The non-fiction section of the Auckland Film Festival, starting next week, offers some rich pickings. Peter Calder has been watching.
Given the parlous state of the planet's ecology and economy, it's no surprise that documentary films often tell grim stories. And for those who have a taste for it, this year's festival has its share of chilling tales: anyone who can exit Collapse - an 82-minute one-man jeremiad explaining just how nigh the end actually is - without needing a stiff drink, is a good deal tougher than me.
But there are other films - enchanting, sobering, touching and dazzling -that will transport filmgoers from the depths of an Auckland winter to places beyond imagining. Some highlights: Teenage Paparazzo is aptly enough named: its subject is Austin Visschedyk, a 12-year-old who lives and dies for a shot of Britney Spears climbing out of a limo - or even better, putting out the rubbish with no makeup on. But the documentary by Adrian Grenier who, not incidentally, plays a movie star in the HBO comedy-drama Entourage, becomes something much more interesting than that set-up would suggest.
Starting out with the idea of stalking his stalkers, Grenier encounters some hilarious reactions: one snapper says, with a straight face, that the film-maker is "exploiting what we do for a living" (!) and a grizzled Fleet St veteran seems oblivious to the circularity of his observation that "an explosion of [gossip] publications" creates "a need for the work that we produce".
The relationship between paps and celebs is a hall of mirrors that starts to get even more dizzying when Visschedyk becomes a celebrity in his own right. One terrific scene has documentary crews shooting Grenier's documentary crew; in another, Visschedyk begins to speak of Paris Hilton as "one of my best friends" when she is no such thing and is, in fact, collaborating with Grenier (who is her friend) on a scheme to hoax the paps.
But what's even more compelling is watching the changing relationship between Grenier and Visschedyk, as it morphs from combative to collaborative to big brother-little brother. Documentaries that chart their makers' unexpected responses are the best ones of all and this film is honest enough to deliver in spades.
The title of Space Tourists tells only half the film's story. Certainly we get some idea of what life is like for the well-heeled who pay almost $30 million to spend eight days as a passenger on a Russian Soyuz rocket and the low-orbit International Space Station, because we follow Iranian-American telecoms billionaire Anousheh Ansari - the first female space tourist - as she does just that. (It is grimly funny to listen to her rabbit on about how anyone who has a dream and wants to "be the change" can follow in her footsteps). But large and fascinating swathes of the film focus on the distinctly earthbound activities of the hard-bitten and dirt-poor men who cruise the deserts of Kazakhstan in ancient trucks, picking up rocket parts for scrap metal. (We are definitely not in Kansas any more). The quixotic ingenuity of a Romanian theologian building a rocket in his backyard is another subplot. It all adds up to a film of occasionally vague focus - but you won't be bored for a second.
You don't need to know anything about the woman herself to enjoy Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (though it would probably help) because the film gives a fully rounded portrait of a pioneer of stand-up who was a trailblazer for women (she was cracking jokes about abortion in the 60s) and who is still, at 77, breathtakingly outrageous on stage. But uber-versatile directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (whose previous subjects have included the Darfur genocide in the Sudan and a man wrongly convicted of rape) get beneath Rivers' skin to paint a touching, even sad, portrait of the loneliness of the long-distance performer. Recommended.
Only those who saw the American documentary Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 in the 2008 festival will be prepared for the exhilaration of Pianomania. Everyone else can - and should - enjoy the surprise. This is not intended as a companion piece (it's a German-Austrian co-production) but it functions as a sort of "what happens next" as we follow the extraordinarily engaging Stefan Knupfer. To call him a piano tuner is like calling Usain Bolt a jogger or Charles Dickens a journalist; it's true, but there's a bit more to it. His relationship with the extraordinarily demanding concert pianists for whom he prepares instruments and, more important, with the instruments themselves is akin to a long marriage: a triumph of loyalty, compromise and empathy. Stefan is an ultra-geek, but also, one with a richly sensitive soul (and, we learn, a wicked sense of humour), and to spend time with him is to learn that a concert grand is much closer to a living organism than an inanimate object.
Short cuts: The Peddler, is a terrific little Argentine film about Daniel Burmeister who travels from town to town making movies in which the townsfolk star, in return for bed and board. This puts you in mind of our own impresario of artisan theatre, Warwick Broadhead, who was the subject of Florian Habicht's Rubbings from a Live Man in 2008.
Strange Birds in Paradise is an eye-opening insight into life for Indonesia's oppressed easternmost people, ethnically Melanesian and under threat from government indifference and mining company rapacity. It's the newest shame in our backyard, told through the music of its Melbourne-based expatriates.
