Film Carew: Around The MIFF In (Just Over) Eighty Films

MIFF is here! Sweet, nourishing MIFF! The 63rd Melbourne International Film Festival is ready to take over the city’s cinemas and streets come tomorrow, and at 250 feature-films vast, working out what to actually watch during its 17 days can seem daunting. In either dutiful service to loyal readers or the throes of something resembling mental illness, your old pal Film Carew has been watching as many films as humanly possible before MIFF begins. So, here’s reviews of all of ’em: 83 films, to be exact.

10,000KM

Director: Carlos Marques-Marcet (Spain)

Premise: A Barcelona couple's relationship goes from co-habitual to long-distance when one is awarded an artist's residency in Los Angeles.

Film Carewzin': This remarkable, no-budget two-hander plays out almost entirely via Skype, every digital glitch symbolising the decaying central relationship. Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer give brilliant, bristling performances, beginning with a remarkable opening-scene whose conflicted emotions spill out in real time. A MIFF standout.

Go Watch It If: You want to experience (or relive) the emotional-standoffs of a relationship falling apart.

ABUSE OF WEAKNESS

Director: Catherine Breillat (France)

Premise: A filmmaker (Isabelle Huppert) recovering from a stroke casts an ex-con (Kool Shen) in her new film, leading to an obsessive friendship and him grifting her of €650,000.

Film Carewzin': Breillat's fictionalised her life before (see 2002's Sex Is Comedy), but here she studies her own humiliations, in agonising detail.

Go Watch It If: Breillat's grim, acerbic filmography has treated you kind in the past, or you know Huppert is cinema's greatest contemporary actor.

ADVANCED STYLE

Director: Lina Plioplyte (USA)

Premise: Old people can be stylish too!

Film Carewzin': Ari Seth Cohen's Advanced Style photo-blog corrals glamorous geriatrics on New York streets, but anyone expecting profound insights from the blogger —or, even, an interesting screen presence— won't find much here. Luckily, his subjects have far better stories to tell.

Go Watch It If: You want to taste the actual humanity behind what's, essentially, a novelty Tumblr.

ANINA

Director: Alfredo Soderguit (Uruguay/Colombia)

Premise: An outsider school-girl receives a sealed envelope as ‘punishment’ for a schoolyard fight, with tantalising instructions to keep it unopened for a week.

Film Carewzin': A minor tale of primary-school diplomacy and tolerance, Anina’s a sweet story whose stylised digital animation made my eyeballs ache.

Go Watch It If: You’re age 8+.

APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR

Director: Desiree Akhavan (USA)

Premise: A bisexual Brooklynite suffers the humiliations of awful employment, cultural baggage, questionable sexual choices, and breakup heartache.

Film Carewzin': Writer/director/star Akhavan is so 'Next Lena Dunham' she's already landed a role on Girls Season 4. She's got an undeniable presence in this particularly-personal portrait of the late-20s malaise, but the film is, ultimately, a rom-com in hipster threads.

Go Watch It If: You want to get a primer on Hannah's future Iowa Writers' Workshop rival.

BABYLON

Director: Danny Boyle & Jon S. Baird (UK)

Premise: The movie-length pilot of a British TV series about PR spin-doctory in Scotland Yard.

Film Carewzin': Penned at a cracking pace by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (the smart-asses behind Peep Show and Chris Morris’s Four Lions), there’s satirical wit and trenchant topicality to the theme of Police media-policies being amped up for the Twitter age.

Go Watch It If: You’ve been waiting for Generation Selfie’s definitive cop-show.

BACKWATER

Director: Shinji Aoyama (Japan)

Premise: An angry adolescent recalls being raised by his violent father in a provincial Japanese shithole.

Film Carewzin': Aoyama once made the towering Eureka and the post-apocalyptic noise-music exorcism Eli, Eli, Lema Sabachthani?. But those past triumphs are distant memories in this drudging, witless, violent portrait of the corrosive misogyny of Japanese patriarchy.

Go Watch It If: You’re really into mediocre movies about pouty adolescent dickwads who want to fuck their abused stepmothers.

BLIND DATES

Director: Levan Koguashvili (Georgia)

Premise: A 40-something sadsack still living with his parents seeks romance, only to fall for a woman married to an ex-con fresh outta prison.

Film Carewzin': Koguashvili deadpan comedy delivers droll observations at low dramatic wattage, its tale etched with absurdity, melancholy, and women’s soccer.

Go Watch It If: Lovelorned depression on Tbilisi streets sounds sweet to thee.

BLOODY BEANS

Director: Narimane Mari (Algeria)

Premise: A wild tribe of unsupervised kids play-acts the Algerian revolution amongst their Lord Of The Flies-esque micro-society.

Film Carewzin': It kicks off with kids swapping fart-jokes on the beach, before swiftly escalating into an all-night cacophony of collective mayhem shot with the twitchy terror of found-footage horror, and blessed with one of the fest’s best scores.

Go Watch It If: You treasure cinema driven by youthful enthusiasm.

BOYHOOD

Director: Richard Linklater (USA)

Premise: Shot over 12 years, Linklater’s adolescent odyssey finds its lead (Ellar Coltrane) aging from 6 to 18 over three hours.

Film Carewzin': His Before films have brilliantly displayed Linklater’s yen for chronicling the passage of time, and Boyhood’s miraculous making pushes things further. Dramatically, though, it’s not his best work, especially in a drunk-dad storyline seemingly on loan from and after-school special. But when Coltrane grows into being a Slacker philosopher, his life seems indivisible from Linklater’s art.

Go Watch It If: This thing called ‘cinema’ matters at all to you.

BREADCRUMB TRAIL

Director: Lance Bangs (USA)

Premise: Bangs seeks the secrets of Slint’s Spiderland, the mysterious LP that founded post-rock sound.

Film Carewzin': For a trad rockumentary —talking heads chronicling the making of a classic album— Breadcrumb Trail is free from hype and heroising, portraying Slint as a bunch of teenage obsessives whose obsessions were, in equal parts, interlocking guitars and farts.

Go Watch It If: The line “I’m the only one left, the storm took them all” still sends shivers.

CASA GRANDE

Director: Fellipe Barbosa (Brazil)

Premise: When a wealthy family fires their hired help, their sheltered son comes face-to-face with the vast differences between Rio’s social classes.

Film Carewzin': Barbosa feigns his film is going to be about a 17-year-old dufus’s lost virginity, but instead it’s about lost innocence; a pointed, poignant portrait of the inequality of Brazilian society.

Go Watch It If: The soccer gave you a yearning to see Brazil beyond the clichés.

CHEATIN’

Director: Bill Plympton (USA)

Premise: A wordless tale of infidelity from the iconic animator.

Film Carewzin': In an era of cold digital imagery, Plympton’s signature hand-drawn style seems more wondrous than ever in this surreal silent-movie saga set to an operatic tenor.

Go Watch It If: You yearn for when ‘animation’ meant cartoons.

CHILDREN OF THE PYRE

Director: Rajesh S. Jala (India)

Premise: A look at the luckless lower-caste kids who work in India’s largest open-air crematorium.

Film Carewzin': There’s gruelling menial toil, then there’s living and labouring amidst teeming masses of burning corpses, your social-status promising no hope of escape.

Go Watch It If: You want to see the human-spirit, flickering bright and alive, even amidst the fires of a living hell.

CLARA AND THE SECRET OF THE BEARS

Director: Tobias Ineichen (Switzerland)

Premise: A 13-year-old girl is haunted by visions of witches in an Alpine community obsessed with eradicating bears.

Film Carewzin': Witch-hunts and bear-hunts are big, obvious social symbols in this melodramatic tale of smalltown prejudice and herd-mentality.

Go Watch It If: Over-the-top family soap-operas with teachable Nazi motifs seem worth your while.

COME WORRY WITH US!

Director: Helen Klodawsky (Canada)

Premise: The couple at the centre of Montréal’s almighty Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra take the pressures of new parenthood on tour.

Film Carewzin': Klodawsky had never heard SMZ’s awesome music before making the film, so Come Worry With Us! has none of the clichés of rockumentary hagiography. Instead, it’s a bruised, beautiful portrait of parental anxiety and financial insecurity, and those attempting to defy traditional employment and gender-roles in a capitalist climate unsympathetic to artists.

Go Watch It If: Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything sounds a rallying cry in your heart.

CONCERNING VIOLENCE

Director: Göran Hugo Olsson (Sweden/USA)

Premise: Archival mid-20th-century footage from African frontlines, set to the text of Frantz Fanon's anti-colonialist cry-of-rage The Wretched Of The Earth (read by Lauryn Hill).

Film Carewzin': After his previous stellar archival-footage opus The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Olsson makes something more disquieting, more profound; the 1970s footage of white Rhodesians blithely lawn-bowling in the face of insurrection bordering on surreal.

Go Watch It If: L-Boogie Narrates The Guerrilla War Mixtape sounds like a way to engage in colonialist philosophisin'.

CONCRETE NIGHT

Director: Pirjo Honkasalo (Finland)

Premise: A 14-year-old Finn escapes his fucked-up family by retreating into fantasy.

Film Carewzin': Honkasalo’s fabulous-looking film shoots Helsinki’s underbelly in dark shadows and grim black-and-white, and dream-sequences in aqueous colour. But its sensitive-kid-in-the-ghetto drama is much more prosaic than its visuals.

Go Watch It If: You can stomach terrible drunk-acting as long as it’s beautifully photographed.

THE DIRTIES

Director: Matt Johnson (Canada)

Premise: A pair of high-school nerds making their own revenge-movie —and this movie itself— up the ante by staging a real school massacre.

Film Carewzin': Director Johnson stars as an obsessive cinephile who loses track of the line between fiction and fantasy, and he’s a wildly-entertaining screen presence. But the whole is scuttled by a faked ‘found footage’ gimmick that’s both inconsistent and implausible.

Go Watch It If: Your disbelief is easily suspended.

THE DISTANCE

Director: Sergio Caballero (Spain)

Premise: An Austrian performance-artist held captive in an abandoned nuclear power-plant recruits a trio of telepathic dwarves to steal the mysterious, titular McGuffin at the reactor’s heart.

Film Carewzin': Last seen making art-movie monkeyshines on the Sonar backlot with Finisterrae, Caballero makes a huge auteurist leap with The Distance. Its premise may seem cutesy in its ‘weirdness’, but the film is filled with memorable images, and its final-scene payoff is proudly inexplicable.

Go Watch It If: You’ve ever wanted to watch a dwarf skin a hare in a caravan plastered with pre-war nudie pictures.

DON’T THINK I’VE FORGOTTEN: CAMBODIA’S LOST ROCK AND ROLL

Director: John Pirozzi (USA/Cambodia)

Premise: Recapturing the lost pop-cultural totems of swingin’ ’60s Cambodia.

Film Carewzin': Recod-collector-scum know all about the glories of now-rare Khmer rock. But Pirozzi’s picture tells the human story behind the vinyl treasures, sounding a lament for a Golden Age razed by the cultural terrorists of the Khmer Rouge.

Go Watch It If: You side with rock’n’roll over genocide.

EXHIBITION

Director: Joanna Hogg (UK)

Premise: A minimalist micro-drama about an aging artist couple’s cohabitation inside a marvel of modernist architecture.

Film Carewzin': After her gentle family-dynamics dramas Unrelated and Archipelago, Hogg makes her first defiant auteurist picture, a precisely-mounted piece of sharp framing and evocative sound-design. Its barely-there story is a marital comedy-of-manners, yet Hogg is far more into lengthy silences and architectural lines.

Go Watch It If: You think buildings tell the stories of their inhabitants.

FANDRY

Director: Nagraj Manjule (India)

Premise: An urchin from India’s ‘untouchable’ caste dreams of rising above his station.

Film Carewzin': A simple, ruralist portrait of provincial oppression and social stigmatisation that crests amidst the colour and cacophony of a percussion-thumping village celebration.

Go Watch It If: You’re a bird hoping to escape your cage.

FANTAIL

Director: Curtis Vowell (New Zealand)

Premise: A blonde-haired, blue-eyed half-Maori wrestles with her identity and independence whilst working the night shift at a local petrol station.

Film Carewzin': Writer/star Sophie Henderson, adapting her own stageplay, starts out delivering a droll workplace comedy that playfully touches on New Zealand cultural identity. But then comes a ’90s-indie-movie-styled Big Dramatic Shock Ending that’s so badly-judged and incongruous that the whole thing sinks with it.

Go Watch It If: Hardcore Kiwi accents give you an erotic frisson.

FOCUS ON INFINITY

Director: Joerg Burger (Austria)

Premise: A philosophical conversation on the nature of the universe.

Film Carewzin': Talking to quantum physicists, philosophers, priests, and Area 51 truthers, and pointing his camera at spartan landscapes and desert observatories, cinematographer (mmmmm) Burger cogitates on man’s obsession with the unknowable concepts of infinity and eternity.

Go Watch It If: Talk of the biggest of concepts widens your mind in wonder.

THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN COMES TO EDEN

Director: Dan Geller & Dayna Goldfine (USA)

Premise: A chronicle of a handful of German settlers attempting to build an 'Eden' on a previously-uninhabited isle in the Galapagos in the 1920s, only for jealousies to take their micro-society to dark places.

Film Carewzin': There's a heaping helping of gossip in this documentary tale of real-life unsolved mystery, but it's blessed with astonishing archival footage, including an oh-so-symbolic silent-movie melodrama starring the Island's eccentric Baronness.

Go Watch It If: You ever wondered why Gilligan's Island didn't drip with paranoia, obsession, and murder.

GOD HELP THE GIRL

Director: Stuart Murdoch (UK)

Premise: A screen musical about a trio of Glasgow cuties starting an indie-pop band over one whimsical summer.

Film Carewzin': Belle & Sebastian’s legendary frontman makes his filmmaking debut with an all-too-personal picture that’ll thrill fans. It’s, essentially, a fictionalised re-write of his own band’s beginnings, shot through with both youthful joie de vivre and the melancholy of remembrance.

Go Watch It If: You ever sung along to String Bean Jean, wishing it was a movie.

THE GOOD LIFE

Director: Jean Denizot (France)

Premise: A pair of brothers have been raised off-the-grid by their refusenik father, their ‘lifestyle’ less Thoreau-esque romance, more on-the-lam lawlessness.

Film Carewzin': Summoning memories of small children-of-radicals gems —from Cristian Petzold’s The State I Am In to Julie Gavras’ Blame It On Fidel and Benjamín Ávila’s Clandestine Childhood— Denizot’s superb socio-realist picture mounts a rural picaresque about a boy-on-the-brink-of-manhood who yearns to no longer follow his father, but his own heart.

Go Watch It If: You’re itching for a 90-minute retreat into the French countryside.

HAPPINESS

Director: Thomas Balmes (Bhutan)

Premise: With electricity set to arrive in their remote mountain village, a Bhutanese family decide to get a television.

Film Carewzin': Balmes’ quiet, observationist documentary harbours clear symbols of technological change, the rapidity of globalisation, and the reaches of the information age; sounding as both celebration of man’s ingenuity and lament for innocence lost.

Go Watch It If: You’re cool with ‘yurt movies’.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

Director: Joe Swanberg (USA)

Premise: The lives of a couple with a toddler are shaken up when the husband’s drunken younger sister moves into their basement.

Film Carewzin': The fast-maturing Swanberg follows his excellent Drinking Buddies with another slyly-effecting drama built around the unspoken. Its cast is headlined by Anna Kendrick and Lena Dunham, but Melanie Lynskey is great as a writer grappling with her newfound stay-at-home-mom status.

Go Watch It If: You’ve ever believed writing an erotic novel would solve your cashflow problems.

A HARD DAY

Director: Kim Song-hun (South Korea)

Premise: A homicide detective covers up a hit-and-run accident, only to sink into a hysterical noir-film nightmare.

Film Carewzin': Kim’s macho action-movie delivers a ricocheting collection of cops crooked and crookeder, its escalating cat-and-mouse games and ridiculous cover-ups laced with multiplex melodrama and dramatic shock-tactics.

Go Watch It If: You want to take a rest from minimalist art-movies with some maximalist genre-trash.

HARD TO BE A GOD

Director: Aleksey German (Russia)

Premise: On a distant planet where human society has never progressed beyond medievalism, an Earth cosmonaut secretly walks amongst the backwards, backwoods inhabitants, a God amongst men.

Film Carewzin': German’s 14-years-in-the-making, posthumous three-hour opus is sure to be MIFF’s most divisive film. Taking place in some black-and-white unreality, it’s a tone-poem floating on a breeze of farts; a sci-fi parable penned in pus, piss, and shit; a repulsive Russian Ark, dowsed in depravity.

Go Watch It If: You’re both obsessed with bodily excretions and endlessly patient.

HEAVEN ADORES YOU

Director: Nickolas Rossi (USA)

Premise: The sad life and sweet songs of suicidal junkie Elliott Smith.

Film Carewzin': Whilst Rossi gladly assembles family-and-friends rather than celebrity interviewees, his picture’s still a parade of talking-heads waxing rhapsodic about a dead rock-hero’s songs.

Go Watch It If: You love Either/Or so much you’re fine with it soundtracking endless shots of empty Portland streets.

HUMAN CAPITAL

Director: Paolo Virzì (Italy)

Premise: A gleaming, cold, critical portrait of Italian high-society and its children-of-privilege that circles a tragic accident from different perspectives.

Film Carewzin': This glossy thriller boasts a taut script, a top-notch cast (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Golino, Luigi Lo Cascio, star-in-the-making debutante Matilde Gioli), and an unalloyed repulsion for the titans of the modern economic climate.

Go Watch It If: You love that ol’ Rashomon device.

IF YOU DON’T, I WILL

Director: Sophie Fillières (France)

Premise: A 40-something couple react to their failing relationship in various passive-aggressive, hostile, and increasingly-outlandish ways.

Film Carewzin': French screen legends Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric bring both dramatic and comic intensity to this odd, mercurial, minor portrait of loving eccentrics turned uneasy combatants.

Go Watch It If: Sometimes you just can't fucking stand your significant-other.

THE INFINITE MAN

Director: Hugh Sullivan (Australia)

Premise: A time-travel rom-com about the neurotic obsession with perfection.

Film Carewzin': One of this century’s great local debuts, Sullivan’s abstract take on time-travel leads to the film’s faltering lovers overlapping in an ever-escalating maze of parallel selves. It results in a smart, wry, often-hilarious film that employs a sci-fi gambit only as prism for its conflicted emotions.

Go Watch It If: You want to feel good about Australian cinema.

IRANIAN

Director: Mehran Tamadon (France/Iran)

Premise: An expatriated Iranian returns from France and invites Muslim clerics to engage in a model 'secular state' in his country home.

Film Carewzin': Tamadon hopes his conversational cinematic exercise can open the minds of local fundamentalists, but, instead, he's marginalised in his own movie; the mullahs matching their unwavering faith with closed-logic reasoning and the silver-tongued parries of performing lawyers.

Go Watch It If: You need to understand why democracy demands the separation of church and state.

IS THE MAN WHO IS TALL HAPPY?

Director: Michel Gondry (USA)

Premise: Gondry interviews iconic egghead Noam Chomsky, and animates the results.

Film Carewzin': Given access to the workings of Chomsky’s brain, Gondry is inquisitive and inspired, spinning conversations into charming, childlike animations; the animated medium a natural place for a filmmaker so alive to ideas, and so fond of dreams.

Go Watch It If: When your mind gets racing, it feels like scribbled, squiggly drawings in motion.

JEALOUSY

Director: Philippe Garrel (France)

Premise: An exceedingly-attractive Parisian (Louis Garrel) leaves his exceedingly-attractive girlfriend (Rebecca Convenant) for another exceedingly-attractive woman (Anna Mouglalis), only to discover she’s not so into monogamy.

Film Carewzin': After some lean years, Garrel makes a return-to-form with this minor, pleasant portrait of relationship comings-and-goings, infidelities, and notions of family, shot on fabulously-fuggy black-and-white celluloid.

Go Watch It If: To you Nouvelle Vague is a cinematic raison d’être, not a novelty band.

JOE

Director: David Gordon Green (USA)

Premise: An ex-con (Nicolas Motherfuckin’ Cage!) takes a mischievous scamp (Mud’s Tye Sheridan) under his wing in a Southern Gothic, impossibly-macho Mississippi.

Film Carewzin': Moving out of his Hollywood-cheque-cashing phase, Green returns to the Deep South with a vengeance, casting a host of real hillbillies and hobos in his grim portrait of live below the poverty line. It begins with pleasing vérité, but soon gets silly with shoot-’em-up guns.

Go Watch It If: The name Nicolas Motherfuckin’ Cage(!) fills you with chills of lowbrow thrills.

JOURNEY TO THE WEST

Director: Tsai Ming-liang (France/Taiwan)

Premise: A monk (Lee Kang-sheng) walks very, very, very slowly through the streets of Marseilles.

Film Carewzin': As much a piece of video-art as motion-picture, the latest work for the truly-great Tsai is a meditation on the pace of contemporary life, and a wry commentary on the filmmaker’s fondness for slow cinema in an era of short-attention-span media.

Go Watch It If: You prefer sublime cinematic stillness to fidgety filmmaking restlessness.

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING

Director: Denis Côté (Canada)

Premise: After Bestiaire was a silent, contemplative portrait of animals in captivity, here Côté looks at captive humans, chronicling the daily drudgery of factory work.

Film Carewzin': The Québécois oddball loves blurring lines of fiction and non-, and Joy Of Man’s Desiring is both classic observationist documentary, and a subversive, cinematic play thereon.

Go Watch It If: You snigger at the sexual suggestiveness of pounding machinery.

KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON

Director: Alan Hicks (USA)

Premise: Ailing jazz lifer Clark Terry serves as mentor to a blind piano prodigy.

Film Carewzin': Hicks’ picture begins as a standard homage to a jazz great, yet as the years press on —and Terry’s health declines— the talking heads give way to life, as lived. Instead of a rote rockumentary, what results is a profound portrait of love, work, and trans-generational friendship.

Go Watch It If: 86 minutes’ worth of jazz isn’t a terrifying concept.

THE KIDNAPPING OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ

Director: Guillaume Nicloux (France)

Premise: A fictionalised take on the media-imagined 2011 ‘kidnapping’ of cranky French author Michel Houellebecq, with the writer wryly playing himself.

Film Carewzin': The premise sounds clever, but, trust me, the film’s not; Nicloaux making a minor kidnapping movie in which hostage and captors make mildly-amusing banter in a locked-room of sheer dramatic inertia.

Go Watch It If: Your first 200 or so MIFF preferences fell through.

KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER

Director: David Zellner (USA)

Premise: A lonely Japanese office-worker (Rinko Kikuchi) obsesses over an old VHS of Fargo, convinced it contains the clues to buried treasure.

Film Carewzin': After the raw wound of Kid-Thing, the Zellner brothers summon something more upliftingly cinematic with this stirring portrait of pop-cultural obsession and shaping reality to resemble your dreams.

Go Watch It If: You’ve ever yearned for a life more like a Coen Brothers movie.

L FOR LEISURE

Director: Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn (USA)

Premise: A sprawling set of preppy friends wile away 10 episodic holidays across 1992 and 1993, their droll conversations dowsed in washed-out synth-pop.

Film Carewzin': So early-’90s-indie-movie you half expect a young Parker Posey to appear, this mannered, shakily-acted style-piece is a fuzzy, 16mm homage to early Whit Stillman and Richard Linklater, its stagy conversations growing increasingly philosophical.

Go Watch It If: You’ve committed Metropolitan to memory.

LIFE ITSELF

Director: Steve James (USA)

Premise: A career chronicle of the world’s most famous film critic, Roger Ebert.

Film Carewzin': Mirroring his subject’s late-career celebration of cinema as a “machine that generates empathy”, James —the maker of documentary masterworks Hoop Dreams, Stevie, and The Interrupters— examines Ebert’s chequered life in its most human aspects, searching for true profundity rather than cheap sentimentality.

Go Watch It If: You’ve spent your own lifetime at the movies.

LOCKE

Director: Steven Knight (UK)

Premise: A real-time, set-entirely-on-one-car-ride thriller in which Tom Hardy makes a string of in-commute phonecalls, its tension rising with the timbre of his Welsh accent.

Film Carewzin': Knight and Hardy have essentially made a theatrical one-man-show, even if the breathless and fidgety editing seems panicked about setting a whole film inside one car.

Go Watch It If: Your life is a succession of desperate hands-free phonecalls made to put out metaphorical fires.

LOVE IS STRANGE

Director: Ira Sachs (USA)

Premise: After four decades together, a pair of aging New York lovers find themselves legally married, but suddenly without a home.

Film Carewzin': Sachs’ mannered drama feels as well-worn as any romantic-comedy, yet it progresses with the inescapable darkness of tragedy, with John Lithgow delivering a sterling turn as a man young at heart, yet facing old-age's slide into inevitable oblivion.

Go Watch It If: You have a thing for Marisa Tomei. Like she would ever go out with a short, stocky, bald man.

MACONDO

Director: Sudabeh Mortezai (Austria)

Premise: An 11-year-old Chechen kid dwelling on Vienna’s fringes feels threatened when a potential suitor for his mother arrives in their low-rent tower-block.

Film Carewzin': Austrian-Iranian documentarian Mortezai makes her first fiction film amongst a real community of Chechen refugees, deftly capturing the claustrophobia of an insular ex-pat enclave. The drama is both socio-realist and savage, modern-life resembling Greek tragedy.

Go Watch It If: You’ve a yen for dark coming-of-age dramas.

MANAKAMANA

Director: Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez (Nepal/USA)

Premise: Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Laboratory —the collective behind 2009’s sublime Sweetgrass and last MIFF’s mind-altering Leviathan— assembles 12 single-shot long-takes of ‘pilgrims’ ascending to a Nepalese mountain-top monastery via cable-car.

Film Carewzin': It may not have the insane visuals of Leviathan, but Manakamana is just as singular, its juxtaposition of the mundane and the divine making for a transcendent trip.

Go Watch It If: You seek cinema as a meditation retreat.

MISS AND THE DOCTORS

Director: Axelle Ropert (France)

Premise: A pair of Parisian brothers —doctors running an after-hours medical clinic— both fall in love with the same single mother.

Film Carewzin': With its late-night mise-en-scène inhabiting the desolate, shadowy expanses between neighbourhood tower-blocks, Ropert makes a charismatic portrait of loners in a lonely landscape, its dramatically-coincidental premise aided by the irresistible presence of uber-babe Louise Bourgoin.

Go Watch It If: You harbour a soft spot for gentle French dramedies, tender sibling rivalries, realist depictions of alcoholism, or Bourgoin’s hotness.

MY NAME IS SALT

Director: Fanda Pacha (India)

Premise: A family of itinerate workers come to India’s seasonal salt marsh, the Rann of Kutch, to harvest salt by hand.

Film Carewzin': Whilst Pacha camera captures unvarnished labour and human exploitation, she’s not making a mere critique; instead hoping to find transcendence in devotion to toil.

Go Watch It If: MIFF serves as your window onto the world, and you treasure glimpsing radically-different lives.

NATIONAL GALLERY

Director: Frederick Wiseman (UK)

Premise: Continuing his observationist studies of institutions, the legendary documentarian turns his patient camera on London's National Gallery.

Film Carewzin': Wiseman's three-hour look at the gallery’s working life gives rise to a meta-theme, in which the 84-year-old ruminates on how his own artworks will be preserved after his death.

Go Watch It If: You love both budget meetings and art theory.

NE ME QUITTE PAS

Director: Sabine Lubbe Bakker & Niels van Koevorden (Netherlands/France)

Premise: A documentary about the persistent friendship between a pair of toothless drunks in the French countryside.

Film Carewzin': Never moralising nor judging, Bakker and van Koevorden compassionately watch on as the seasons pass, and their soused subjects seemingly compete to drink themselves into an early grave.

Go Watch It If: You want to see a dentist pull out a boozehound's rotting teeth with pliers.

THE NIGHTINGALE

Director: Philippe Muyl (China)

Premise: An iPad-swipin’ 10-year-old city-kid travels cross-country with her, like, ten-thousand-year-old granddad.

Film Carewzin': As this original odd couple traverse the Chinese landscape, they function as generational symbols of a changing nation.

Go Watch It If: You find young and/or old people adorable just by their youth/age.

OF HORSES AND MEN

Director: Benedikt Erlingsson (Iceland)

Premise: A remote Icelandic community are gossipy rivals united only by their shared obsession with horses.

Film Carewzin': A series of tragicomic vignettes delivered with a deadpan absurdity bordering on Roy Andersson-esque, Erlingsson's singular film juxtaposes equine beauty with human ugliness against vast landscapes, making for a comedy-of-manners that feels primal.

Go Watch It If: You're a good judge of horseflesh.

PARTICLE FEVER

Director: Mark Levinson (USA)

Premise: Egghead physicists gather to turn on the Large Hadron Collider in hopes of creating the ‘God Particle’.

Film Carewzin': Levinson’s film is at once philosophical discussion of man’s yearning to understand the universe, and a picture of personal politics and petty politicking amidst networking scientists.

Go Watch It If: You’re a goddamn nerd.

PATEMA INVERTED

Director: Yasuhiro Yoshiura (Japan)

Premise: In a dystopian-future-world, star-cross’d lovers come together from opposite worlds —an oppressive totalitarian state above-ground, a community of outsiders underground— that are governed by opposing gravitational forces.

Film Carewzin': This inventive piece of anime uses the grand symbol of its opposing gravities —each realm ‘upside-down’ to the citizens of the other— to mount a simple parable on social differences.

Go Watch It If: You love that oh-what-a feeling when you’re dancing on the ceiling.

PING PONG SUMMER

Director: Michael Tully (USA)

Premise: In the scorchin’ summer of 1985, one nerdy teenager turns the tables on a local bully with a winner-takes-all ping pong showdown.

Film Carewzin': Stockpiling clichés from ’80s teen-movies, Tully’s film is equal parts parody and homage; obsessively fetishising boomboxes and jheri curls, but having no reason to exist beyond that.

Go Watch It If: You’ve ever wondered what crossing The Karate Kid with Wet Hot American Summer would result in.

THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS

Director: Edward Lovelace & James Hall (UK)

Premise: An impressionist portrait of post-punk legend Edwyn Collins’ recovery from a stroke.

Film Carewzin': Artfully interpreting Collins’ razed mental state, this quasi-documentary willingly inhabits his confusion, mounting a cinematic mosaic out of environmental imagery, dramatised memory, and Collins’ oft-perplexed narration.

Go Watch It If: You’d follow Rip It Up down disconnected neural pathways.

PREDESTINATION

Director: Michael & Peter Spierig (Australia)

Premise: A man walks into a bar and admits he was once a woman.

Film Carewzin': No MIFF film demands spoilers more than its Opening Night thriller, a twisted tale of time-travellin’ ‘temporal agents’ navigating a noir-film’s shadows, whose story-within-the-story narrative/s create layered paradoxes that loop back on themselves.

Go Watch It If: Soylent Green is people.

PRINT THE LEGEND

Director: Luis Lopez & Clay Tweel (USA)

Premise: A look at the players in the booming 3D printing industry.

Film Carewzin': The parade of hucksters, hustlers, and visionaries dueling for marketplace space shows 3D printing as a tech-bubble Gold Rush, a grand symbol of American ambition and runamok hyper-capitalism.

Go Watch It If: You’re intrigued and/or repulsed by start-up culture.

PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH & SUPERMARKETS

Director: Florian Habicht (UK)

Premise: As Pulp prepare to play their final hometown concert, the people of Sheffield discuss their favourite sons.

Film Carewzin': The oddball Kiwi quasi-documentarian —last seen serving cereal from his sunken chest in Love Story— makes a fine choice to handle a homage to Jarvis Cocker and co, steering clear of the regular rockumentary clichés in favour of random man-on-the-street vox-pops.

Go Watch It If: You find a band's weird fans more fascinating than its members.

ROHMER IN PARIS

Director: Richard Misek (UK)

Premise: When an Englishman watching late-night TV discovers himself, as a long-ago backpacker, in the frame of an Eric Rohmer movie, he begins an obsession with the New Wave icon’s films.

Film Carewzin': An essay movie assembled entirely from his films, Misek’s introductory-cinema riffs on Rohmerian storytelling are endearing but a little embarrassing.

Go Watch It If: You’re a film nerd happy to keep your expectations in check.

RUIN

Director: Amiel Courtin-Wilson & Michael Cody (Cambodia)

Premise: A pair of lawless lovers leg it on-the-lam along the Mekong, escaping brutal lives in Phnom Penh’s underbelly.

Film Carewzin': Courtin-Wilson is Australian cinema’s most interesting auteur, and Ruin is a pure-cinema parade of memorable images.

Go Watch It If: Your idea of Australian cinema is a dreamy art-movie spoken solely in Khmer.

SCHOOL OF BABEL

Director: Julie Bertuccelli (France)

Premise: One year in the lives of adolescent immigrants at a ‘reception class’ in the 10th, where a multicultural class receives a crash course in assimilation.

Film Carewzin': Though tucked away in MIFF’s youth-oriented Next Gen strain, Bertuccelli’s moving movie is one of the fest’s best docs, an achingly-human portrait of a cast of individuals bonding over shared differences, outsider anxiety, and wonky French.

Go Watch It If: You love both To Be And To Have and The Class.

THE SECOND GAME

Director: Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania)

Premise: Porumbiou re-watches a 1988 soccer match with its referee, his father, talking unedited over the match-day footage.

Film Carewzin': “You can’t make a film out of this,” says the filmmaker's father, as the two provide an awkward-silence-riddled audio commentary over the grainy VHS of a Soviet-era soccer-match. Dad may or may not have a point: Porumboiu's picture calling into question what a 'film' may actually be.

Go Watch It If: You actually like it when your old man rambles on when you're trying to watch the football.

SEPIDEH – REACHING FOR THE STARS

Director: Berit Madsen (Denmark/Iran)

Premise: A girl in rural Iran is obsessed with astronomy and space, which leads to conflict with her family.

Film Carewzin': Madsen’s stirring portrait of an ambitious, unwavering teenager is a testament to standing defiant in the face of oppressive patriarchy.

Go Watch It If: You’re not yet too cynical to see such stories as ‘inspirational’.

SONG FROM THE FOREST

Director: Michael Obert (USA/Germany)

Premise: An American ethnomusicologist who's spent 25 years living amongst the Bayaka tribe of the Congo basin brings his adolescent Bayakan son back to New York.

Film Carewzin': When Louis Sarno’s 13-year-old son leaves the jungle to see the world for the first time, Obert's camera bears witness to sweet moments of hunter-gatherer-in-the-metropolis First Contact.

Go Watch It If: If you yearn for the jungle when in the city, and the city when in the jungle.

A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS

Director: Ben Rivers & Ben Russell (Estonia)

Premise: Two of the world’s most striking new experimental filmmakers collaborate on a wildly-visual triptych of ethnographic ruralism, hippy-commune observationism, and black-metal shamanism, featuring members of Lichens and Prince Rama.

Film Carewzin': Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May is one of the decade’s great outsider films, and at times, he and Rivers (Two Years At Sea) find transcendence in the Northern wilderness. But interrupting the pure naturalism is a long, patience-testing stretch amongst a commune’s dude-ish unwashed.

Go Watch It If: You love both long-take minimalism and corpse-paint screechin’.

THE STORY OF MY DEATH

Director: Albert Serra (Spain)

Premise: In a perverse 18th century, the aging Casanova leads an overland party deep into the countryside, where they encounter the decrepit Count Dracula.

Film Carewzin': Serra’s long, dawdling film begins as powdered-wig period-piece hinging on conversation, before gradually moving away from narrative, into the wilds of nature and the darkness of man’s hearts.

Go Watch It If: You’re cool with waiting a super-slow 90 minutes before Dracula even arrives on screen.

STRAY DOGS

Director: Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan)

Premise: A portrait of a Taiwanese family fallen through society’s cracks, told with Tsai’s inimitable minimalism.

Film Carewzin': Seven long years after he last graced MIFF, Tsai’s return —a silent cry of social outrage— is a resounding reminder of his greatness, each exquisite frame slowly gathering with the force of a storm.

Go Watch It If: You know that ‘Lee Kang-sheng eats chicken’ can be a five-minute scene of horrifying human heartache and sweet cinematic beauty.

TOM AT THE FARM

Director: Xavier Dolan (Canada)

Premise: Urbane Tom (Dolan) descends into a rural nightmare when he attends the funeral of his closeted boyfriend.

Film Carewzin': The hyper-prolific Québécois boy-wonder embraces genre with this thriller, whose score summons Hitchcock, but whose psychodrama suggests the early perversions of François Ozon.

Go Watch It If: You’ve no nightmare greater than meeting your boyfriend’s family.

TRAP STREET

Director: Vivian Qu (China)

Premise: A digital-mapping street-surveyor (Lu Yulai) stalks the road on which he saw a hot babe (He Wenchao) blow by.

Film Carewzin': On first blush, Qu’s debut is a slight courtship in the modern surveillance state, but it slowly reveals itself as a portrait of the doomed nature of romance —and individualism— in an era of top-down policy, be it from state or corporate entity.

Go Watch It If: You have a hostile relationship with your GPS.

UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL

Director: Kitty Green (Ukraine)

Premise: Behind the blonde-hair-and-boobs of infamous performance-art protest group Femen.

Film Carewzin': Green, a debutante Australian documentarian, spent 14 months living amongst the ladies of Femen, where she discovers the troubling politics at the collective’s core. This makes for a film not just about third-wave feminism, but about complicity and compromise in the new-millennial world.

Go Watch It If: You suspect that behind every scantily-clad woman there’s a dark despot pulling the strings.

THE UNKNOWN KNOWN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DONALD RUMSFELD

Director: Errol Morris (USA)

Premise: A decade after grilling Robert McNamara, Morris sits another ex-Secretary of Defense in front of his Interrotron.

Film Carewzin': The grinning face of bellicose Bush-era America, Rumsfeld remains unrepentant, justifying the invasion of Iraq with a wink and a smirk, Morris seemingly under the sway of his abundant charisma.

Go Watch It If: You need reminding that pricks end up in power.

WE ARE MARI PEPA

Director: Samuel Kishi Leopo (Mexico)

Premise: A crew of slackers weigh up their awful adolescent rockband versus the looming responsibilities of girlfriends, school, work, and money.

Film Carewzin': Leopo’s amiable picture sees its titular group as a small ‘victory’ against the parade of humiliations otherwise greeting his disenfranchised, down-and-out youths.

Go Watch It If: You were ever in a shitty high-school band that wrote songs about chicks who wouldn’t sleep with you.

WE ARE THE BEST!

Director: Lukas Moodysson

Premise: A trio of Swedish tweens form a punk band in 1982, whilst dealing with patriarchal condescension and surging hormones.

Film Carewzin': Back in the crowdpleasin’ form of his Fucking Åmål/Together glory days, Moodysson paints a pitch-perfect portrait of adolescent rebellion, his greatest strength as director the way he steps back and allows his young, exuberant, mischievous cast to shine.

Go Watch It If: You possess/admire the firestarting qualities of youthful joie de vivre.

WETLANDS

Director: David Wnendt (Germany)

Premise: A smart-ass teenage punk (Carla Juri) disobeys all laws of hygiene as she runs ongoing ‘experiments’ on her vagina and anus.

Film Carewzin': Part gleeful prurience, part bawdy Sex And The City-style comedy, part melodramatic bildungsroman, Wnendt’s crowdpleasin’ adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s infamous novel is a charming rebuke of gender stereotypes.

Go Watch It If: You yearn to dive headlong into those shadowy nether-regions that dwell below the belt.

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

Director: Taika Waititi & Jemaine Clement (New Zealand)

Premise: A vampires-in-a-Wellington-sharehouse mockumentary.

Film Carewzin': Vampire mythology and mockumentaries are both effective cinematic corpses, but deadpan Kiwi comedy vets Waititi (Boy) and Clement (Flight Of The Conchords find life —and absurdity and amusement— in their haggard forms by combining them in a droll domestic setting.

Go Watch It If: You already find undead neck-biting inherently silly.

WHEN EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST OR METABOLISM

Director: Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania)

Premise: A director (Bogdan Dumitrache) and an actress (Diana Avramut), in the middle of an on-set affair, rehearse scenes and wax philosophical in a series of minimalist long takes.

Film Carewzin': Porumboiu’s making-a-movie movie opens with a conversation on the 11-minutes-a-take restrictions of shooting on film, then pushes at the edge of that imposed timeframe. Like its exhausted leading-man, it’s a film at once wild with ideas and pretty vacant.

Go Watch It If: You wanna see an unedited endoscopy video on the big screen.

WHITEY: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. JAMES J. BULGER

Director: Joe Berlinger (USA)

Premise: The guy behind the Paradise Lost movies explores the epic court-case that followed the arrest of infamous Boston crim Whitey Bulger.

Film Carewzin': Due to be Hollywood Biopic'd soon, here Bulger gets a searing journalistic treatment. Berlinger both has an eye for the people tangled up in a web of crime, and for a bigger social picture; his film an indictment not of its titular subject, but of the FBI.

Go Watch It If: You want to see crooked cops get their day on screen, if not in court.