Is Garth Maxwell Aotearoa’s own John Waters? Maybe a better question is whether an interest in foot fetishism is a prerequisite of entry into the canon of cult queer cinema.
Naughty Little Peeptoe, Maxwell’s 2000 short, follows the charismatic shoe designer Doug George, who rhapsodically narrates his love for perfect arches and the titular coy peeptoes over a stream of inexplicable but hypnotic images of speedo-clad, stiletto-caressing muscle men on the beach.
It’s the second of Maxwell’s films to be added to MoMA’s permanent collection in recent years, alongside his cult classic Jack Be Nimble, which we reported on in Art News Summer 2022. In the article, MoMA’s Curator, Department of Film, Ron Magliozzi shared: “What continues to make the film so relevant is its focus on gender roles in the context of the family. The film satirises and rejects traditional, socially sanctioned notions of the family, and suggests there are other models for what family could be.”
Maxwell has reportedly begun writing a sequel for Jack (set to star artist Sarah Smutts-Kennedy once again), but for now, don’t miss the NZIFF Auckland screening of Naughty Little Peeptoe, which will also feature Maxwell’s first ever film, Come With Us.
SCHEDULE:
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
9pm, 16 August: ASB Waterfront Theatre
(followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker and reading by Samuel Te Kani)
In the autofictive tradition of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, Zia Anger performs an exorcism of her past filmic failures and assembles something unique from the wreckage with My First Film.
It adapts a live performance work Anger started to do in 2018, years after completing her first feature which never gained distribution. The film is a collage of recreations, archival footage, Instagram stories, narration and more—a performative self-crit reflecting wryly on the trials of independent filmmaking and the doubts and misfires of artistic practice.
Tellingly, Anger includes short clips from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in her assemblage. The film is a landmark of avant-garde, innerspace cinema, which Deren says intended “to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.” This registered in hallucinatory images and potent but slippery subjectivities—a combination dubbed by her critics as ‘trance cinema’.
For Anger, ‘mania cinema’ might be the more accurate term, weaving as she does the aesthetic and psychological presence of contemporary hyper-media into her film (the protagonist even has an Adderall addiction).
SCHEDULE
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
3.45pm, Friday 9 August: Hollywood Avondale
Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington
6.15pm, Thursday 8 August: Lighthouse Cinema
2pm, Friday 9 August: Roxy Cinema
Peter Roche produced many of his performance works in the late 1970s and early 80s, the twilight years of lax health and safety standards and the decades in which the New Zealand sheep population was at its peak. Both of these circumstances feel relevant to his work, which often involved self-mutilation and sheep carcasses, and sometimes both at once.
His work was shocking, disturbing and risky, but thoughtful about the relationship between the body, the image and the audience. Bridget Sutherland’s new documentary revisits this iconic oeuvre, weaving archival footage with the accounts of Roche’s friends, collaborators and art historians, and a soundtrack courtesy of David Kilgour.
The film debuted last year in the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi’s exhibition In Relation: Performance Works 1979–1985 which documented Roche’s collaboration with then-partner Linda Buis. Natasha Conland wrote on the exhibition for our Winter 2023 edition, while online readers can revisit Dan Chappell’s 2011 profile of the artist here. In the artist’s own words: “My work is generated by my physical response, so you should interact with the work in your own way. It’s not all easy work, not all dark and heavy—it’s often a lot of fun. I definitely don’t ever do things by halves.”
SCHEDULE
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
1pm, Saturday 17 August
(followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker)
Pepe is the story of a hippopotamus imported from Namibia to Colombia by Pablo Escobar in the 1970s, then left with the rest of the herd to roam free after the infamous drug lord’s killing. One of these hippos was shot dead by German hunters in 2009 and it’s his ghost that narrates this film, speaking in an evocative, plodding bass that could be the voice of Father Time.
Director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias deploys a mixture of narrative techniques, archival footage and excerpts from the cartoon Peter Potamus/Pepe Pótamus in what he calls an “exercise of imagination production.” He intends for this to bridge the cultural and political contexts of Latin America and Africa, and to be a strange, speculative corrective to the logics of divide and conquer.
Pair it with Johan Grimonprez’s essay-film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which centres on an especially corrupt episode in decolonial history: the US-backed assassination of Congolese politician and independence leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Grimonprez makes the case that Lumumba’s murder served as a death blow to the non-aligned movements of the Global South seeking a radical third-way against the two bleak paths that dominated the Cold War era. de los Santos Arias shows that some sort of global solidarity may still be stirring.
SCHEDULE
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
3.30pm, Saturday 10 August: Hollywood Avondale
Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington
8.15pm, Wednesday 7 August: Lighthouse Cinema
3.30pm, Saturday 10 August: Lighthouse Cinema
Just last week, Israel green-lit the largest land grabs in three decades in the West Bank while continuing its decimation of the people and infrastrucutre of Gaza.
Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land documents the occupation of Palestine—of which the baseless demolition of homes and schools is a daily cruelty and has been for decades—and is a must-see for many reasons, not least of them the growing weaponisation of ‘property rights’ here in Aotearoa as a means of undermining Indigenous self-determination.
The film sits at the outflow of some of the most contentious and urgent geopolitical events and cultural debates taking place today, and gets a deservedly wide distribution in this year’s festival, showing in all ten of the festival’s regional programmes.
SCHEDULE
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
10am, Thursday 8 August: The Civic
1.15pm, Saturday 17 August, The Civic
Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington
8.15pm, Thursday 1 August: Lighthouse Cinema
2.15pm, Thursday 8 August: Roxy Cinema
1.15pm, Saturday 10 August: Embassy Theatre
Ōtautahi Christchurch
10am, Sunday 18 August: Lumière Cinema
4.15pm, Friday 30 August: Lumière Cinema
3.30pm, Saturday 31 August: Lumière Cinema
Ōtepoti Dunedin
10.45am, Sunday 25 August: Regent Theatre
Kirikiriroa Hamilton
6.15pm, Monday 26 August: Lido Cinema
1pm, Sunday 1 September: Lido Cinema
Tauranga
6pm, Monday 19 August: Luxe Cinemas
2.15pm, Sunday 1 September: Luxe Cinemas
Napier
7.45pm, Tuesday 27 August: MTG Century Cinema
Ngāmotu New Plymouth
4.15pm, Monday 2 September: Len Lye Centre
6.15pm, Wednesday 4 September: Len Lye Centre
Whakaoriori Masterton
2pm, Friday 23 August: Regent 3 Cinemas
6pm, Monday 26 August: Regent 3 Cinemas
Whakatū Nelson
2pm, Thursday 15 August: State Cinemas
6.15pm, Thursday 22 August: State Cinemas
Join Art News Aotearoa after the screening of Mati Diop’s Berlinale-winner Dahomey for a panel discussion with visual artists Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye and Luke Willis Thompson.
Covering the return of a stolen artefact to Benin, Diop’s film touches on the myths and injustices of the past, and the future a new generation in Africa are building from them.
We’ll be speaking about Diop’s film and it’s connection to discourses of repatriation in the Pacific.
Statues Also Die: On Repatriating and Reanimating Stolen Taonga
11:15am–12:15pm, Saturday 10 August: Wintergarden, The Civic
Visit the New Zealand International Film Festival website to view the full programme and venue information, and to purchase tickets.
Introducing the Artist Advice Bureau