Auckland 14 – 31 July;
Wellington 22 July – 7 August;
Christchurch 28 July – 14 August;
Dunedin 4 – 21 August;
Nelson 3 – 21 August;
Timaru 11 – 21 August;
Gore 11 – 21 August;
Hamilton 17 August – 11 September;
Palmerston North 18 August – 4 September;
Tauranga 18 August – 11 September;
Masterton 31 August – 14 September;
Hawke’s Bay 1 – 18 September;
New Plymouth 1 – 18 September.
Who would be likely, or, more often, extremely likely to recommend NZIFF to friends and family? 97% of respondents in Auckland, that’s who, along with 99% of those in Wellington; and 100% in Christchurch. Do it, please! In Dunedin, Hamilton and Timaru the percentage was 95% or more. The lowest: 82% in Tauranga. Definitely an ‘A’ for Excellent. Yay. That was the really good news. This year there was no really bad news to cloud it, but nobody’s saying we’ve attained perfection just yet.
Website & ticketing
There was abundant love for our website, thank you again, CactusLab. Ditto the improved ticketing facilities the site (and Vista ticketing) provided for NZIFF in Wellington. (The rocky first day on this system drew some understandable complaints, but after that, only joy.) Nothing would suit us better than comparable service, minus the teething problems, in other centres too, and we received numerous pleas for just that. We won’t list the other great website add-ons suggested by various respondents, just in case they turn out to be impossibly complicated, but you can be sure we’re working on them.
How you select films
Festivalgoers still rate the free printed programme highly. For the first time it
The Toronto International Film Festival celebrated its 40th appearance this year. By no means North America’s oldest festival, TIFF is the biggest, bringing 399 programmes to an estimated audience of 500,000. Could the world ever produce that many great films in a single year? Guess not, but that’s never discouraged a dedicated Toronto public or the thousands of industry players and media who join them every September to make their city the teeming headquarters of the movie universe.
I tend to fossick around the margins of the programme, and the only World Premiere on my agenda was Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next. It turned out to be much more fun than seemed reasonable to expect. Though its title and sole promotional image imply a diatribe against US militarism, the film provides instead a ramble around some surviving — and apparently flourishing — bastions of welfare-state programs in Europe, Scandinavia and Tunisia.
Moore adopts the incredulous tone of a dyed-in-the-wool free marketer as he interrogates cops, teachers, prison inmates, school dieticians and other articulate proponents and beneficiaries of humane and effective education, employment, health care and criminal justice policies. As often with the crusading Moore, there are holes in some of his
A fortnight after our final Christchurch screening the action has moved to the provinces. At the NZIFF office in September we traffic in reports, not movies, passing on the news – most of it very good – to the many people and organisations who contributed to a bumper 2015. We’re keen to hear your reports too, while the weather’s still brisk and impressions are fresh.
NZIFF in Christchurch hit an all-time record attendance at 23,628 admissions, thanks, of course, to our glorious new central location at the Isaac Theatre Royal, where we sold almost 15,000 of those tickets. The good faith of the many funders and individual donors who helped us pay for that beautiful digital cinema equipment was certainly vindicated. We were blown away by the enthusiasm with which the ITR staff took to their new role as a film festival venue and quickly mastered the art of digital film presentation. Their experience in live performance presentation came to the fore on many occasions too, not least with our Live Cinema screening of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, accompanied by the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra.
Hoyts Northlands, who gave us a home in 2011, remains a bastion of NZIFF in Christchurch with nearly
Saturday 22 August
6.40pm at Hoyts Northlands (Cinema 5)
Sunday 23 August
6.20pm at Hoyts Northlands (Cinema 5)
Monday 24 August
6.00pm at Hoyts Northlands
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