BEHIND THE FILM FESTIVAL CURTAIN
It’s just on a year since New Zealand International Film Festival director Bill Gosden died. But his legacy lives on in The Gosden Years. The book is a retrospective of his near four decades at the helm of the festival, which, in pre-Covid times, delivered an annual, increasingly nationwide programme of films that were oft en the first and sometimes the only chance to see the most remarkable movies of a particular year.
This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the festival in Wellington, where Gosden became director of the capital’s event in 1981, then the newly aligned Wellington and Auckland festivals in 1984.
He began writing his reflections on the festival aft er his terminal-cancer diagnosis.
The book reprints his programme introductions and the pieces he contributed about individual movies, many of them the first glowing notices a local film would receive. But it’s his memories of each event that make The Gosden Years more than an archive. Here, we’ve chosen his thoughts on 10 of those years.
What? Suddenly, the
