Screened as part of NZIFF 2023

Pacifiction 2022

Tourment sur les îles

Directed by Albert Serra

Art cinema maverick Albert Serra takes us on an unsettling tour of the French Polynesian tropics with his latest anti-epic, a tale of political paranoia set to a backdrop of disquieting picture postcard sunsets.

France In French with English subtitles
162 minutes Colour / DCP

Director, Screenplay

Producers

Pierre-Olivier Bardet
,
Albert Serra
,
Montse Triola
,
Dirk Decker
,
Andrea Schütte
,
Joaquim Sapinho
,
Marta Alves
,
Laurent Jacquemin

Cinematography

Artur Tort

Editors

Albert Serra
,
Artur Tort
,
Ariadna Ribas

Cast

Benoît Magimel
,
Pahoa Mahagafanau
,
Marc Susini
,
Matahi Pambrun
,
Alexandre Melo
,
Sergi Lopez
,
Montse Triola
,
Michael Vautor
,
Cécile Guilbert
,
Lluis Serrat
,
Mike Landscape
,
Cyrus Arai
,
Mareva Wong
,
Baptiste Pinteaux

Production Designer

Sebastian Vogler

Costume Designer

Práxedes De Vilallonga

Music

Marc Verdaguer, Joe Robinson

Festivals

Cannes (In Competition), Melbourne, Toronto, San Sebastián, London, New York, Busan 2022; Rotterdam 2023

Awards

Best Actor (Benoît Magimel), César Awards 2023

Elsewhere

Pushing against the grain of grand, exotic storytelling in strangely hypnotic ways, Catalan director Albert Serra has enhanced his singular cinematic résumé with a contemporary thriller echoing Graham Greene and John le Carrébut in a sensual and structural form all of his own unconventional making.

Insidious in a tailored white suit and floral dress shirt, Benoît Magimel stars as De Roller, a shady high commissioner whose role is to rub shoulders with Tahitian citizens and maintain relations, all the while serving his own dubious agenda. As De Roller saunters around the island, flexing his bureaucratic muscle and leering at the locals like a modern-day Gauguin, there are even more sinister machinations afoot: comings and goings at a seamy nightclub, and in the nearby waters, a submarine and rumours of nuclear testing.

New Zealand’s anti-nuclear protests need no elaboration regarding France and the Pacific, except to say Serra’s fictional film is disturbingly close to home. The slow creep of Pacifiction’s commentary on imperial corruption and colonisation is deeply unnerving, while its mixing of prosaic documentary realism with vibrant widescreen visuals and deliberately opaque narrativealongside occasional flourishes of chilling humouris nothing short of uncanny. — Tim Wong

“What do you want when you already have paradise? That question looms over Albert Serra’s singularly mysterious cinematic immersion into Tahiti, Pacifiction. The indigenous Polynesians living there would likely argue that this paradise hasn’t been theirs in a long time. Serra... is yet another outsider coming to their shores, but he avoids the touristic travel-porn clichés of most movies set in some tropical locale... Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself.” — Christian Blauvelt, Indiewire