Interviewed last year before the release of his excellent artist biopic Mr Turner, British director Mike Leigh named Maurice Pialat's sublime 1991 movie Van Gogh as one of the three films about artists he most admires because "they treat the artists as real people and not just idealised aesthetes".
Auckland Film Society members will get the chance to see what Leigh means when the film, never commercially released here, screens as part of the society's 2015 programme.
The programme includes three newly restored films by Indian maestro Satyajit Ray and a trio of the fevered 50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, the German-born master of the quintessentially American genre.
Other notable inclusions are groundbreaking British films of the 60s (Losey's The Servant and Accident and Schlesinger's Billy Liar); a rerun of last year's foreign-film Oscar-winner The Great Beauty; and a screening of a restored, hand-painted version of the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, the most famous work of Frenchman Georges Melies, the man who invented special effects and inspired the 2011 Martin Scorsese film Hugo. This is accompanied by a 2001 documentary charting the film's history.
