Harvesting & Resurrecting: Ricky Lai on NZIFF 2025

FEATURE | REVIEW | HANGA / CRAFT

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickylaitheokperson | Contributing Writer

‘You need to be bigger, you need to be bolder, and you need to be everywhere’, declared Kaine Thompson, Chair of the 2025 board of the Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival on its opening night in Tāmaki Makaurau. These words were their vision statement as accrued from the previous year’s feedback, and yet I, who couldn’t have been sizzling more with excitement in the Civic’s balcony seats, would never need to be convinced. But how does a film-screening programme – spanning just a week and spare change – truly perform to the rest of our city? Scanning even the half-filled theatres during the week and observing a reassuring amount of young people willing to take a chance on, say, the 4K remaster of Béla Tarr’s ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’, I figure the answer may be: ‘huh – pretty good, for now!’.

As Debate Magazine’s film columnist, it may surprise you to learn that I’ve only been attending the festival for three years and engaging with movies since 2020, so I’m far from familiar with NZIFF in its pre-pandemic heyday. That said, I have a gut instinct that the committee is on the right track. Anyone’s interest can only grow in the presence of a culture that encourages inclusion and engagement, so it made my heart swell to see this year’s programme totally chocker with Cannes titles to curb the average auteur-geek’s hunger pangs, plus an expanded selection of six venues, most notably the SkyCity Theatre, to behold them in. (For a closer review, I defer to Issue #9 of Debate for a fantastic venue guide by fellow contributors Daniel Tang & Caeden Tipler.) During NZIFF’s Auckland run, I saw seventeen films and have since caught up on an extra four – yet I still have FOMO about the stuff I didn’t see! Reflecting on my blind spots, including Lav Diaz (‘Magellan’), Kleber Filho (‘The Secret Agent’), Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardennes (‘Young Mothers’), Sergei Loznitsa (‘Two Prosecutors’), Richard Linklater (‘Nouvelle Vague’), Radu Jude (‘Kontinental ‘25’) and Joachim Trier (‘Sentimental Value’), it’s hilarious that even I, with a few comp tickets (chur team xx) and all the time in the world, have still been spoilt for choice.

The best film I saw at this year’s NZIFF was Bi Gan’s ‘Resurrection’, at once an abstraction of Chinese and filmic histories that reminded me, left with tear-soaked cheeks by the finale, that everything which matters is finite and vice-versa. The 30-minute single-take tracking shot – at this stage one of Bi’s temporal specialties – which lapses through the night and into the crack of dawn, may not even be my favourite thing about it. I covered ‘Resurrection’ for Debate, and I still cringe at my decision to end my review with “A+.” as if it were some esteemed stamp of approval – who does this guy think he is? Robert Christgau? – but that goes to signify how excited I was in the moment. Despite the crest containing multitudes, I don’t expect every other highlight to be as boundless; often the simplest narratives can return stunning emotional stakes, too – take Christian Petzold’s ghost-story-in-disguise, ‘Miroirs No. 3’, or the endlessly funny and anxious physical comedy from homegrown stoner-horror ‘The Weed Eaters’ (complete with a death-by-line-trimmer that’d make Peter Jackson look back and laugh), or even the patient Bostonian roadie from Kelly Reichardt, ‘The Mastermind’, which is practically one long build-up to a great punchline in which one man refuses to morally stand for anything during the ‘70s, yet still pays the same price as the few who go down fighting.

With that lesson lingering, it’s worth lauding the inclusion of documentaries that appeal to present-day geopolitical concern; namely coverage of the Israeli state’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. Photojournalist Sepideh Farsi’s ‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’ centers around the significance of long-distance online communication methods by Gazan citizens, but I’ve also since become acquainted with Göran Olsson’s ‘Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989’; a curation of archived reports by SVT’s on-site journalism over three decades. It is, to my lack of expertise, the most valuable historical coverage of this crisis I have seen, especially demonstrating how passive media coverage and its biases can become directly complicit in the perpetuation of human atrocities. A truly useful non-fiction feature enriches your perspective on history and society, and Olsson’s work is a refreshing counterpoint to what seems like the milquetoast, liberal concessions of ‘Prime Minister’, a retrospective on Jacinda Ardern’s dual terms which only seemed to generate controversy for the contentious dialogue outside the film than any of its generically agreeable self-pat-on-the-back content.

As much as I keep my ears keen for Lennon & Ono, Don McGlashan and (sometimes) Warren Ellis, the only music-doc that magnetised this hipster’s attention was, unsurprisingly, Alex Ross Perry’s ‘Pavements’, about Stephen Malkmus’s seminal indie-rock band, and beyond all its formal masturbation, there may be some worthwhile commentary about the ongoing, millennial-borne feud between sincerity and irony. An even more pretentious documentary – but not without hypnotism – is Albert Serra’s ‘Afternoons of Solitude’, a highly controversial aerie on the sportsmanship of 29-year-old star bull-fighter Andrés Roca Rey as he incapacitates a seemingly bottomless cattle of tauri to the cheers of an unseen stadium crowd, and then the testosterone-boosting praises of his own entourage. (You’ve never heard more heckled compliments about the size of somebody’s balls.) Sneer if you must at my endorsement of this feature, but I made moves far more rogue – for instance, after catching the 30th anniversary restoration of Mamoru Ishii’s ‘Angel’s Egg’, I made a last-minute decision to skip a session at the Civic which I had already paid for, in favour of barely slipping onto a bus barrelling down the length of New North Road towards a different screening at the Hollywood Avondale which I was more interested in. A foolish financial decision, I’m sure you’ll agree, especially for a lad with a student’s tax code, but I assure thee: Athina Rachel Tsangari’s ‘Harvest’ was worth the digression. Assessing the audience’s indifference on the way out, it wasn’t everybody’s tankard of tea, but I was so bewitched by this psychedelic folk-thriller about a superstitious, xenophobic community in rural Scotland. Courtesy of the great Sean Price Williams as DOP, rain in the country has never looked this good on camera.

‘Harvest’ shares a key cast member – the fantastic Frank Dillane, who I’ll assume is already a TikTok-edit heartthrob – with the directorial debut of Harris Dickinson, ‘Urchin’: about a solid-hearted young waif in Britain whose inability to help himself leads to his boomeranging in and out of homelessness. It’s a fine movie with its moments, undermined by indie-drama conventions, though I was uneased by a good early scene where Dillane, unhoused in London city, asks passers-by for money, who all avoid eye contact and walk straight-ahead without a word. A deeply upsetting self-recognition arises watching a scene like that when you live in Auckland; that every person in that theatre, including myself, has been one of those passers-by – let alone on the way to a film that dramatises this very interaction. ‘Urchin’, despite holding up a mirror, doesn’t spurn the audience, nor does it propose answers to our everyday cognitive dissonance, besides at least encouraging you to unearth it. Following NZIFF this year, a single movie might not re-map society, but perhaps the kindling of an inclusive, art-cherishing, sustainably financed culture in even our business-forward city makes me optimistic of what can burgeon from that coterie. We are active participants, if not outright contributors to, the society that we want to see. That Paolo Bertolin, Artistic Director, performed some sort of teleportative magic act between locations in order to introduce nearly every screening in person, impressed me with great faith in how much this matters to the people who keep it breathing.

Ricky’s 10 Highlights from NZIFF 2025

1. Resurrection (dir. Bi Gan)

2. Werckmeister Harmonies (dir. Béla Tarr)

3. Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 (dir. Göran Olsson)

4. Harvest (dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari)

5. The Weed Eaters (dir. Callum Devlin)

6. Afternoons of Solitude (dir. Albert Serra)

7. Abraham’s Valley (dir. Manoel de Oliveira)

8. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (dir. Phạm Thiên Ân)

9. Miroirs No. 3 (dir. Christian Petzold)

10. The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt)