the last year than Chilly Gonzales crowd surfing a Viennese concert hall in Shut Up and Play the Piano.

Holiday

And the one film from Ant's programme that you're crazy about.
Liquid Sky.  Unadulterated pre-AIDS 1980s hedonism and fuck-you glam without the filters of hindsight. I also look forward to taking a prime seat at the Civic for Climax, the contemporary equivalent.

Climax

Just finally, reflecting back on 50 years of the Festival, what have been the changes you've seen in the films, both internationally and locally - and the one thing that makes you proudest about the impact the Festival has annually? 
Changes? There have been too many to address here.
I’m proud that we have kept pace, even set the pace on occasion.  The Film Festival retains its place in the heart of Auckland amongst events and on-screen choices that have exploded beyond the wildest imagining of that optimistic group who set out to invigorate our film-going - and our film-making - in 1969.