We’re busy getting the last of our 2026 programme and materials ready for the full announcement at the end of the month. It’s looking seriously good, and we can’t wait to share it.
In 2026, we will continue to screen each film twice, at 6pm and 8.30 on Mondays, starting with our opening night film Picnic At Hanging Rock on February 23rd. We will have four films where the second screening will instead be at 8.30pm on Tuesday, either due to their length or because they’re Live Cinema where the film is accompanied by musical performers.
Here are a few more details of the programme to tide you over until we can announce more:
Live cinema is back – The Wind. We are stoked to be able to announce that our 2026 live cinema performance will accompany a film with a strong Wellington flavour: Victor Sjöström’s The Wind.
The score will be composed and performed by two Wellington-based musicians: acclaimed Indonesian singer-songwriter Hara and Thomas Arbor, who is reuniting with us one decade after his celebrated score for The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari back at the Paramount. Both musicians know what it’s like to live somewhere so windy that it’s impossible to get used to it, and we can’t wait to see them incorporate Te Whanganui-a-Tara soundscapes into their composition.
Classic Hollywood – one of the all time great directors of classic Hollywood was Billy Wilder. We love his films and in 2026 we are playing his dark-edged romantic comedy The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.
Aotearoa cinema – It’s vital to us that each year’s programme contains some homegrown content. One of the NZ films we will be playing this year is The Quiet Earth. This is a 1985 sci-fi directed by the late Geoff Murphy (Utu, Goodbye Pork Pie).
Action cinema – Action is one of the foundational genres of cinema and we’re looking forward to a couple of incredible action films in the programme this year – one of these is the 1987 Hong Kong action film City on Fire, directed by Ringo Lam and starring the great Chow Yun-Fat.
Recent films – It’s important that we aren’t stuck in the past and enjoy some of the newest trends in cinema. As such, we’re playing La Chimera, starring man of the moment Josh O’Connor as an archaeologist turned grave robber in Alice Rohrwacher’s (Happy as Lazzaro) 2023 film set in 1980s Italy.
We look forward to announcing all the details later in the month. There is much, much more to come including directors such as Jafar Panahi, Brian De Palma, and Luis Buñuel. We have films from across the world including Aotearoa, Mexico, Japan, the Soviet Union, Hong Kong and Greece among others.