One of audiences’ favourite films of the 2023 Whānau Mārama, New Zealand International Film Festival Programme was Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. The film revolves around Hirayama, a sanitation worker and physical-media aficionado. Each day, on the way to his mundane but crucial job, Hirayama listens to cassettes of great musicians from the 1960s and 1970s like Lou Reed (hence the film’s title), Otis Redding and Nina Simone. At one point, Hirayama agrees to let his much-younger colleague Takashi borrow his car for a date with girlfriend Aya. Takashi and Aya have starkly different reactions to Hirayama’s cassettes. The cash-strapped Takashi immediately thinks of the resale value of the tapes and later takes his colleague to a second-hand record store to try and convince him to sell his collection. Aya, on the other hand, is transfixed by Patti Smith and the quality of her voice played through the car speakers.

*From left to right: Takashi, Hirayama and Aya in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days.*

When making programming or curatorial decisions, organisations too frequently think of new audiences as Takashi, unwilling or unable to appreciate art. In my experience, we should think of them more like Aya: perfectly capable of engaging with art that is presented to them but too infrequently given the opportunity.

This diminishing trust in audiences appears to be underpinning recent decisions by Whānau Mārama.

The film festival has been a highlight of each year since I moved to Te Whānganui-a-Tara well over a decade ago. A love for, and knowledge of, cinema and a respect for audiences underpinned its decisions during this time. This was driven by its programmers and the late, great Bill Gosden who had been Director of the festival for 40 years. That’s not to say that everything the festival programmed was good: when Ngā Taonga was still on Taranaki Street, it was notorious for playing host to weird documentaries with fringe political agendas. But if nothing else, these films were an eccentric part of a suite of programming that played an invaluable role in the artistic life of the city.

*AWAKE: The Life of Yogananda was the type of film that Ngā Taonga used to play in the 2010s, terrible but in a singular way*

In the years since, Whānau Mārama was faced with a number of setbacks. After a cancer diagnosis, Gosden stepped down in 2019 and subsequently died. It is not clear what kind of succession planning was in place to mitigate the risk of losing someone so irreplaceable. In 2020, COVID-19 hit, a safe communal viewing experience was impossible, and the festival briefly moved online. Since then, the festival has struggled to attract audiences back to the theatre with ticket sales covering just 60% of costs in 2023 according to the 10-year strategy Te ahua o te Whānau Mārama that was released last year. Many of the factors influencing the viability of the festival have been driven by external and international phenomenon and have been outside the control of the festival. However, the festival’s response to these factors has not always inspired confidence.

*I watched Autobiography, an excellent film about a young man resisting the genocidal culpability of his elders, in a nearly empty cinema at The Roxy*

Although ticket sales were nowhere near where they needed to be, the 2023 programme was the festival’s strongest in years. Part of that is driven by international film productions and release schedules returning to some sort of new equilibrium after grinding to a halt in the early years of COVID. But a large portion of the credit lies at the feet of the programmers. This was the first year that I remember there being a really extensive Southeast Asian programme with highlights such as Indonesia’s Autobiography and Malaysia’s Tiger Stripes. That work was driven by newcomer Vicci Ho who led the Asian and LGBTQ+ Programming. Despite this though, the audiences didn’t materialise. Many of the best films I saw were in near-empty theatres, most often niche or international films, and this was reflected in those sales figures.

*The Tuakiri (character) and Whanonga Pono (Values) outlined in the Whānau Mārama 10-year strategy have not been reflected in recent decisions.*

Unfortunately, Whānau Mārama took one look at this (real) problem, panicked, and responded in a way that does not inspire confidence. In the past few weeks, four programmers have announced their resignations. In addition to Ho, is Ant Timpson, architect of the legendary Incredibly Strange programme, Sandra Reid who does the European Festival Circuit and Nic Marshall who founded Square Eyes for children’s programming. These three have been a part of the festival for much longer than I’ve been attending and the impacts of programmes like Incredibly Strange and Square Eyes are deserving of lengthy coverage of their own. It is difficult to see how allowing this loss is consistent with the character and values outlined in the 10-year strategy.

*Halina Reijn’s rape thriller Instinct was a bizarre choice for the only 2020 screening at The Embassy*

It is also worth noting that, despite a stellar 2023 programme, there have been decisions since Gosden’s departure that have fallen short of expectations. I’ve written before about the collective cringe in the audience when General Manager Sally Woodfield introduced Dame Gaylene Preston’s film about a champion of women’s labour rights by citing Barbie. It is hard to see how this lives up to the stated goal of being “a champion of New Zealand film”. Nor was it evident when the newly preserved version of Merata Mita’s Patu! (possibly the best film to ever be made in this country) was granted only a single screening in each of the City Gallery and Lighthouse Petone in 2021. In 2020, the year when the Festival was mainly online, COVID restrictions allowed for only one screening at the Embassy Theatre. Even with the reduced programme, there were a number of standout films that year but one-time festival director Marten Rabarts was friends with Game of Thrones actor Carice van Houten so opted to screen the ill-conceived Instinct on Wellington’s biggest screen.

*A selection of film festival posters from* *The Gosden Years*.

The fact is, the festival’s 10-year plan is vague, with laudable ideas buried in the jargon (such as a commitment to “Reach audiences that have not previously experienced NZIFF”) but little in the way of specifics. The word ‘content’ being used 10 times is likely to get many cinephiles’ backs up. In hindsight, mention of a “re-imagined programme” and the need to appoint a “creative/artistic leader” likely foreshadowed the fact that the board saw some of the responsibility lying at the feet of its specialist programmers. Notably, there is no mention of the fact that maybe some of the failure might be attributable to the way its ‘brand identity’ has evolved in recent years with the fun, welcoming way the festival presented itself in the past giving way to a sterile aesthetic that would be better suited to an art gallery than a film festival. A number of friends have attributed the festival’s recent woes in no small part to this change in aesthetic. There is no doubt that audiences who do not already have that brand association are likely to look at these posters and conclude that the festival is not for them.

*The new Whānau Mārama brand identity for a post-Gosden world.*

The problem has never been that the overall suite of films isn’t strong (it nearly always is), it’s that within that suite, the films receiving the most screenings, on the biggest screens at the best times are increasingly often the least interesting. While many of the best films played to near-empty audiences, the biggest sources of revenue for the festival have been films that have no business being in an arthouse programme (like Asteroid City, which I liked a lot) or hagiographic documentaries that launder right-wing ideas for liberal audiences (like Navalny and Merkel). A cynical board would take a look at this and conclude that the festival needs to be less strange, less queer and less diverse and the recent departures certainly do nothing to dispel this suspicion. Heck, why doesn’t Whānau Mārama not simply open with Barbie and close with Oppenheimer, character and values be damned!

I would like to push back on that cynical interpretation though. Not because I disagree that capitalist incentives are frequently at odds with artistic ones, but because I disagree with holding that level of disdain for audiences. Whānau Mārama wants to programme a festival for the Takashis of the world but I think it should be aiming for the Ayas. The main problem isn’t that Whānau Mārama is programming films that nobody wants to see, but that it’s done a poor job of reaching those audiences. As the festival has been struggling, the film society movement has never been stronger. Each Monday night, the Embassy theatre is packed with film society audience members (like Aya, they are increasingly cool young zoomers starved for meaningful art). Likewise, mainstream cinemas are being propped up by Hindi, Tamil and Telugu-language films with massive audiences, mostly from the Indian community, showing up to see their stories on screen. In my view, an excellent Asian Cinema programme playing to empty theatres indicates a problem with reaching Asian communities, not a problem with the programme.

*With ‘Cinema India’ Event Cinemas has been doing big business with audiences Whānau Mārama has struggled to reach*

It remains to be seen what the board is actually going to do to “deliver and reconfigure Whānau Mārama” other than get rid of its best people. Based on social media statements from individuals who have been involved in the festival, there is likely a degree of interpersonal conflict being worked through behind the scenes to which I am not privy and which is none of my business. However, there have been decisions related to programming, personnel and branding since 2020 that suggest a concerning tendency towards devaluing art and disdaining audiences. Naturally, any organisation with a reliance on revenue from sales (acknowledging that the festival is run by a non-profit, registered charitable trust) is always going to put artistic concerns second when push comes to shove. This is a common theme in Hollywood; think of how Warner Bros keeps realising it’s more profitable to delete finished movies than release them or the constant invocation of the supposed bigotry of international audiences in order to justify racist or homophobic artistic decisions. I understand that under the current model, the best-programmed festival may still need to throw in Wes Anderson’s latest in order to get sales up. But our artistic institutions need to understand that there is an actual audience out there who is ready for meaningful art.

Jimmy Lanyard is a writer, unionist and cinephile from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. While he is primarily interested in film, he also occasionally writes about history, the public sector and animal psychology.

Whānau Mārama and the lost art of trusting audiences