Festival Programme

Films by Language

English

100 Nights of Hero

Julia Jackman

Based on a graphic novel, this dazzling sapphic fable is a whimsical ode to the power of storytelling.

The Best Summer

Tamra Davis

Rediscovered and resurrected into a Sundance-premiering doc by Tamra Davis, this is a raw 90s capsule of life on tour with The Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, Rancid, The Amps and Bikini Kill.

Big Girls Don't Cry

Paloma Schneideman

Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Paloma Schneideman’s coming-of-age debut launches our festival with a tender portrait of 14-year-old Sid, as she tentatively traverses insecurity, identity and desire during the summer of 2006.

Butterfly Jam

Kantemir Balagov

The Beanpole director's third feature — and first in English — confirms his extraordinary formal and sensory capabilities.

Crocodile

Pietra Brettkelly, The Critics

A collaboration between Arts Laureate Pietra Brettkelly and Nigerian filmmaking collective The Critics, this Berlinale hit is a tribute to the power of imagination, storytelling and creative ingenuity.

Dead Man's Wire

Gus Van Sant

After a seven year hiatus, Gus Van Sant is back behind the camera with this star-studded true-crime thriller, earning an 11-minute standing ovation after its premiere in Venice.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Grant Gee

Grant Gee was awarded Best Director at the Berlinale for this intense, fragmentary and inventive portrait of Bill Evans, in an interval of the American jazz great’s career when he grappled with grief and opioid addiction.

Father Mother Sister Brother

Jim Jarmusch

Indie cinema’s long-time King of Cool Jim Jarmusch finds mystery and melancholy alike in this triptych of family short stories, each grappling with the weight of shared history.

Fatherland

Vaterland

Paweł Pawlikowski

A pristine masterpiece from Polish Academy Award winner Paweł Pawlikowski, reflecting on history and its shadows on the present, as well as on the undying bond of family ties.

Fjord

Cristian Mungiu

A divisive talking point at Cannes even before it took its top award, Cristian Mungiu’s story of a conservative immigrant family under institutional suspicion is a barbed interrogation of liberal Nordic attitudes.

Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale

Murray Ball

40 years ago, New Zealand’s most loved cartoon strip was adapted into our first-ever animated feature and the result broke the box office and captured the hearts of a far more innocent nation.

The Fox

Dario Russo

Upon discovering his fiancée’s affair, Nick makes a deal with a trickster fox in this sly and quirky ‘she'll be right’ Aussie comedy about the lengths (and shortcuts) we'll go for love.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

David Wain

High priest of American buffoonery David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer) returns with his latest irresistibly silly slice of nonsense, a Wizard of Oz-aping Hollywood odyssey about a small-town girl with a very particular mission.

The Good Boy

Heel

Jan Komasa

When a picture-perfect middle-class family turns out to be dangerously twisted behind closed doors, Jan Komasa's darkly funny psychological thriller asks who really needs ‘fixing’... and how far is too far.

The History of Concrete

John Wilson

ohn Wilson gives his inimitably magpie-ish style of documentary-making the big screen treatment in this endlessly digressive investigation into a hilariously mundane topic.

I Want Your Sex

Gregg Araki

Provocative and horny as ever, New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Araki’s first film in over a decade is a riotous antidote to the Gen Z sex recession.

Jimpa

Sophie Hyde

A filmmaker balances her outspoken father and a boundary-pushing teenager while working on her latest screenplay that only she believes in, in Sophie Hyde's heartfelt, queer family drama.

Kiri and Lou go Raaa!

Harry Sinclair, Antony Elworthy

A feisty little dinosaur and a gentle purple creature navigate big feelings and discover friendship in a beautifully handcrafted, musical adventure for kids and their grown-ups.

La Gradiva

Marine Atlan

A stunning directorial debut that was a big winner at Cannes – a coming of age story set at the foot of Mount Vesuvius that announces the arrival of a major new talent of French cinema.

Last Man Standing

Gerd Pohlmann

Gerd Pohlmann offers a timely doc tribute to politician Jim Anderton as a long-haul fighter for Labour’s welfare-based values, against a wave of neoliberal deregulation that fundamentally changed New Zealand politics.

Late Fame

Kent Jones

Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee bring heart and realness to this wistful, unromantic comedy about the fragility of creative ambition and a bygone, bohemian New York lost to a consumerist era of gentrification and influencers.

Lomu

Gavin Fitzgerald, Vea Mafile'o

Rugby's first global superstar was also one of its most private — a shy, gentle giant caught between two worlds, whose story mirrors Aotearoa's own coming of age.

The Match

El Partido

Juan Cabral, Santiago Franco

The infamous World Cup quarterfinal between England and Argentina — won, defined, and immortalised by Diego Maradona… and by the hand of God.

Mouse

Kelly O'Sullivan, Alex Thompson

In the summer of 2002, a 17-year old must navigate the earnest pressures of teenage life – identity, family, and friendship – while burdened with the profound weight of grief.

Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant

THUNDERLIPS

Directing duo THUNDERLIPS add another comedy horror classic to the Kiwi film canon in this tale of an accelerated extraterrestrial pregnancy, packed with some outrageously off-kilter visual effects!

Mysterious Skin

Gregg Araki

Newly restored, Gen-X icon Gregg Araki’s remarkable, aggressively over-censored coming of age classic grapples with the enduring spectre of child sexual abuse, presenting one of the auteur’s bleakest but most essential visions.

Nuisance Bear

Jack Weisman, Gabriela Osio Vanden

The lines between predator and prey begin to blur as a solitary polar bear journeys through a rapidly changing world.

Out of the Blue

Robert Sarkies

Dunedin’s Robert Sarkies ventured into weightier territory after Scarfies, reckoning with a defining tragedy of gun violence that rocked Aotearoa’s sense of security in his chilling but sensitively measured sophomore feature.

Rose of Nevada

Mark Jenkin

Sci-fi strangeness meets working-class struggle in Cornish director Mark Jenkin’s haunting vision, meticulously crafted with analogue methods, of a fishing boat lost decades ago that claims a new crew from the present.

Saccharine 

Natalie Erika James

A medical student creates a sinister diet drug to fight her own eating disorders in this witty, gory body-horror shocker.

Silent Friend

Ildiko Enyedi

The plant world lights up alongside Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Léa Seydoux in this playful, eccentric love letter to scientific experimentation and the beauty of noticing life in all things.

The Tale of Silyan

Tamara Kotevska

When everyone he loves moves on, one man stays, and finds unexpected solace in the most unlikely of companions. Tender, majestic and deeply humane, it's a film about what we risk losing when the world moves too fast.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

As a maven of pop-culture detritus, American director Jane Schoenbrun’s campground of twisted delights is a heady, horny headtrip of the highest order.

Time and Water

Sara Dosa

As Iceland's ancient glaciers start to vanish, one family's extensive archive becomes a portrait of a disappearing landscape through the passage of a century.

Whistle

Christopher Nelius

The competitive world of musical whistling takes centre stage in this humorous documentary that showcases the weird and wonderful lives that have devoted themselves to the art.

The Wizard of the Kremlin

Olivier Assayas

Actors Jude Law and Paul Dano star as Putin and his propagandist in an epic political thriller by Olivier Assayas, that shows how brutal repression in Russia is puppet-mastered behind a veil of manufactured illusion.