Brazilian actress Sonia Braga has the role of her life in this engrossing and richly surprising portrait of a fiercely intelligent and independent woman fighting to save the apartment she loves from demolition.
Films — by Strand
Big Nights
![Elle](/assets/resized/sm/upload/42/ea/sl/7m/Elle_03_rgb%20KEY-0-520-0-390-crop.jpg?k=0195efe0e3)
Elle
Genre subversive Paul Verhoeven, director of Basic Instinct and Black Book, teams up with the great Isabelle Huppert to craft this provocative, blackly comic thriller.
![I, Daniel Blake](/assets/resized/sm/upload/ef/8a/y5/5l/KEY%20IDB_DAY_7_248_Katie__Hayley_Squires__Dan__Dave_Johns_-0-520-0-390-crop.jpg?k=c37ee785d8)
I, Daniel Blake
This often funny and ultimately intensely moving tale of the friendship between an out-of-work Newcastle carpenter and a young single mother won for Britain’s Ken Loach a second Palme d’Or for Best Film at Cannes this year.
![Neruda](/assets/resized/sm/upload/3m/k1/kt/1l/neruda-gael-garcia-bernal%20KEY-0-520-0-390-crop.jpg?k=256fed2dd7)
Neruda
Not your conventional biopic, this enthralling dramatic exploration of the legacy of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda conjures up a fiction in which he is pursued into political exile by an incompetent detective played by Gael García Bernal.
![Paterson](/assets/resized/sm/upload/v5/2a/1i/b5/_c__2016_-_Mary_Cybulski%20KEY-0-520-0-390-crop.jpg?k=be62c03a33)
Paterson
Direct from Cannes, Jim Jarmusch’s beautifully calibrated ode to art and ordinariness stars Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver who writes poetry in his downtime and Golshifteh Farahani as his cupcake chef wife.
![Poi E: The Story of Our Song](/assets/resized/sm/upload/0y/x4/t7/ep/0F9A7085crop-0-520-0-390-crop.jpg?k=fe0ea1b3e6)
Poi E: The Story of Our Song
NZIFF 2016 opens with the World Premiere screenings of the Kiwi feel-good movie of the year: Tearepa Kahi’s richly researched celebration of Dalvanius Prime and the many rivers that flowed into the making of ‘Poi E’.
![A Quiet Passion](/assets/resized/sm/upload/yx/vz/gr/qk/AQP_01256_CROP%20KEY%20OPTION%202-0-520-0-390-crop.jpg?k=4364a1e221)
A Quiet Passion
Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle and Keith Carradine star in Terence Davies’ lively, witty and ultimately intensely moving dramatisation of the sheltered life of 19th-century New England poet Emily Dickinson.
![The Red Turtle](/assets/resized/sm/upload/8t/8r/va/pb/latortuerouge04-web-0-520-0-390-crop.jpg?k=447d422475)
The Red Turtle
La Tortue rouge
Studio Ghibli’s first international co-production is a ravishing castaway fable that combines beauty, mystery, drama and heartbreak – with not a word spoken. It’s a triumph for animator Michael Dudok de Wit.
![The Rehearsal](/assets/resized/sm/upload/ki/nf/68/z9/TR_151004_106%20KEY-0-520-0-390-crop.jpg?k=1a30f391de)
The Rehearsal
In Alison Maclean’s vibrant screen adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s debut novel, a first-year acting student (James Rolleston) channels the real-life experience of his girlfriend’s family into art and sets off a moral minefield.
![Toni Erdmann](/assets/resized/sm/upload/2v/5n/f1/ho/ToniErdmann_Still_01-SandraHuller_PeterSimonischek_credit%20Komplizen%20Film%20KEY-0-520-0-390-crop.jpg?k=1dcf648294)
Toni Erdmann
Hailed at Cannes as a brilliantly original comic masterpiece, Austrian writer/director Maren Ade’s epic of parent-child dysfunction centres on a father assailing his uptight corporate daughter with crazy pranks.