Looking forward to the Film Festival

Apart from the usual release-day website snafus seemingly afflicting the NZ International Film Festival every year, there are still plenty of great films to look forward to in the 2026 Wellington festival. Here's what I'm looking forward to seeing, mainly in the wonderful Embassy Grand.

Father Mother Sister Brother (dir. Jim Jarmusch, USA, 2025, feat. Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett & Vicky Krieps)

Fjord (dir. Cristian Mungiu, Norway, 2026, feat. Renate Reinsve, Sebastian Stan)

Nuisance Bear (dir. Jack Weisman & Gabriela Osio Vanden, Canada, 2026)

No Good Men (dir. Shahrbanoo Sadat, Afghanistan, 2026, feat. Shahrbanoo Sadat, Anwar Hashimi)

Last Man Standing (dir. Gerd Pohlmann, NZ, 2026)

Rose (dir. Markus Schleinzer, Austria, 2026, feat. Sandra Hüller)

Dead Man's Wire (dir. Gus Van Sant, USA, 2025, feat. Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Al Pacino, Colman Domingo, Myha'la)

Fatherland (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski, Germany, 2026, feat. Sandra Hüller, Hanns Zischler)

Whispers in the Woods (dir. Vincent Munier, France, 2025)

The Beloved (dir. Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Spain, 2026, feat. Javier Bardem, Victoria Luengo)

Nambassa Festival (dir. Philip Howe, NZ, 1979)

Every inch of you's a star, now a chauffeur drives your car

Thursday music corner: The Badloves were formed in Melbourne in 1990, originally as DC3 and then, a year later, under the name they're best know as. Influenced by American soul and R&B, the band were signed by Mushroom in 1992 after supporting Hall & Oates. The band released two albums: Get on Board in 1993, which reached number 5 in the Australian charts and was certified double platinum, and Holy Roadside in 1995, which reached number 14 and went gold. The Badloves released nine singles during their 1990s heyday, scoring two Australian top 40 hits: supporting Jimmy Barnes on a cover of The Band's The Weight, which reached number 6 in 1993, and Green Limousine, which reached number 35 in the same year.

The moody soul track I Remember was the second single released from The Badloves' debut album in 1993. Featuring impeccable harmonies, it improved only slightly on its predecessor Lost's number 51 singles chart placing, reaching number 48. It was surpassed by the Barnes single The Weight, which appeared alongside other collaborations with Joe Cocker, Tommy Emmanuel, Diesel, Deborah Conway and Archie Roach on Barnes' seventh album, Flesh & Wood (1993). 

The Badloves - I Remember (1993)

See also:

Music: Jimmy Barnes & the Badloves - The Weight (The Band cover, 1993)

Music: Jimmy Barnes - Flame Trees (Cold Chisel cover, 1993)

Music: The Badloves - Green Limousine (1993)

We bluff our souls on canteen patios

Thursday music corner: Beck Hansen, better known as Beck, is a Los Angeles-born musician known for his eclectic and experimental recordings since his single Loser became a hit in 1993. He has released 15 studio albums from Golden Feelings in 1993 to Hyperspace in 2019, and from 2002 to 2017 all six of his album releases reached the US top 10. His most successful single Loser reached number 10 in the US charts, and he has scored eight UK top 40 charting singles.

Deadweight was a non-album single released in 1997 on the soundtrack to the Danny Boyle-directed and Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz-starring black comedy, A Life Less Ordinary. The song was recorded with the Dust Brothers, and the video for the single was directed by Michel Gondry. Deadweight reached number 23 in the UK singles chart, and number 18 in Iceland. 

Beck - Deadweight (1997)

See also:

Music: Beck - The New Pollution (1997)

Music: Beck - Girl (2005)

Music: Charlotte Gainsbourg & Beck - Heaven Can Wait (2009)

Prince Eugene's Belvedere

The Upper Belvedere in Vienna, 28 May 2026

The high reputation of Prince Eugene [of Savoy] has endured over the centuries, as has his personal stamp on Vienna with his summer and winter residences being two baroque jewels of the city. His city palais on the Himmelpfortgasse was built by both Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Johann Lukas von Hildebrand. The building, which has a twelve-bay baroque façade, also has an exquisite interior, including an extraordinary staircase, stone sculptures and frescoes. The building currently hosts the Austrian Finance Ministry.

Eugene's most famous residence was the Belvedere, a historic complex of two palaces and beautiful baroque gardens, just outside the city walls. Johann Lukas von Hildebrand designed and built the Lower and Upper Belvedere between 1712 and 1723. One of Europe's standout baroque landmarks, it is listed together with the rest of Vienna city centre as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Lower Belvedere, with its beautiful Hall of Mirrors, was the day. to-day summer home of Prince Eugene, while the Upper Belvedere was conceived with prestige and display in mind, positioned on a rise overlooking the middle of the capital with copper roofs. They were designed to resemble Turkish tents, an allusion to Eugene's victories over the Ottomans. The sumptuous grandeur of the interior includes Herculean figures supporting the vaulted ceiling of the Sala Terrena and the two-storey-high Marble Hall with its ornately painted ceiling.

The gardens between the Lower and Upper Belvedere are a baroque masterpiece in their own right and look down towards Fischer von Erlach's baroque Karlskirche, with its oversized flanking columns. Eugene had an intense interest in horticulture and nature, seeking out rarities and abnormalities. His menagerie was the second largest in Europe after that of King Louis XIV, numbering 43 species of mammals and 67 species of birds, including 'unheard of' species of the time. Eugene was also an avid collector of books and developed friendships with the leading international authors and thinkers of the age, including Gottfried Leibnitz, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles-Louis Montesquieu. More than 15,000 books formed part of a world-class collection together with hundreds of manuscripts and prints, described as follows by Rousseau: 'The Prince's library is very extensive and consists of exceptionally fine books beautifully bound. But what is more remarkable is that there is scarcely a book in it that the Prince has not read or at least looked through. It is difficult to believe that a man who almost alone carries such a public burden for all Europe, who is Field-Marshall and the Emperor's Prime Minister, can find the time to read almost as much as someone who has nothing else to do'

- Angus Robertson, The Crossroads of Civilisation: A History of Vienna, New York, 2022, p.37-8.

The freak of your imagination sparkles into view

Thursday music corner: Former Pixies bassist and Breeders frontwoman Kim Deal appeared on five Pixies albums from 1987 to 1991 and founded the Breeders in 1989. Growing up with her twin sister Kelley in Ohio, Deal was inspired by indie cassettes mailed by a friend in California, which inspired the sisters to form their own band. Having released six Breeders albums plus one by her side-project The Amps in 1995, in 2024 Deal released her first solo album, the self-produced Nobody Loves You More. Kim and Kelley Deal celebrated their 65th birthdays on 10 June 2026. 

Crystal Breath was the second single from Nobody Loves You More. Deal wrote the song as a tribute to Australian actor Rose Byrne, and it was originally intended for use as a TV theme.

Kim Deal - Crystal Breath (2024)

See also:

Music: Kim Deal - Coast (2024)

Music: Breeders - Cannonball (live, 2018)

Music: Pixies - Gigantic (live, 1988) 

Brassaï's Parisian night photography

Here is Brassaï himself, towards the end of his life [in a 1976 interview with Claude Bonnefoy], describing one of his night-time expeditions in the early 1930s: 'I used to spend whole nights beside the canal, waiting for the right moment to take the shot, or in other words for a little fog to soften the lights. Often the hirondelles, the policemen on bikes, seeing a man squatting down would stop and ask me: "What are you up to?" And I'd say: "I've come to take a photo." At two in the morning, that seemed like an odd thing to do. So, I'd have a couple of prints on me so I could show them what it was possible to achieve at night. Then the ones that liked taking pictures would ask me for advice. I explained to them that I had several exposure times - the "Gauloise exposure", in other words the time it took to smoke a Gauloise, and the "Boyard exposure", which was about twice as long. This airy description, long after the event in question, contrasts with remarks made by Brassaï during the 1930s when he referred to 'a period of endless experiments with developers and exposure times', which were probably closer to the truth. The table of exposure times, reproduced at the back of Camera in Paris, shows that far from being a mechanical and repetitive practice the calculations involved a number of parameters, including natural lighting conditions and supplementary light sources. The exposure time could be anything from a fraction of a second to ten minutes or longer: 1/50 of a second for a photograph taken using flash ('14 July, Place de la Bastille'; 'Parisian cats'), one minute without supplementary light ('A carriage in front of "Le Dôme""), ten minutes for a Seine embankment shrouded in fog, or a panoramic view taken from one of the towers of Notre-Dame.

- Sylvie Aubenas & Quentin Bajac, Brassaï: Paris Nocturne, London, 2013, p.196-98.