Based on a graphic novel, this dazzling sapphic fable is a whimsical ode to the power of storytelling.
Festival Programme
Films — by Venue
Rialto Cinemas
The Best Summer
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.
Betty Blue [Director’s Cut]
37°2 le matin
The stylish, sexy global sensation of the mid-1980s has had an hour of material added that has underlined the film’s artistic qualities without losing any of the elements that originally seduced a generation 40 years ago.
Butterfly Jam
The Beanpole director's third feature — and first in English — confirms his extraordinary formal and sensory capabilities.
Calle Málaga
An intimate and warm story of a life entwined with a deep-rooted sense of belonging, and the inconvenience of aging in a world that continues to move at pace.
Comédie-Française
De la Comédie-Française
Drunk actors, cursed props, clashing egos and a Macbeth that refuses to come together… a gloriously chaotic love letter to theatre and everyone mad enough to make it.
Crocodile
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.
Flies
Moscas
As a young boy searches for answers, he is aided by an unlikely individual in this modest and affectionate take on an intergenerational friendship, combining droll humour and neorealism.
Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale
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.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
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.
Ghost in the Cell
Indonesian genre maestro Joko Anwar returns with a wild mashup of martial arts, horror and comedy, set inside a corrupt prison system, where an evil entity is literally turning prisoners inside out.
The Good Boy
Heel
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.
Goodbye, Cruel World
Adieu monde cruel
A bullied 14-year-old sends farewell letters to his classmates and vanishes, but when a girl from his school spots him wandering the streets at night, the two begin to build a fragile, secret world of their own.
Hen
Kota
Beyond the confines of a factory farm, a heroic hen finds a new lease on life in a crumbling restaurant's courtyard. Feathers are ruffled and jokes are cracked in this egg-cellent adventure.
The History of Concrete
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.
The Ice Tower
La Tour de glace
Lucile Hadžihalilović’s spellbinding 1960s-set fairytale follows a teenage runaway who becomes infatuated with an alluring movie star filming a local adaptation of The Snow Queen.
Jim Queen
Bold, colourful and irreverent, Jim Queen is the elevated campy animation you don't want your mother to watch – but that all your gay friends will die to see.
Jimpa
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.
La Gradiva
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 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
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.
The Match
El Partido
The infamous World Cup quarterfinal between England and Argentina — won, defined, and immortalised by Diego Maradona… and by the hand of God.
Mouse
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
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
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.
No Good Men
When Kabul's only female camerawoman is given a career opportunity by the last man she expected, she finds herself falling for someone in a city that is about to fall itself. A funny, warm and deeply political romance from one of the most exciting voices in world cinema.
On the Road
En el camino
Danger, desire and an unlikely bond forged on the long roads of Mexico – David Pablos's award-winning thriller is drenched in heat and darkness, with tenderness at its core.
Prosecution
Staatsschutz
Faraz Shariat’s sleek, suspenseful crime drama about a racially targeted prosecutor won an Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival, and takes the temperature of a Germany that has not shaken off its Nazi-era maladies.
Sheep in the Box
箱の中の羊
Kore-eda's nuanced exploration of how grief manifests is distinctly Japanese yet universally resonant, in this empathetic consideration of how technology may serve as a vehicle for healing.
Silent Friend
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.
Sundays
Los domingos
Coming off a win for Best Film at the San Sebastián Film Festival, Sundays is a coming-of-age drama with the fragility of family and faith at its forefront.
The Tale of Silyan
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.
Time and Water
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.
The Wizard of the Kremlin
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.
Yellow Letters
Gelbe Briefe
A celebrated Turkish theatre couple are suddenly targeted by the state and stripped of their livelihoods, leading to their marriage, their ideals and their sense of self being pushed to breaking point. Winner of the Golden Bear (the Berlin Film Festival's top prize), this is a riveting and urgently relevant political drama.