The film festival is 50. Metro talks to its long-standing director and to three film-makers with movies in this year’s programme — and picks what not to miss this time around.

Bill Gosden laughs at me when I ask him to tell me about his time at the New Zealand International Film Festival . This is the festival’s 50th anniversary year; he has been working there since 1979, and director since 1984. We have 45 minutes to talk, and I’ve just asked for his life story.

Technically, in fact, the New Zealand International Film Festival did not exist until 2009, a clarifying rebranding of the nationwide web of regional film festivals. Gosden had been stringing that web together since 1984, when the Auckland and Wellington film festivals merged and he became director of the new joint entity. He had previously been the administrator of the Wellington Film Festival, and if you’re curious to know why a Wellingtonian took over running Auckland’s festival, the answer is that the Auckland organisation hadn't been on the ball.

RelatedArticlesModule - NZIFF Related

“The early years of the Auckland festival had incredibly impressive programming. They were managing to secure films which people still watch today,” says Gosden. “That was not the case in the early 80s. They treated some quite zeitgeisty films of the day very poorly, running them in obscure time slots or not at all, and at the same time they were doing things like running one of David Hamilton’s erotic films with a programme note describing it as a young woman’s charming coming-of-age tale. Really quite disconcerting. That kind of thing brought the festival in Auckland into a degree of disrepute; the feminist disdain they came in for was substantial. The crowning mistake they made was turning down a film called Liquid Sky, which screened in Wellington in 1983 and was an enormous hit. This was a film which ran for four years in New York.”

Liquid Sky will screen this year, as part of the 50th anniversary programme strand, which is otherwise bringing back significant films from the festival’s five-decade history. “Not an easy selection to make — how do you pick the highlights when we’ve shown hundreds and hundreds of films? We’ve tried to pick films which are still going to speak to people now. And, of course, there needs to be a good-quality print available, which inevitably cuts down our options. There are only two theatres left in Auckland which can still project 35mm film.” Those would be the Hollywood, in Avondale, and the mighty Civic. “Digitisation has been a mixed blessing, from that point of view.”

The shift to digital technology has been the largest single change in the festival’s operations over Gosden’s four decades: not just digital distribution and projection, but the associated change to a global instant-information culture. The day after we spoke, he was scheduled to sit down and watch most of the major prizewinners from the Cannes Film Festival, which had wrapped one week earlier. “Back in the day, those films would not have reached New Zealand for three years.”