The NZ International Film Festival 2011

The delight that is the New Zealand International Film Festival was launched last night with Aucklanders as culturally flushed with as much excitement as they can muster for anything that requires a set start time. The Media launch was a couple of weeks earlier, and the line up is the usual brilliant masterpiece of cinematic adventure and exploration. I've been going to the Film Festival in Auckland for as long as I can remember and it is always a journey that I delight in taking.

The power of film to narrate is a powerful and provocative medium that does change the way you perceive the world around you, and while the choice is always overwhelming, it is a feast that deserves as many random blind dates as designated ones.

This year my Top 10 picks are

The 1980's depressed chic of Submarine, the eco-terrorism recruitment doco If a tree falls, the brutal Australianess of Snowtown, the Machiavellian gangster warlords of China in Let the bullets fly, the hilarious awkwardness of The Trip, the 'never see this movie with your girlfriend' romcom of the The Woman, the need little explanation of Hobo with a shotgun, another recruitment doco for domestic terrorism in the joyful Better this world, the deliriously funny shut up little man, and the most sexually perverted film on offer, the extraordinarily sleazy Sleeping beauty

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