World Cinema Showcase: 2011

With minimal fanfare, another film festival has snuck up ahead of the mid-winter bonanza one. This one is aimed at showcasing some big titles headed for the art house circuit while giving others exposure they aren’t likely to get elsewhere.

In Auckland, the festival is restricted to the under-used Sky City Theatre, which at least provides a central venue that is unlikely to sell out for most sessions. Each film screens at least twice.

Three highlights so far:

• La Potiche, which means “trophy wife,” is set amid the turmoil of 1977-78, when France was gripped with industrial unrest, stagflation and rising unemployment. Feminism was also on the rise.

A family-owned umbrella company is under threat, with the workers demanding higher wages, better conditions and a 40-hour week. The scene is set for a confrontation between the anti-union bourgeois owner (Fabrice Luchini) and the workers, who move things along by taking him hostage. At a critical stage, he takes ill from the stress, taking his dowager wife (Catherine Deneuve) well out of her comfort zone when she takes on the manager role.

She soon changes the business, giving the workers much of what they want in return and achieving higher sales. On her husband’s return, the ensuing struggle for control reveals some deep secrets, not the least being her one-time affair with the communist mayor and MP (Depardieu), who mediates the dispute.

It’s predictable stuff, with a family split along political lines, alliances shifting like swinging doors and some sexual misbehaviour. Deneuve sails through every sumptuous scene as a woman very much in charge, giving an ironic lie to the title, while a portly Depardieu reveals a less than man-of the-people side. The boss’ secretary (Karin Viard) steals many a scene, looking straight out of Mad Men.

• Rabbit Hole gives Nicole Kidman one of her best dramatic performances as a grieving mother who with her husband is coming to terms with the loss of their only child a road accident. Based on the acclaimed stage play by David Lindsay-Abaire, who also wrote the screenplay, it reveals its theatrical origins in only a few stand-up domestic rows. For most of the time it understates its emotional punch with fair doses of dry humour and totally believable characters.

• Of Gods and Men, a hit in its native France, pits the unworldly life of committed French Christian monks against the gruesome realities of terrorism in Algeria during the 1990s. Living high in the Atlas mountains, the eight brothers dedicate their lives to helping impoverished villagers living nearby as well as living their own spiritual ones. The tension builds as they reject government orders to return to France and face whatever fate has for them. This is a highly emotional experience as well as a theological one; the cast of top French actors only compounds the excellence.

Others worth watching out for are:

Waiting for “Superman” is a study of the US public education system and why it is stymied – wait for it – not by lack of funding but teacher union intransigence. Director David Guggenheim homes in on an example where a private academy, paying good teachers for performance, has done wonders in the poorest area of Harlem.

Freakonomics is a collection of mini-documentaries based on the best-selling book of economic truths and myths by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Among the contributors are Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp) and Seth Gordon (King of Kong).

Another contributor to Freakonomics is Alex Gibney, the best of the big US documentary makers if not the best known. His Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is self-explanatory and received much higher praise than Freakonomics.

Another Year will please fans of Mike Leigh, as he puts a suburban English couple's under the microscope, while The Way Back marks a return by Australian director Peter Weir after several years' absence. It based loosely on a Polish POW’s story of seven men, who escape from a Soviet gulag in 1940 and walk 4000 miles to freedom in India, pitting their resolve and determination against almost impossible odds.

This year's surprise Cannes Festival winner, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, from Thailand, completes this short list.

The festival runs in Auckland until April 18, Wellington (April 14-30) and Dunedin (May 5-18). Due to lack of a venue because of earthquake damage, Christchurch will miss out this year.