Film fests for everyone! Especially green Italians...

The Italian Film festival and the DOCNZ film festival are in full swing up in various parts of the country right now, spreading further in the coming months like celluloid viruses.

They're likely to be viruses you want to catch if you're interested in contemporary film.

The Italian Film Festival hits towns around the country in primavera, calling viewers to vicariously live la dolce vita. The selection this year includes 17 films, ranging from crime thrillers and political dramas, to romance and comedy.

A defining feature in this year's festival, according to festival director Tony Lambert, is that a number of films have a political edge or "political commentary".

"I've got Il Caimano (The Caiman), which is definitely about Berlusconi, and Viva Zapatero!, which is a documentary about political interference in the media, but the other films have all got that overtone. Goodbye My Love, Goodbye [Arrivederci amore ciao, pictured above] is about the corruption in the judicial system, effectively. I've tried to broaden the scope of films in this year's festival. We've got all the way from zany comedies, such as Christmas in Love, which people just giggle their way through because it's nice and silly, to really serious documentaries.''

Read more about the festival's programme, cinemas and screentimes in your area on the website: www.italianfilmfestival.co.nz.

The International Documentary Film Festival, DOCNZ is the (relatively) new film festival where "real people are the stars". There are squillions of documentaries on show this year in the fledgling film festival, more than 90 films from numerous countries including China, Australasia, Europe and Mexico and South Africa, plus many from New Zealand

directors.

The big stars of the show feature, well, big stars. Leonardo DiCaprio takes on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore with his own version of An Inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour (pictured left).  The environmental film describes the last moment that change is possible, how we got there and what we can do about it.

Another huge draw to the festival will be director Spike Lee's challenging 240-minute epic When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, which is here split into just two acts of 120 minutes each.

Read more about the festival's programme, cinemas and screentimes in your area on the website: www.docnz.org.nz.