My second weekend of the NZIFF 2018 was less packed than the first weekend which was fortunate as after the first weekend and first week I had been packed with 12 films already. The second weekend added another four films -- two each day.

Le Grand Bal

"Le Grand Bal" is a French documentary about a folk dance (and music, really) festival in Gennetines (central France), held every summer. The festival runs effectively 24 hours a day for about a week, with dance classes from 10:00-21:00 followed by formal balls well into the early hours, and then informal jams and dance gatherings through until the classes resume in the morning (mostly attended by those who slept during the daytime!). All across 7 (outdoor) halls, simultaneously. With most (all?) participants camping nearby. Dance camp, if you will.

It feels like the cinematographer and director managed to capture a wide variety of the events at Le Grand Bal, from a variety of camera angles, including lots of shots from in amongst the dancers which gives a very intimate view of the dancing. This is mixed together with a good helping of logistics of running a festival, and conversations amongst participants about being part of a dance festival and partner dancing -- choosing dance partners, being chosen, dancers with different amounts of experience, the years to learn all the dance styles, etc. Overall it gives a good impression of what it would be like to attend such a festival.

While I enjoyed the film a lot, I did feel that -- as I overheard another viewer say afterwards -- it could have been edited to be a shorter film, and would have been better for it. Probably 15 minutes or more could have been trimmed, with care, and resulted in a film that left you feeling like you saw a little of everything but wanting a bit more, rather than wondering at times whether a given topic needed that much screen time. If you love partner dance, especially folk dancing, or folk music, it would be a rewarding movie to watch -- there is both a lot of good dance footage, and a wide variety of folk music.

Angie

"Angie" is a movie that touches on a lot of important, insufficiently talked about, topics -- including sexual abuse, alcohol/drug addiction, difficult childhoods, and the infamous Centerpoint Commune. The film is a Centerpoint story, told in the voices of some members of one family who were there as teenagers, but not the Centerpoint story -- and more than anything it is a film about Angie Meiklejohn and her family, because the director (Costa Botes) makes "films about people not places or organisations" (as he said in the introduction to our screening). (Anke Richter's "Bert's Labyrinth: Revisiting Centerpoint" article talks about the process of researching the topics that ended up in "Angie" -- Anke was a co-producer and researcher of the film. For an early Centerpoint documentary, while it was relatively young, before the scandals broke, see "Centerpoint: A Spirtual Growth Community" a two part "made for TV" documentary.)

I have known Angie for several years, and had met many of the people who appeared in the film, in person, before seeing the film. So it is difficult for me to judge the film in the abstract -- viewing it was mixed with reminders of my own life experiences, outside knowledge of people appearing in the film, and already knowing much of Angie's life story before I went to see the film. Yet even with all of that seeing the film helped fill in some gaps for me.

The spine of the film is a series of interviews with Angie, intercut with interviews with others in Angie's life (always identified by name, but their link to Angie not always made clear as another viewer noted), and mixed with historial photos, and some reconstructions of events that happened in the past. Many of those interviews are shot with something between a closeup and an extreme closeup, which seems to be a Costa Botes stylistic choice.

Overall I think the documentary works, even for those without specific knowledge of the events or the people shown, but there is definitely more to access for those with starting their viewing with some existing knowledge. It is not an easy film to watch, particularly for those with any personal history of a troubled childhood, addiction issues, sexual abuse, etc. But I think it is important that these topics are brought out into the light, and maybe like "Once Were Warriors" the film can provoke useful discusion and action.

Orlando

"Orlando" is tale of gender and gender presentation, that cheerfully breaks the fourth wall periodically, all wrapped in period costumes -- ranging across about four hundred years of European, and especially English, history. Over the period of the film Tilda Swinton, playing Orlando, goes from 17th Century men's dress to 18th Century women's dress and onwards to the present day. Orlando eventually loses the property given him by Queen Elizabeth -- played by Quentin Crisp, also cross dressing in that scene -- due to the small technicality that "he" (Orlando) is now "she" (Orlando). A potential reprieve to this loss of property is offered if only "she" (Orlando) will give birth to a son immediately... but she gives birth to a daughter, and loses the property. Orlando finally visits the property again a hundred years later, now a historic estate, still not looking a day older than the first scene of the movie!

If you enjoy period costumes, or gender roles thorughout history and how they have been subverted, or the role of European courtly history, it is a film well worth seeing, with a critical eye. I suspect there are more layers there to reward the repeat viewer. (The movie is based on a book by Virgina Woolf of the same name, from 1928 -- although I do not know how close the storyline of the film follows that of the book.)

Arctic

"Arctic" is an Icelandic survival thriller, and consists of almost entirely white locations with a single human (played by Mads Mikkelsen) for much of the movie. As we join the story it is clear he has been surviving for some time in his crash landed plane, with an obvious daily routine that he hopes will bring about a rescue. As the movie unfolds that daily routine is upset, and eventually he is forced into a series of increasingly difficult choices and challenges in the hope of surviving.

Mads Mikkelsen carries the film well over the 90+ minutes of routine, then less routine, drudgery, through to facing the increasingly desperate challenges to survive. If you like white, the Arctic, or survival thrillers it is worth seeing. And I am not surprised it was "far the most difficult shoot [Mads Mikkelsen had] ever done -- shooting the film must have been a survival experience of its own!