GISELLE

The Royal New Zealand Ballet’s superb, universally acclaimed production of Giselle has now been made into a superb film. Director Toa Fraser, producer Matthew Metcalfe, cinematographer Leon Narbey and editor Dan Kircher have worked intensively with the company to ensure that this film version works wonders in its own right. First performed in Paris in 1841 and based on a poem by Heinrich Heine, Giselle is a quintessential artefact of 19th-century European Romanticism, a brooding two-act drama in which eroticism and death each claims its act.