8 ½ - WFS Film Fest screening - members only booking

PG

BOOKING DETAILS

To book, you must have a valid full year membership to the Wellington Film Society. You can book up to two seats per film - but all attendees must be valid full year members. We are making half the seats in the theatre bookable. The rest of the seats will be available on the day on a 'first come, first served' basis.

If you have a three film sampler membership, you cannot book in advance. You can attend screenings on the ‘first come, first served’ basis for the remaining seats. We will clip your card for each screening you attend. Bring a buddies are not valid.

Your membership must be valid at the time of booking, and also at the time of the screening in June. If you need to renew during this time, make sure you do so via our website - https://wellingtonfilms.nz

You must book through Humanitix using the same name and email as your Wellington Film Society membership, in order to enable cross-referencing.

Places are bookable per film rather than for the whole festival – so you can pick what you want to see.  We’ll be clearing and cleaning the theatre between films so you’ll need to leave, just like between our usual Monday 6 and 8:30 screenings. Seating will be unallocated for all screenings, as normal.

On the day of the screening, we will check both your Humanitix booking via a QR code, and your Film Society membership.

Please be on time, if you are not, we may give your booking away to members who are waiting. Please be seated in the cinema five minutes before the screening time. After that point we do not guarantee your booking is valid.

FILM DETAILS

An iconic breakdown of the role of the artist, creativity, writer’s block, and Italian machismo, in gorgeous black and white photography: it’s 8½. Emerging at the height of Fellini’s international reputation following the success of La Dolce Vita, it’s now firmly in the frame as one his masterworks, ranked the 31st best film of all time on the 2022 Sight & Sound critics poll and 6th in the directors poll — tied with our closing night film, Vertigo.

Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido, a successful film director (and stand-in for Fellini) who retreats to a health spa while attempting to begin his next production. Surrounded by producers demanding answers, actors awaiting direction, journalists seeking clarity, and the competing pressures of his wife and mistress, Guido drifts between present reality, childhood memory and elaborate fantasy. Scenes unfold with a fluid dream logic, moving effortlessly from intimate confession to grand spectacle.

Fellini’s camera glides through vast sets and private recollections, while Nino Rota’s score shifts between melancholy and carnival brightness. The result is a film about the hurdles of making art that exudes creativity and flair in every scene. A landmark of modern cinema that continues to influence filmmakers and enthral audiences more than sixty years on – we think it will be the perfect film to cap off our 80th Anniversary Film Festival weekend.

“What would Fellini do after La dolce vita? We all wondered. How would he top himself? Would he even want to top himself? Would he shift gears? Finally, he did something that no one could have anticipated at the time. He took his own artistic and life situation—that of a filmmaker who had eight and a half films to his name […] achieved international renown with his last feature and felt enormous pressure when the time came for a follow-up—and he built a movie around it. 8½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways—the freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions…” – Martin Scorsese, Criterion