Another wonderful Whānau Mārama NZIFF has come and gone and, as usual, we asked our members to pick their favourites from across the programme! We had nearly 200 of our members selecting films this year, and we’ve crunched the numbers to find the top ten.
First, some details from the overall response:
- This year, 110 different films made it into at least one respondent’s top three – over two thirds of the entire programme! That’s a sign of a wonderfully consistent programme.
- It wasn’t the best year for short films and children’s films, by the looks of the data, with very few of these programmes getting chosen by our respondents. Clearly there’s something more memorable about feature-length dramas.
- Once again there are some clear favourites for certain medals – Fatherland, for instance, was a clear second-place for many of our respondents. But there’s one clear favourite for the gold, as you’ll see…
Time for the leaderboard!
10=. A tie between Fatherland and Chronovisor – one is an eerie dark-academia noir, based on a true story, and the other is Paweł Pawlikowski’s exploration of the life of the author Thomas Mann. Despite their differences, the scores for these two films were the same across the board;
9. The History of Concrete – A weird assemblage of musings, but it took the fancy of a lot of our respondents for their second-place pick;
8. Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant – one of the only films in this year’s festival to credit multiple prosthetics designers, this Kiwi horror-comedy was the highest-ranked of the Māhutonga thread;
7. Whispers in the Woods – Vincent Munier’s gorgeous documentary meditation on the wildlife of the Vosges forests, a strong showing in second- and third-place picks made this one a contender;
6. Minotaur – The Cannes Grand Prix winner was a favourite among our members in Aotearoa for its bleeding-edge depiction of fraying lives away from the fronts of the Russia-Ukraine conflict;
4=. Fjord – this piercing critique of Norway’s reputation for tolerant attitudes took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and was the most-frequent choice for our respondents’ bronze medal; and
4=. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – This gory, sensual and utterly bizarre meta-commentary on horror and queer identity was chosen more than any other film for the second-place spot;
3. The Black Ball – A three-part story that defies easy explanation but unearths a wonderful mix of history, war, romance and literature. This film earned Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi the best director award at Cannes, and twenty-two of you put this title somewhere in your top three;
2. La Gradiva – Another twenty-two of you placed this film on your scorecard, with eleven of those votes for the best film of the programme. Marine Atlan’s debut feature was simultaneously a fresh and timeless take on the coming-of-age film, cramming countless emotions into its runtime;
But there was no contest for first place this year…
- All of a Sudden – Our second-place film got eleven top votes, but Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s first French-language feature was selected as the best film of the festival by twenty-five of you! This tale of friendship and grief united audiences of all stripes this year, sharing scorecards with dozens of other films of incredibly disparate genres.
With another excellent programme under our belts, we can’t wait to see what happens in 2027! Thanks to all of our members who shared their choices with us and supported cinema in all its fascinating diversity this year.