The Wellington Film Society is open to everyone
We operate on a subscription basis to comply with screening rights restrictions.
Membership gives you free entry to all our screenings, and most screenings are open to members only.
You can join at any time of the year, with membership running for 12 months from the month of joining. The cost is just $120 yearly, with Discounted and Youth membership even less.
And you can start with a 3-film sampler and upgrade to a full membership later.
3 Film Sampler
Choose any 3 films to see
over 12 months
Full Year Membership
See every film we screen
for 12 months
Films screened during 2024:
Barry Lyndon
Stanley Kubrick’s stately, sumptuous drama returns to the big screen where it belongs. Previously seen as a lesser work from the man who made 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, it is now widely regarded as one of Kubrick’s masterpieces. ...
First Cow
In this stirring film by revered auteur Kelly Reichardt an odd couple discover friendship and free enterprise on the American frontier. Reichardt is one of the most exciting directors working today, beloved the world over for her minimalistic realism, outsider protagonists and distillation of wider social issues through the personal – all of which are masterfully realised in First Cow, ...
Memories of Murder
Based loosely on a true story, Memories of Murder sees two cops investigate a series of grisly murders in a small town on the edge of farmland. Bong Joon-ho’s masterful, gonzo comic take on the police procedural won him worldwide acclaim and helped make the Korean New Wave a full-fledged international force. ...
After Hours
A hilarious 1985 Scorcese comedy where a Manhattan office worker ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette). So begins the wildest night of his life — involving underground-art punks, a distressed waitress, a crazed Mister Softee truck driver, and a bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight ...
Night Train to Munich
Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich is a twisting, turning, cloak-and-dagger delight, combining comedy, romance, and thrills with the greatest of ease. Paced like an out-of-control locomotive, Night Train takes viewers on a journey from Prague to England to the Swiss Alps as Nazis pursue a Czech scientist and his daughter ...
Shiva Baby
Shiva Baby is a relentless comedy of errors that opens with the sort of discordant string music one would ordinarily expect from a horror film – and it soon becomes abundantly clear why... What if your whole precarious life, your carefully constructed, fatally fragile persona, fell publicly to pieces amid the ritual and solemnity of a stranger’s funeral? ...
Rain
The long, languid days at the end of a summer holiday. Slices of lemon for the gin and tonics. Diving off the back of the boat. Grown-ups at parties. Rain is an evocative mood piece, enriched by gorgeous visuals, about the dissolution of a marriage as a mother reaches out for excitement and escape and her 13-year-old daughter explores her own budding sexuality ...
Silent Running
This authentic 1970s cult sci-fi classic stars a key figure of the period, patrician hippie Bruce Dern, as an idealistic crew member of a 21st-century space station refusing to destroy the only forest vegetation saved from a defoliated Earth. The reputation of Silent Running has grown to near classic status and its environmental message more relevant today than ever. ...
Joint Security Area
JSA follows the international investigation of an incident in which two Northerners have been shot dead by a South Korean soldier, but no one seems to want to talk about what really happened. In lurid colour, director Park Chan-wook tells the story of an unlikely friendship – and eventual betrayal ...
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
On the face of it, this is a film about the life of writer Yukio Mishima, however that’s only a starting point for a glorious collage in celluloid, broken into four parts, with each part given its own colour palette... "one of the most gorgeous and sophisticated portraits of an artist ever put on film.” ...
Good Bye Lenin!
In a disarmingly entertaining fashion, this multi-award-winning German bittersweet comedy seems to encapsulate all the emotion and drama of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “It is not a step-by-step chronicle of German reunification, but it gives a perspective of the time. It's a bonus that this comes as part of an engrossing and well told story.” ...
The Fallen Idol
Initially it seems such a small story, yet its significance grows as we’re immersed in it, contemplating a child’s first corrosive inkling of evil in the world and, a decent man’s growing realisation of the thin tissue of circumstance separating happiness from damnation. ...majestic black-and-white camerawork ... timeless and intoxicating ...
An Angel at My Table
An elegiac evocation of Frame’s acclaimed autobiographical trilogy which is both cinematically stunning and tenderly intimate in its depiction of a woman constantly shadowed by death who wrote herself into life. Beautifully shot, it also displays a keen, often eerily accurate eye for the New Zealand past ...
Cow
Andrea Arnold has created a kind of agribusiness pastoral about the daily life of cows on a working dairy farm. We hear human voices from the very beginning, often cheerfully calling the cows “girlies!” – no word could be less suitable for these mighty beasts. But we don’t see any people until the very end... ...
The Unknown + Freaks
Neither of the films in this double bill received much love in their time. Their controversial subject matter meant both were subject to censorship in the subsequent decades. Luckily, audiences have become more open to films in which the real monsters are ‘normal’ people and Tod Browning’s masterpieces are getting the belated appraise they deserve ...
Happening
A powerful and moving story based on a memoir by Nobel Laureate, Annie Ernaux, recounting when, as a star student, she discovers she is pregnant and must come to terms with how this will change her life. Audrey Diwan’s Happening adapts Ernaux’s account into a lean, muscular film resolutely cinematic in its retelling ...
The Andromeda Strain
This screen adaptation of Michael Crichton’s first bestseller tackles the crisis that unfolds when a space probe falls to Earth carrying an extraterrestrial virus that instantly turns human blood to powder. Thankfully, the US authorities have just built a secret subterranean research facility for exactly such eventualities ...
Joyland
Tartly funny and plungingly sad in equal measure, this is nuanced, humane queer filmmaking, more concerned with the textures and particulars of its own intimate story than with grander social statements — even if, as a tale of transgender desire in a Muslim country, its very premise makes it a boundary-breaker ...
Cairo Conspiracy
Adam is a young man living in a small fishing village with his father. A good student, the local imam puts him forward for a scholarship to the elite Al-Azhar university, the centre of Sunni Islam. Soon after he arrives he becomes embroiled in various plots for control of the university, its theology, and even Egypt itself ...
Brief Encounters
Muratova explores the intricate triangular relationship of three striking individuals with clarity, tenderness and irony. As with the lovely solo piano score, every incisive detail registers with a sure, light touch and there are some unexpected, haunting chords. The cinematography is crisp, beautiful, and for 1967, daringly, but expressively, unconventional ...
Heathers
A subversive black comedy about a clique of High School mean girls – all named Heather – and the violent revenge taken out on them by one their own. Perhaps because it found humour in such taboo subjects as teenage suicide, bulimia, date rape, and murder, the film was not a success when it came out in 1988. Since then though... it has become a cult classic ...
Burning
Desire, ravenous and ineffable, shudders through Burning, the latest from the great South Korean director Lee Chang-dong… The story has the quality of a mystery thriller — somebody goes missing, somebody else tries to figure out why ...
Whānau Mārama NZ International Film Festival
Festival films come from 20 countries including Bhutan, Iran, Somalia, Nepal and Vietnam, as well as China, Japan, the UK, Ireland, USA, France, Germany, Portugal and Australia. Ticket sales open on Friday 12 July ...
Barry Lyndon
Special encore screening! Stanley Kubrick’s stately, sumptuous drama returns to the big screen where it belongs. Previously seen as a lesser work from the man who made 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, it is now widely regarded as one of Kubrick’s masterpieces ...