The A-Z Of The 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival: Part One

The Melbourne International Film Festival opens this week. If staring at its gargantuan program —and, then, combing through its schedule with a highlighter— is doing your head in, fear not. Your Beloved Homie Film Carew has been watching as many films as humanly possible in anticipation, and has assembled this handy viewer’s guide for all those venturing into uncharted cinematic wilds and braving cold-ass queues.

1001 GRAMS

Director: Bent Hamer (Norway)

Premise: When tragedy disturbs her carefully-ordered existence, the keeper of Norway’s official kilogram measure learns to loosen up and love.

Film Carewzin': Hamer made his name with the deadpan comedy of 2003’s Kitchen Stories, but, here, he keeps the cold framing and sense of removal and employs it, contrarily, in service of a drama.

Go Watch It If: Precision —be it in cinema or measurement— is appealing.

7 CHINESE BROTHERS

Director: Bob Byington (USA)

Premise: Jason Schwartzman is a charismatic, self-sabotaging, deadpan dick.

Film Carewzin': Byington’s last MIFF flick, the equally twee and caustic Somebody Up There Likes Me, seemed to annoy more people than it pleased. 7 Chinese Brothers may do the same; though how anyone can deny a film involving Vampire Weekend karaoke is beyond me. Also: Tunde Adebimpe!

Go Watch It If: Other Jason-Schwartzman-is-a-charismatic-self-sabotaging-deadpan-dick entertainments —from Bored To Death to Listen Up Philip— have delighted you.

ACTRESS

Director: Robert Greene (USA)

Premise: After stepping away for new motherhood, Brandy Burre of The Wire struggles to reignite her acting career.

Film Carewzin': Greene’s unique portrait of the aging actress is a piece of two-way collaboration; a one-woman-show in which ostensible documentary elements —unvarnished footage of the quotidian grind— give way to poetic flights of dramatic fantasy.

Go Watch It If: You wish more documentaries resembled old soap-operas.

ANGELS OF REVOLUTION

Director: Alexey Fedorchenko (Russia)

Premise: In 1934, a troupe of young idealists arrive in remote Siberia, proselytisin’ the people’s revolution by making propaganda films (and pornos).

Film Carewzin': With First On The Moon, Silent Souls, and Celestial Wives Of The Meadow Mari, Fedorchenko has shown himself to be fond of droll comedy and conceptual gimmickry, but also uniquely interested in the ancient tribal customs lost when Arctic communities were assimilated into the USSR. That form holds here, with a picture both bizarrely comic and, ultimately, tragic.

Go Watch It If: Absurd tableaux + attractive unclothed comrades + portraits of idealism-taken-too-far = good times.

THE ASSASSIN

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan)

Premise: The Taiwanese master finally delivers on his years-in-the-making wuxia epic.

Film Carewzin': There’s wuxia movies, then there’s a wuxia movie by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Hou gives us Shu Qi as blade-wielding 9th-century assassin, but anyone expecting coherent narrative or wild fight choreography is in the wrong place. Instead, it’s a dreamlike, elusive, meditative piece of pure painting-with-light cinema.

Go Watch It If: The sound of crickets chirping is sweeter than the sight of swordfighting.

B MOVIE: LUST & SOUND IN WEST BERLIN

Director: Jörg Hoppe, KKlaus Maeck, Heiko Lange (Germany)

Premise: A chronicle of the Berlin underground across the ’80s.

Film Carewzin': Most nostalgic paeans for how-great-things-were come off as either dull or insufferable, but B-Movie, luckily, has a charismatic tour-guide in Mark Reeder, a Manchester ex-pat and super-8 enthusiast who landed amidst Berlin’s post-punk scene in 1979 with camera rolling.

Go Watch It If: Contemporaneous appearances from Blixa Bargeld, Nick Cave, Tilda Swinton, and Gudrun Gut will get your heart thumping.

BEING 14

Director: Hélène Zimmer (France)

Premise: A trio of teenage friends make out, fall out, make up across one school year.

Film Carewzin': Most coming-of-age films seem to forget that teenagers are, generally speaking, complete cunts. Not Zimmer’s incisive picture, which depicts a high-school’s toxic cesspool of rivalry, gossip, and hormones in horrifying vérité.

Go Watch It If: 14 either feels close-to-home, or so long ago.

BIKES VS CARS

Director: Fredrik Gertten (Sweden)

Premise: A documentary look at the blood feud for right-of-way in city streets.

Film Carewzin': Touring a host of global metropolises —Copenhagen, Toronto, Los Angeles, Bogotá, São Paulo— Gertten (Bananas!* and Big Boys Gone Bananas!*) sees each city’s approach to transport management as articulating its own collective social values.

Go Watch It If: Urban-planning is exciting to you.

BODY

Director: Małgorzata Szumowska (Poland)

Premise: A new-age therapist convinces a widowed prosecutor and his bulimic daughter to try and contact the spirit of their dead wife/mother.

Film Carewzin': The latest for the ever-impressive Szumowska (Stranger, Elles, In The Name Of) tilts into outright —if absurdist— comedy; its study of bodies, both dead and alive, delivered deadpan.

Go Watch It If: You’re not a sympathy-vomiter.

BREAKING A MONSTER

Director: Luke Meyer (USA)

Premise: Teenage thrash-metal trio Unlocking The Truth attempt to turn YouTube novelty to into a career launching-pad.

Film Carewzin': A mundane rockumentary about a shitty band sounds like a cinematic nightmare, but there’s a fascinating subtext beneath Breaking A Monster’s banal façade. As band-on-the-rise portrait, it’s a failure, but luckily it also plays as backhanded critique of corporate hype-making.

Go Watch It If: You know the musical business is a cruel and shallow money trench where thieves and pimps run free.

CHASUKE’S JOURNEY

Director: Sabu (Japan)

Premise: A tea-boy from heaven comes down to Earth, as an angel, to try and rescue a girl he has a crush on.

Film Carewzin': In this brightly-coloured fable, Heaven is a place where a room full of white-clad writers recycle cinematic clichés as they pen plots for Earth’s citizens. In turn, the film riffs on Capra, Chaplin, and, um, Takashi Miike as it goes; its titular hero battling not just the villains, but bad screenwriting.

Go Watch It If: The ‘crazy Japanese’ cliché becomes thee.

CITY OF GOLD

Director: Laura Gabbert (USA)

Premise: Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold is, um, the Los Angeles Times food critic.

Film Carewzin': Gabbert’s portrait of the only restaurant reviewer to win the Pulitzer is impossibly slight, but gets by on Gold’s easygoing charm, and its simple idea that Gold’s open-minded, open-hearted approach to eating —multicultural, highbrow, lowbrow— taps into LA’s essential id.

Go Watch It If: You actually like looking at someone else eat. Or type.

CORN ISLAND

Director: George Ovashvili (Georgia)

Premise: An Abkhazian elder and his granddaughter make their home on an ephemeral mud-island in the middle of the Inguri river, under the watching eye of patrolling Georgian and Russian soldiers.

Film Carewzin': Ovashvili’s highly-symbolic drama is told in near silence, but with its motifs of claimed and contested land in disputed Abkhazia, it speaks plenty loudly.

Go Watch It If: Minimalist, symbolist, unspoken dramas about unwashed peasants don’t bore.

CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS

Director: Sebastián Silva (Chile)

Premise: Michael Cera and the three Silva brothers plan a road-trip to imbibe lysergic cactus on a Chilean beach, only to find their plans crashed by Gaby Hoffmann’s annoying new-age sage.

Film Carewzin': Far-and-away the standout of the respective on the Chilean hipster, here Silva stages a seemingly ‘slight’ story that slyly subverts normal notions of narrative and moral.

Go Watch It If: You’ve ever tried to find transcendence amongst annoying people.

THE CULT OF JT LEROY

Director: Marjorie Sturm (USA)

Premise: The ‘life and times’ of JT LeRoy, the 21st-century’s greatest literary hoax.

Film Carewzin': When Sturm started rolling tape on JT LeRoy, the cultish following flocking to the (apparently) young, tortured author was just beginning. She kept rolling as it became stranger-than-fiction controversy, and, in the wash, years on, tries to piece together the definitive portrait of the non-existent author.

Go Watch It If: You want to see fawning celebrity fans hilariously embarrass themselves (especially Ben Foster, who looks like an absolute dickhole in hindsight).

DANNY SAYS

Director: Brendan Toller (USA)

Premise: Wild, drug-addled, back-in-the-day anecdotes from rock’n’roll raconteur Danny Fields.

Film Carewzin': Where most exercises in Baby Boomer rock nostalgia operator with myth-making reverence, Fields, instead, is utterly irreverent.

Go Watch It If: You wanna hear shit-talkin’ tall tales starring The Beatles, Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, Nico, The Doors, The MC5, The Stooges, The New York Dolls, The Ramones, Patti Smith et al.

Stay tuned for parts two through five of film carew's exhaustive run around the 2015 melbourne international film festival, coming at you every day this weeek!