Our March Opening consists of four films:

Mini Opening Festival Screens first 4 Tuesdays in March

2nd   Mar   The Blue Angel, Von Sternberg (Germany 1930)
The film that launched one of the most famous director / star partnerships in the cinema. Dietrich,  star of the sleaziest nightclub in screen history.

9th    Mar Waydowntown, Gary Burns (Canada 2000)

              A group of young employees bet a month's salary, winner take all, on who can last the longest without going outside.

16th Mar  Magik & Rose,  Vanessa Alexander (NZ) Oporto International Film Festival 2001, Special Jury Award. Two women chasing one dream.

23rd Mar   A programme of Queenstown home movies.  A slice of Queenstown’s history on 16mm. Some views of Queenstown in the 60’s and images from the Coronation. Dress in period and enjoy. Non-members welcome with gold coin donation.

Main Programme Screens every second Tuesday from April

6th    Apr  Policewoman, Dresden  (Germany 2001) The eastern part of Germany is both a stony desert and a human desert. A police station manned by police officers who are better described as social workers than as fighters against crime.

20th Apr  Grill Point, Dresen (Germany 2002) Chris and Ellen launch an affair. It is quickly discovered. Suddenly, no one is complaining about a dull life. The shock of this affair causes each character to examine the stagnation of his or her existence. Reactions run in extremes…

4th    May Days of Heaven, Malick (USA 1976) One of the most beautiful films ever made. Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie.

18th May  The Son,   Dardenne (Belgium/France2002)

Just out of prison for killing Gourmet's son in a robbery five years ago,  Gourmet appears to be making the extraordinary gesture of taking the boy into his pastoral care without revealing the truth to the authorities or to the boy himself.

.1st  Jun   Chimes at Midnight, Welles (1966) There's the triangle: the prince, his king-father, and Falstaff, who's a kind of foster father.  Essentially the film is the story of that triangle.  Opposed to Falstaff, the king stands for responsibility. 

15th Jun    The Franc  A poor musician, finds some money and is immediately tackled by a dwarf who forces him to buy a lottery ticket.

              The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun Feisty and fearless Sili sets out to earn a living hawking the newspaper ‘Le Soleil’ (‘The Sun’), the only girl in a sea of boys.

29th Jun    The Law, (Burkina Faso 1990) Cannes Grand Jury Prize. A man rides back to his village across a parched landscape, a solitary tree on the horizon. Characters speak with simple dignity. Slowly but surely we are pulled into the story about a fateful clash between love and the dictates of tilaï.

13th Jul    Xala, Ousmane Sembene (Senegal 1974)

A comic satire and a deadly accurate polemic against the black bourgeoisie of Dakar. the ancient codes and customs of Senegalese life clash violently with the present, leading to a shocking and memorable climax.

27th Jul    Woman of the Dunes, Teshigahara (Japan 1964) The extraordinary visual appeal of the film lies in the fascinating textures it conjures up out of sand, sea and human flesh, and in the pictorially striking and emotionally suggestive patterns of contrasts, and also of weirdly disturbing resemblances, it creates.

10th Aug   Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) Famously closeted Rock Hudson returns from death (and 'outing') to explain what was really going on in all those frothy comedies with Doris Day.

                 + Bruce and His Things

24th Aug   Tokyo Story, Ozu (Japan 1953) An elderly couple leave their young schoolteacher daughter behind in the small town of Onomichi, while they go to visit their married children in Tokyo.

7th Sep    Blowup,  Antonioni (UK 1966) Best film of 1967 by the National Society of Film Critics, and got Oscar nominations for screenplay and direction. Thomas wanders into a park and sees, at a distance, a man and a woman. Are they struggling? Playing? Flirting? He snaps a lot of photos. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) runs after him. She desperately wants the film back.

21st Sep The Lady Eve, Sturges  (USA 1941) A brilliant and hilarious boudoir battle of the sexes, with Stanwyck supplying gold-digger sass to Fonda's ingenuous shyness. The lady cardsharp playing for her supper and the junior herpetologist rolling in an inherited ale fortune meet aboard an ocean liner.

  5th Oct  Animals, Philibert  (France1995) For 30 years the Zoology Hall of the Museum of Natural History in Paris was closed to the public, while thousands of stuffed animals – mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects, crustaceans – were abandoned inside. Animals wittily documents the Hall’s renovation

Louvre City, France (1990) A witty and light-hearted investigation of an enormous institution from behind the scenes. 

19th Oct To be and to have, (France 2002)  In a one-room schoolhouse in rural France, Georges Lopez, a handsome, slightly monkish teacher in his late middle years, works with his pupils, who number less than a dozen and range from kindergartners to preteens.

2nd  Nov   Sullivan’s Travels, Sturges (USA) A film that movingly searches the grim depths of poverty, prisons, and chain gangs; and a film that is, in the end, a hilarious exposé of its own well-established concern. While Sullivan's Travels prefigures Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers, it remains unique in American cinema.

16th  Nov  Intimate Strangers Berliner (USA 1991) A  stunning, imaginative family exorcism of Berliner’s grandfather, a Palestinian Jew, living in New York and working in Japan.

              Nobody’s Business Berliner (USA 1996)An ordinary crusty old Dad? Links past to present and future and man to mankind with humour and poignancy.

 30th Nov  Blues According to Lightning Hopkins . Les Blank (USA)  Six weeks in the life of a Texas Bluesman

Marc and Anne Life and culture of Southern Louisiana

              Yum Yum Yum Vibrancy of Cajun and Creole cuisine

14th Dec   Flight of the Albatross, Werner Mayer (NZ1996) 1997: Berlin Kinderfest - Best Film. 1996 NZ Film Awards:

              A German teenager comes to New Zealand and falls in love.