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.