WFF logoLast night a select group of over 500 peo­ple at the Para­mount were treat­ed to the launch of this year’s Welling­ton Film Fes­ti­val pro­gramme. Fol­low­ing a brief-ish intro­duc­tion from return­ing direc­tor Bill Gos­den, those present were treat­ed to a delight­ful ani­mat­ed film called Perse­po­lis – an adap­ta­tion of Mar­jane Satrapi’s graph­ic-nov­el-auto­bi­og­ra­phy which is avail­able in some local stores. Satrapi grew up in pre and post-rev­o­lu­tion­ary Iran and the film is a vivid and wit­ty por­tray­al of the way total­i­tar­i­an­ism of all extremes can squeeze human beings beyond recog­ni­tion.

The pro­gramme is in a dif­fer­ent for­mat this year (A4) which makes it a bit eas­i­er on the eye as you scour it for gems. It also has to do dou­ble duty this year as the lack of a prin­ci­pal spon­sor has meant the elim­i­na­tion of the glossy sou­venir guide book.

I woke up this morn­ing to find that last night I had ticked some­thing on every page which is obvi­ous­ly not a sus­tain­able strat­e­gy, but I do have until Tues­day (when tick­ets go on sale via Tick­etek out­lets) to slim my list down. The pro­grammes are avail­able now at all the Fes­ti­val venues: Embassy, Para­mount, Te Papa, Film Archive and Pent­house and across town over the next few days. The web site seems to be up and down under the load this morn­ing but has a cun­ning cal­en­dar fea­ture to allow you to build a per­son­alised screen­ing sched­ule over the two and a half weeks between July 18 and Aug 3.

Funer­als & Snakes will have a few Fes­ti­val pre­view posts over the next few weeks but I also com­mend you to The Lumière Read­er, whose online cov­er­age of the Fes­ti­val is like­ly to be unequalled.