Film Carew: Around The Sydney Film Festival In 40 (Or So) Movies

The Sydney Film Festival opens this week, bringing with it a host of Australian premieres, and a glimpse of the year-to-come in arthouse cinemas. Whether you’re ready to brave the queues in Olde Sydney Towne or following along from home, your old homie Film Carewz has already dived deep into the program, watching as much as humanly possible to give you the good oil on SFF 2015.

54: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT

It’s a great story: Mark Christopher’s debut film, 1998’s 54, was a critically-maligned flop; its small-town-kid-finds-fame-then-loses-his-way clichés so awful they completely annihilated the director’s budding career. Like an innocent man out to clear his name, Christopher’s spent 17 years attempting to restore his original vision, one butchered back-in-the-day by the Miramax suits. His finally-out-there Director’s Cut does turn out to be darker, queerer, and more cynical than the original, but it’s really just a form of turd-polishing: 54 no longer a D-grade Boogie Nights, now a B-grade one.

BIKES VS CARS

Fans of urban-planning docs will find charm in this Swedish documentary, which tours a host of global cities —Copenhagen, Toronto, Los Angeles, Bogotá, São Paulo— and looks at the struggles for space between cyclists and motorists; each city’s approach to transport management essentially articulating its own collective social values.

THE BOLIVIAN CASE

Sparkling documentary chronicles the trial of a trio of Norwegian teens caught smuggling cocaine out of Bolivia. Violeta Ayala isn’t much interested in getting to the truth of the case; but, then again, neither are the court systems of various countries. Instead, The Bolivian Case portrays the modern-day trial-by-media, and what happens when real-life fates are decided by which stories will sell the most gossip-mag copies.

BREAKING A MONSTER

A mundane rockumentary about a shitty band sounds like something best avoided, but this portrait of Unlocking The Truth —a thrash-metal trio who, by dint of being black teenagers are marketable novelty-act— has a fascinating subtext beneath its banal façade. As a portrait of a young band on the rise, it’s a failure, but as a back-handed critique of music biz hype-making —and its contemporary attempt to monetise the viral— it has enough contrary notes to be redeemed.

THE DREAM OF SHAHRAZAD

Genial, lyrical documentary about the cultural resonance of The Arabian Nights in contemporary Muslim countries, that runs deep with romanticism and carries a quiet political edge.

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

Three films into a brilliant career, Strickland is clearly one of the 21st-century’s most inspired auteurs. The Duke Of Burgundy —following Katalín Varga and Berberian Sound Studio— takes place in a gorgeously-stylised woman’s world of no men and abundant butterflies, and mounts a droll comedy on the banality of domesticated fetishry.

FREEDOM STORIES

There’s no joy in being mean to a well-meaning documentary on Australians who spent turn-of-the-century stints as persecuted refugees imprisoned in detention centres. But Steve Thomas is a putting-himself-in-the-frame filmmaker —and ponderous, portentous narrator— of the worst kind; and, at its worst, Freedom Stories feels embarrassingly home-made. Whilst its first-person testimonies from interviewees can be genuinely effecting, the film’s most symbolic images are when Thomas introduces subjects by literally filming himself scrolling through poorly-formatted Word documents on his computer.

GAYBY BABY

Maya Newell’s portrait of four Sydney pre-adolescents coming-of-age under the watching eye of same-sex parents specialises in the obviously-delivered narratives of reality television, where conflicts are seized on and stories are simplified. If merely filling the space between ad-breaks, that’s okay, but Gayby Baby’s simplification makes mundane a complex issue; this, ultimately, a piece of profound activism that’s only so-so cinema.

GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF

Workaholic documentarian Alex Gibney turns his ever-critical camera onto Scientology, authoring a clear-eyed exposé that charts the rise and fall of Hollywood’s favourite cult; with plenty of crowd-pleasing/stomach-churning footage of villainous David Miscavige and bonkers Tom Cruise to boot. Whilst Gibney gets down to the grimy Sea Org details, his film is, ultimately, a big-picture portrait of Scientology, and its place in the contemporary world; the religion’s division between its ultra-affluent celebrity elite and slave-labour underclass making it a glittering symbol of American society itself.

GOOD THINGS AWAIT

Amiable, charming Danish documentary spends a year on a Biodynamic dairy farm, indulging in the bucolic pastoralism oft used to stoke tree-change dreams and shift gourmet products. The shots of gentle cattle lowing amidst verdant grasses are duly pleasing, but the picture bares real teeth when it shows its cantankerous, unwavering farmer fighting against the regulatory authorities doing the bidding of petrochemical-peddling agribusiness.

HILL OF FREEDOM

Hong Sang-soo’s 16th feature is a lot like his previous 15: a wry drama of masculine pining, chance encounters, scenes in cafés, drunken bonding, ill-advised intercourse, and held-out hope. But, here, the Korean filmmaker introduces an interesting structural wrinkle: telling his story in scattered chronology, its scenes like letters shuffled out of order. This device turns yet another Hong film into a genuine puzzle: rendering some scenes genuinely confusing, others unexpectedly profound.

THE HUNTING GROUND

Whilst the carefully-adhered-to Sundance-social-outrage-documentary form can feel a little suffocating, there’s no doubting the moral clarity and unrepentant activism at work in the latest film for perennial American troublemaker Kirby Dick. It’s an exposé on the epidemic of sexual assaults on college campuses, and the systematic silencing of victims by universities out only to protect their established brand. When coupled with Andrew Rossi’s recent student-loans/education-industry doc Ivory Tower, a college education has never seemed so undesirable a prospect.

IN THE BASEMENT

Ulrich Seidl, the Austrian creep who’s spent a whole career chronicling the absurd, grotesque, and cruel, comes up with a pleasingly-literal premise for descending into the darkest, most shadowy recesses of the Austrian id: documenting the weird things people do in their basements. For Seidl, the subterranean lair is the place in which humans play host to their deepest desires, and the freaks he films —from big game hunters to Reich revivalists to S&M couples— are, when photographed in his flat, wide-angle tableaux, black-comic examples of the banality of perversity.

KABUCHIKO LOVE HOTEL

Ryuichi Hiroki alternates between making art movies, genre films, and pinku eiga erotica without discrimination, and Kabuchiko Love Hotel, at times, feels like it’s splitting the difference. It’s an ensemble-cast movie following a host of different characters all connected to the one Tokyo love hotel; its stories ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, with plentiful flesh and, even, bona fide soft-porn in the mix.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE

Joshua Oppenheimer continues to do the noblest work, pushing Indonesia towards national catharsis via the vehicle of cinema. Whilst it lacks The Act Of Killing’s impossible-to-believe absurdity, this companion-piece takes a more personal, vulnerable look at those still reliving the dark days of genocide; Oppenheimer putting a face to both company-man villainy and traumatised victimhood.

METAMORPHOSES

Christophe Honoré’s latest begins like a parody of a French art movie: oblique classic-lit references, po-faced pretensions, endless fucking. His contemporary adaptation of various mythological adventures cribbed from Ovid’s eternal epic finds a host of impossibly-attractive, fresh young faces —non-professionals, debutantes, and unknowns— in various states of undress, acting out tales of transformation; in which the lines between Gods and mortals, man and animals, and, most notably, genders, are fluid. In turn, Honoré’s film becomes shape-shifting, swimming through its episodic narrative with growing élan; its directorial visions —a religious riot outside council-estate high-rises; an astonishingly-beautiful underwater sequence— growing more vivid and ambitious as it goes.

MURDER IN PACOT

With the air of a commanding stage-play, Raoul Peck’s profound parable plays out entirely in the ruins of an upper-class Port-au-Prince villa, where an affluent couple (Claire Denis regular Alex Descas and German-Nigerian singer Ayọ) have had their social status instantly razed in the 2010 Earthquake. When a white aid worker (Thibault Vinçon) and his hot-blooded Haitian girlfriend (Lovely Kermonde Fifi) rent out the villa’s last standing building, tensions slowly mount in their isolated compound; its quartet of characters symbols of the post-quake milieu, where social castes are in flux and the ruined landscape is ripe for plunder.

MY SKINNY SISTER

This Swedish coming-of-age movie is essentially an artful riff on an after-school special: its tale of a fat younger sister idolising her elder sibling, a gamine ice-skating prodigy whose obsessive training regime has tipped over into anorexia. Debutante director Sanna Lenken finds occasional moments of sharp family-dynamic observation, but her film feels too bound by convention; and you half expect it to end with the number for an eating disorder hotline.

NASTY BABY

Coming off 2013’s awesome Crystal Fairy/Magic Magic double bill, US-indie-crashin’ Chilean renegade Sebastián Silva seems like he’s onto another winning piece of shambling, subversive story-telling; with the filmmaker and TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe playing a couple out to have a three-way baby with their pal Kristen Wiig. It’s charming stuff for the first two acts, before a final-act transformation into a thriller so badly-judged, tonally-off, and cliché-peddlingly awful that you wonder if Silva is sabotaging his own film.

OF MEN AND WAR

In its opening reel, Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men And War —a portrait of returned soldiers staying in a New York veteran’s home specialising in PTSD— feels like its going to be a long 140 minutes; a harrowing stay in the company of raging, testosterone-addled men bristling with fuck-the-world machismo. But, as time passes —both in the film and on screen— it settles into a place of acceptance, for both subjects and viewers; the state of these ruined, discarded men a commentary on America as eternal military nation, effectively serving as an antidote to the repellent, racist fantasia of American Sniper.

ON THE RIM OF THE SKY

One of those documentaries whose tale is so taut, riveting, and symbolically-rich that it plays like a piece of perfectly-penned drama, Xu Hongjie’s picture makes itself at home in a village perched on a clifftop over a Chinese gorge; its handful of citizens living in an isolated enclave amongst the clouds. He introduces us to the entrenched teacher, who for 25 years has overseen the local school as he sees fit. But a 2008 earthquake brings the arrival of state-relief cash, and, in turn, a young, idealist new graduate, who hopes to reform the school’s autocratic rule and casual finances. The two parties —entrenched bumpkin, insouciant city-slicker— represent old agrarian ruralism and new educated capitalism, their generation-clash a picture of the changing face of China.

PHOENIX

Christian Petzold’s follow-up to his 2012 arthouse breakout Barbara finds the director continuing to do what he does: collaborating, again, with muse Nina Hoss on a highly-symbolic, insufferably-tense period drama. Here Hoss plays a concentration camp survivor who, at the end of the war, undergoes radical surgery to reconstruct her disfigured face, and is, in turn, mistaken as a doppelgänger for his ‘dead’ wife by her wayward, erstwhile, untrustworthy husband. This set-up brings with it baggage —Eyes Without A Face, Vertigo, The Skin I Live In— but Petzold stays away from thriller convention or plot convolution; instead slowly, simply drawing the film towards a profound closing-shot conclusion.

THE POSTMAN’S WHITE NIGHTS

Poetic piece of rural miserablism/mysticism, in which drunken Russians —playing themselves in a quasi-documentary— stumble about in a remote lakeside idyll deep in the Arctic circle.

RED ROSE

Set against the cultural tumult of the 2009 Iranian Election protests —whilst, simultaneously, set in the one Tehran apartment— Sepideh Farsi’s drama is, largely, a cinematic two-hander in which the paths of a student radical and a middle-aged intellectual cross. Both filmmaker and characters play games, withhold, and conceal; Farsi’s film taking cues from Asghar Farhadi, and loaded with social symbolism.

THE RUSSIAN WOODPECKER

There’s an old filmmakin’ maxim that a documentary doesn’t take on a life of its own until it becomes something other that what its maker initially intended. Chad Gracia’s remarkable picture changes direction several times over. Beginning as a portrait of an eccentric Ukrainian artist obsessed with the ghosts populating the abandoned remains of the Chernobyl reactor, it then becomes a thorough examination of Russia’s Cold War program of weaponising radio-waves, a bonkers conspiracy-theorising paranoia-thriller about life in a surveillance state and the secret truth behind Chernobyl, and, eventually, a calm, sad chronicle of the epoch of contemporary Ukranian unrest and Russia’s looming neo-Soviet empire.

SECOND COMING

Debbie Tucker Green’s dour domestic drama takes its simple proposition —a socio-realist depiction of an immaculate conception in contemporary, multi-cultural Britian— and fails to find its resonance; Green’s attempts at dreamlike lyricism only revealing a lack of artist gumption to match her provocative premise.

SLOW WEST

John Maclean’s revisionist Western drops Michael Fassbender, Kody Smit-McPhee, and a fuck-you-fur-coat-clad Ben Mendelsohn into an imagined ‘Old West’ shot in New Zealand; where black humour, directorial whimsy, and hipster affectation suggest his cinematic hero isn’t John Ford, but Jim Jarmusch.

SOME KIND OF LOVE

Thomas Burstyn’s exploration of family bonds and his own conflicted relationship to them bears trace elements of both Sarah Polley’s The Stories We Tell and Toby Amies’ The Man Whose Mind Exploded. Here, the Canadian filmmaker chronicles contemporary life for his long-last, ultra-eccentric great aunt: an artist sliding into dementia, who lives in a ramshackle flat under the care of her brother, an esteemed AIDS researcher in the ’80s. Burstyn tries to find lyrical romanticism in their oddball quotidian, but eventually he turns his lens on himself, questioning, even, his own motivations as filmmaker.

SONG OF THE SEA

Tomm Moore’s Secret Of Kells follow-up finds him bringing to life Celtic mythology in a contemporary setting. But its tale of grief-wracked siblings on-the-lam is much less interesting than Moore’s idiosyncratic animation, which prizes the hand-drawn line over the 3D rendering.

SPRING

Lou Taylor Pucci plays a down-and-out Los Angeleno who, in the wake of his mother’s death, spontaneously departs on a trip to Italy. There he meets a babe, Nadia Hillker, who turns out to be enigmatic, flighty, impossibly intelligent, and, oh, actually a mystical mythological monster underneath. Instead of playing the set-up for laughs, budding horror impresarios Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson instead pitch Spring as a genuine romance tinged with wryness; like Before Sunrise for those reared on Buffy.

STATION TO STATION

‘Happening’-staging interdisciplinary artist Doug Aitken cooked up a cock-eyed project in 2013: chartering a train from the Atlantic to the Pacific, picking up indie-rockers and artists as he traversed America. With Dan Deacon, Ariel Pink, Beck, and Cat Power along for the ride, his grand dream of a mobile multi-art collision isn’t lacking for oddballs, and Aitken’s accompanying documentary stays true to the project’s restless spirit: consisting of 62 one-minute films, strung together with no sense of narrative grandeur or documentary cliché.

STRANGERLAND

Nicole Kidman’s return to Australian independent filmmaking finds the impossibly-famous export in ‘brave performance’ mode: crying, screaming, falling apart, walking down Main St naked whilst smeared in her own blood. She’s playing, with a sense of actorly desperation, a mother living twin parental-anxiety nightmares: her kids have disappeared into the outback, and her daughter is the town bike! Whilst Kidman and Joseph Fiennes chew scenery as the aggrieved parents, the openly-judgmental tone with which director Kim Farrant depicts its teen tart makes Strangerland, essentially, two hours of cinematic slut-shaming.

TALES

Rakshan Beni-Etemad’s film is an intricate piece of screenwriting choreography, with its narrative constantly handballed from one character to another, one situation to the next; its endless, restless host of micro-dramas amounting to a kaleidoscopic portrait of the down-and-out in Tehran.

TIGERS

“Why can’t we just say Nestlé?” asks one of the filmmakers out to vet the real-life story —baby formula salesman turned corporate malfeasance whistleblower— they’re out to bring to screen for both cinematic properties and legal culpability. Danis Tanović’s making-of-the-film-within-the-film device serves to frame the narrative, call any notions of truth into question, and bring his own production into the mix; Tigers about what is means to take on an omnipotent multinational corporation as both former-employee activist, and as feather-ruffling filmmaker.

THE TRIBE

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s amazing debut is a striking piece of modern-day silent cinema, its only dialogue delivered in unsubtitled sign language. With long takes, he creates a sense of mounting tension in a Kiev school-for-the-death turned expanding criminal enterprise; this portrait of a corrosive society heading, inevitably, towards a grim, brutal conclusion.

TYKE ELEPHANT OUTLAW

Following in the footsteps of Gabriela Cowpherthwaite’s Blackfish, Stefan Moore & Susan Lambert’s documentary uses an animal-kills-trainer event to mount an exposé into the institutionalised cruelty of an industry that turns wild creatures into performers by any means necessary.

ULRICH SEIDL: A DIRECTOR AT WORK

From Dog Days through to his Paradise trilogy, Ulrich Seidl has long revelled in he perverse, revolting, misogynist underbelly of Austrian society. This documentary explores his career on screen and in the theatre, but much of its running time finds Seidl at work on In The Basement (also screening at SFF), casually commanding ping-pong enthusiasts to remove their clothes and dominatrices to regulate their whipping speed.

(unsubtitled teaser)

VINCENT

A socio-realist superhero-movie sounds like a Frankensteinian cinematic proposition, but Thomas Salvador’s pleasingly-minimalist, borderline-silent picture finds him starring as an itinerate handyman who’s blessed with superhuman strength when he comes in contact with water. It’s a simple idea executed deftly, soliciting both genuine emotion and meaningful tension from its stripped-down drama.

WELCOME TO LEITH

Like some disturbing new-millennial spin on the Western, a black-hat villain rides into a tiny North Dakota town —Pop. 24— with plans to buy up its land and make it the American capital of White Supremacy. With inevitability, the flick inches towards a high-street showdown —and possible shoot-out— between the lawful and the lawless. But, it’s no Western. Rather, Welcome To Leith is a documentary, a slice-of-real-life portrait of America’s lunatic fringe that’s shot through with surveillance state topicality.