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The Film Festival Trust (organisers of both the big NZ International Film Festival and it's better looking younger brother the World Cinema Showcase) have announced 6 movies for the 2012 Showcase Festival which starts in March in Auckland then moves onto Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

Here is their press release in brief: 

"Heretics have been heard to say that the Showcase is preferable to the International Film Festival. Could it simply be because the quality is just as high but the programme is so much smaller and so much more manageable?

This year we’re spelling out the Showcase’s relationship to the Big One, as we see it, with a simple catch-phrase, “NZIFF Selects World Cinema Showcase”. Showcase films are selected by the NZIFF programmers from the vast array of movies that we encounter every year – and which, for one reason or another, are not eligible for NZIFF screening...  We promise as energetic and energising a mix of features and documentaries in 2012 as we’ve ever assembled.  Six of them are announced here.

-Bill Gosden, Festival Director.

OUR IDIOT BROTHER
A performance of perfect blundering innocence from Paul Rudd buoys this laugh-out-loud farce about a back-to-the-earth alternative lifestyler who disrupts the lives of his three uptight New York City sisters. Director (ex- Lemonhead bass player) Jesse Peretz made his feature debut with the sultry doomed love drama, First Love, Last Rites back in 1997 and made a big impression on the festival circuit. His latest film couldn’t be more different, except in one respect: the generous space he allows actors yields great performances from all of them. He’s working with some refined comic talent here in Emily Mortimer, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel and, as the British weasel in the American family nest, the inimitable Steve Coogan. [Trailer at top of the post].

THE DEEP BLUE SEA
2011 marked the centenary of the birth of Terence Rattigan – and an unexpected return to popularity for a prolific playwright whose once enormously successful plays had long been designated artefacts of the postwar era that they dramatized so exactly. Terence Davies' film of his The Deep Blue Sea, illuminated by a performance of quiet intensity and subtlety by Rachel Weisz, shows just how abidingly resonant Rattigan’s observations of British anxieties about sex and class have turned out to be.

URBANIZED
Gary Hustwit’s credentials as a commentator on design matters were established immediately by his Helevtica, the surprise hit of the 2007 NZIFF. His new film Urbanized applies the same deft visual style to the subject of urban design.

THE TRIANGLE WARS
Architects, engineers and city planners take the lead in Urbanized, but politicians and developers hold all the cards in The Triangle Wars, an alarming (and disarmingly funny) account of urban development closer to home.

EAMES: THE ARCHITECT AND THE PAINTER
Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey's lavishly illustrated documentary portrait of husband and wife design team Ray and Charles Eames accommodates many readings: it’s a classic American tale of domestic talent extrapolated into international stardom; of artisanal know-how and innovation tooled for the industrial age. It’s a nostalgic evocation of a time when democratic ideals informed industrial outputs; and it’s a portrait of a creative marriage built on the shifting sands of gender equality in postwar America.

ANDA UNION: FROM THE STEPPES TO THE CITY
The Mongolian Steppes have graced many a film festival screen, but this may be the first armchair tour of those rolling grassy expanses that you can’t sit still for. Anda Union follows a band of young Inner Mongolian musicians as they traverse 10,000 km to perform for each of the ten members' far flung families."

Visit worldcinemashowcase.co.nz for more.

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