The NZ International Film Festival’s most popular directors, ever
Directors Hong Sang-soo, Werner Herzog and Gaylene Preston. Photos / Supplied
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In our preview of this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival programme, I pondered which director has had the most movies in the event and its forerunners.
The thought arose because this year’s fest includes many titles by hardy arthouse perennials including Wim Wenders, Aki Kaurismäki, Todd Haynes and Claire Denis. Locally, Bread and Roses by Gaylene Preston, long a festival fixture, is having screenings of a digitally restored version.
My best guesses were Wenders and Preston.
But surely someone would know? Or they might just have fun making an educated guess. Off went emails to festival folk past and present, staff and festival trust members, asking for their picks of most frequent screen visitor, exotic and domestic in the past five or so decades. Back came the replies – and eventually a definitive answer.
Festival godfather Lindsay Shelton, got in touch:
“The 10 years (1972-81) that I directed the Wellington Film Festival, long before it changed its name to NZIFF, was a glorious era of major European filmmakers. We were able to show all the new work of Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, Varda, Bresson, Tavernier, Fassbinder, Visconti, the Tavianis, Herzog, Wenders. Now more than 40 years later, Wenders is the only one still making films, with his newest in the 2023 NZIFF programme direct from Cannes.
“New Zealand directors? When I started the film festival, there were very few. Vincent Ward was the only local director represented in our first 10 festivals, with his first two films.”
Head of Programming Michael McDonnell shared his opinion:
“My guess for international filmmaker would be Claire Denis; we’ve shown all her films except for two. Now that her films have started to be restored, we’ve already shown one of them again, Beau Travail in 2021, while a restoration of her first film Chocolat will screen in this year’s festival. Other likely contenders would be Hong Sang-soo, based on his relentless productivity, which is impossible to keep up with; Eric Rohmer, who was similarly productive back in the early days of the festival, and also Werner Herzog with some great documentaries added in more recent years.