Film Carew: 10 Best Sydney Film Festival Films I’ve Actually Already Seen

With the Sydney Film Festival two weeks out, so many of the lists of recommendations circulating are so much educated guesswork; gazing at the tea leaves and hoping for the best. Like, the likelihood of Asghar Farhadi's The Past being amazing is high, but only those in Cannes right of this typing have actually seen it. Yr oldest, bestest pal Film Carew has been, however, hurtling through so much of the program, watching films day and night in search of cinematic wonder. So, here's recommendations that can be unreservedly recommended: the 10 Best Sydney Film Festival Films I've Actually Already Seen.

Upstream Color (USA, Shane Carruth)

A defiant Next Level picture from Primer's Shane Carruth, Upstream Color is American cinema's interpretive-art-movie event of the year. Carruth again Full Orsons as writer/director/star of a philosophically-dense sci-fi think piece, but where Primer was, in many ways, about R&D, Upstream Color leaves the eggheadery behind, and pirouettes into pure cinematic daydreamery. Where the film scatters clues about its central 'mystery' throughout, and reveals added layers with subsequent viewings, it's not beholden to a single interpretation; nor is 'understanding' it even particularly important. Like Terrence Malick, Carruth has made a sensorial artwork, one to be experienced and felt as much as it's to be puzzled over and discussed.

The Act Of Killing (Denmark/Indonesia, Joshua Oppenheimer)

In a documentary equally horrifying and absurd, Oppenheimer seeks out ex-members of Indonesian anti-Communist death squads and gets them to re-enact their genocidal roles. Self-styled gangsters fond of fedoras and Al Pacino movies, they take charge of the dramatisation, authoring a bizarre no-budget mish-mash of noir-lit clichés and sitcom bawdiness. It makes for a film that defies description; equal parts condemnation of rife corruption in Indonesia, meta-commentary on the falsity of cinema, and bizarre case of life turning into performance-art. In its final scene, one of the most unbowed gangsters starts hysterically dry-heaving at the sight of a former execution point, and the question just hangs there: has he finally come to a crisis of conscience, or is he just performing a pantomimed penance for the cameras?

Michael H. Profession: Director (Austria/France, Yves Montmayeur)

When we first see Michael Haneke, on the set of his last film, Amour, the fearsome Austrian auteur is jovial, warm, and full of hugs for his crew. It seems incongruous, but as Montmayeur's pleasingly-thorough picture tracks back through Haneke's brilliant career, you find that the initial impression holds: on set, Haneke is always having fun. Even if his actors are suffering. The filmmaker is a fascinating theorist on cinema, and the juxtaposition of interviews, illustrative scenes from his body-of-work, and illustrative archival footage amounts to a great portrait of a great artist at work.

Camille Claudel 1915 (France, Bruno Dumont)

In his first film to feature a star - flow my tears, Juliette Binoche said - Dumont keeps at the same ascetic aesthetic that's long driven his austere auteurism. It's another film in which Christianity - and an individual's intimate relationship with an Old Testament kind of God - is explored in shades of rural realism and dramatic miserablism. Yet, whilst it's unvarnished as usual - there untrained actors, no score, no make-up, no artificial lighting - there's something deeply cinematic about the way Dumont portrays the light moving around the rural abbey, and the way both lightness and darkness are profoundly symbolic. “Everything's a parable,” the picture offers; and Dumont's latest one may be his best one.

Beyond The Hills (Romania, Cristian Mungiu)

Having earnt a spot on Film Carew's hallowed Top 20 Films of 2012 list, Beyond The Hills finally touches down in Sydney. Mungiu's follow-up to his note-perfect 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days - one the best films of the entire 2000s - is a spare, eerie portrayal of religious superstition turning sinister at a remote convent; in which a sister is subject to an 'exorcism'. Patiently, precisely, it builds up into a dramatic tempest that slyly skewers the central role the Orthodox Church still plays in modern Romania.

Ginger & Rosa (UK, Sally Potter)

Potter's girls-gone-wild-in-the-swingin'-'60s soap-opera doesn't scan as one of SFF's highlights; after all, the last time Potter made something to be unashamedly recommended was Orlando, over two decades ago. But Ginger & Rosa taps into the essential nihilism of every generation of budding revolutionaries by setting its transgressions - be they seditious or sexual - against Cold War terror. Here, Elle Fanning's adolescent angst feels as if the world is ending because maybe it really is; and the tenor of her raw performance takes the drama to unexpectedly profound places.

Which one's Ginger?

It's About To Rain (Italy, Haider Rashid)

In this morally-fraught drama, an Algerian-Italian family is denied an application to remain in Florence even after living there for 30 years, putting their settled life suddenly into flux, making them question themselves and each other. In a neat piece of dramatic foreshadowing, Rashid sets the tone by depicting a workers' strike, a classic scenario where solidarity wavers in the face of legal pressures. The sharply-acted, passionate, thoughtful drama is a specifically Italian story, about Italian nationalism and immigration law, but it's far more international than that; at essence a meditation on what it means - in the globalised, EU'd, migration-flurried 21st century - to be 'from' anywhere.

William And The Windmill (USA/Malawi, Ben Nabors)

William Kamkwamba was a budding inventor in rural Malawi when, at 14, he cobbled together a junk-part windmill to bring power to his dustbowl village. By dint of his story's 'inspirational' nature, he soon became a budding celebrity: a TED talk star, a Morning chat-show guest, and an author bound to an unending Book Tour. Nabors' thoughtful documentary peels back that happy façade of two-dimensional inspirationalism to chronicle what going through such a life-changing experience is like for Kamkwamba, who is burdened by the projected hopes of others and grows to feel alienated both in America and back home in Malawi.

The Crash Reel (USA, Lucy Walker)

Similarly, Walker's portrayal of American snowboarder Kevin Pearce scrubs away the easy 'inspirational' angle of his horrific brain injury, subsequent recovery, and eventual return to the slopes, radically changing tone, halfway through, when it delivers the sustained 'crash reel' of its title: accident after accident from a range of action sports, each wipe-out carrying the weight of the real trauma and suffering that comes with. With Pearce as the embodiment thereof, The Crash Reel tables the collateral damage of Extreme Sports being pushed to extremes.

Computer Chess (USA, Andrew Bujalski)

The mumblecore maestro returns with a talky shrine to both early computer programmers and the early cinema of Richard Linklater (Wiley Wiggins! Slackerisms! Bob Sabistan cameoing! Shot in Austin!). The flick's big hook is that, like Pablo Larraín's No, it comes shot in era-authentic VHS technology: all washed-out black-and-white images and fuzzy line-wobbles. Bujalski's prior films favour conversations over imagery, but here he uses his archaic camera as source of endless visual experiments: a stuck-in-a-loop colour outburst; a scene shot from the pinholed perspective of a computer; constantly playing with bleeding light; and, finally, pointing the camera at the sun and 'burning out the tube'. Upstream Color turns extreme nerdery into something transcendently spiritual, but Computer Chess more makes it friendly and accessible.