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

previously: part 1 || part 2

A GERMAN YOUTH

Director: Jean-Gabriel Périot (France/Germany)

Premise: A portrait of ’70s Germany’s Red Army Faction assembled entirely from archival footage.

Film Carewzin': In either narrative movies or documentaries, the Red Army story —intellectual idealism turned bombed-detonating domestic terrorism— is routinely presented as a cautionary tale. But Périot delivers his chronological collage of recovered celluloid —experimental films, news-reels, TV broadcasts— with a sublime detachment.

Go Watch It If: You want to see Baader Meinhof minus the revolutionary romanticism.

GOOD THINGS AWAIT

Director: Phie Ambo (Denmark)

Premise: A year on a biodynamic dairy farm.

Film Carewzin': There’s plenty of lulling shots of gentle cattle lowing amidst verdant grasses, but Ambo’s doco bears real teeth when it shows its cantankerous, unwavering farmer fighting against the regulatory authorities doing the bidding of petrochemical-peddling agribusiness.

Go Watch It If: You’re seduced by the kind of bucolic pastoralism used to stoke tree-change dreams and shift gourmet products.

THE GROUND WE WON

Director: Christopher Pryor (New Zealand)

Premise: A season in a rural rugby comp for a rag-tag collection of Kiwi dairy farmers.

Film Carewzin': Pryor’s affectionate portrait of a smalltown sports-team harbours a soft-spot for its bum-sniffin’ lunks, looking lovingly at their copious bouts of ritualised binge-drinking as a form of community-building.

Go Watch It If: It wouldn’t be a Saturday without rugby.

THE GUEST

Director: Adam Wingard (USA)

Premise: A mysterious stranger arrives on the doorstep of an All-American family, and you can be sure he’ll start killing people before the second act is over.

Film Carewzin': MIFF’s stupidest film.

Go Watch It If: When presented with a program of over 250 films from across the planet —some directed by the absolute masters of contemporary cinema— you’re the kind of person who picks the moronic American genre-movie.

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT

Director: Josh & Benny Safdie (USA)

Premise: A bunch of NYC junkies screech at each other.

Film Carewzin': The MIFF emotion tracker for this street-hustling drama —starring real-life down-and-outers effectively playing themselves— leans heavily towards revulsion.

Go Watch It If: People on heroin are interesting to you.

HILL OF FREEDOM

Director: Hong Sang-soo (South Korea)

Premise: The 16th verse, same as the first 15.

Film Carewzin': The 16th film for the Korean filmmakin’ machine is another droll comedy-of-manners filled with male vanity, ill-advised intercourse, spontaneous soju-sluggin’ sessions, etc. It’s essentially the same ol’ song, but, here, he employs a fascinating framing-narrative device, where its episodes are read from letters shuffled out of chronological order.

Go Watch It If: It wouldn’t be a MIFF without your latest dose of Hong.

HUNGRY HEARTS

Director: Saverio Costanzo (Italy)

Premise: When young newlyweds (Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher) have a baby, the mother becomes a cooped-up control-freak, obsessed with the idea they’ve birthed an Indigo Child.

Film Carewzin': After his eccentric The Solitude Of Prime Numbers, here Costanzo heads to New York and duly summons Rosemary’s Baby; only, this time, it’s the paranoid mother who’s the monster.

Go Watch It If: You’ve ever wanted to see Driver as the less-creepy half of a couple.

THE HUNTING GROUND

Director: Kirby Dick (USA)

Premise: An exposé on the culture of rape on American campuses, and the institutional incentives to under-report and minimise these crimes.

Film Carewzin': Dick is one of America’s great documentary provocateurs, not above muckraking or irony to make a political point. But The Hunting Ground finds him steely-eyed and cool-nerved as he digs the dirt on how the business of education encourages a climate of rampant sexual assault.

Go Watch It If: You want to feel outrage.

IN THE BASEMENT

Director: Ulrich Seidl (Austria)

Premise: The weird shit Austrians do in their basements.

Film Carewzin': Seidl, the creep who’s spent a whole career chronicling the absurd, grotesque, and cruel, descends into the darkest, most shadowy recesses of the Austrian id; seeing the subterranean lair as the place in which humans —from big game hunters to Reich revivalists to S&M enthusiasts— play host to their deepest desires.

Go Watch It If: You’re ready to laugh at the banality of perversity.

LENNY COOKE

Director: Josh & Benny Safdie (USA)

Premise: The meteoric rise and fall of the one-time high-school basketball star.

Film Carewzin': Coming-of-age when prep-to-pros mania was at its zenith, Lenny Cooke was feted to follow in the footsteps of Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady, a presumed peer to Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James. Instead, he became a cautionary tale of what happens when cultural smoke-blowing meets juvenile arrogance, a symbol of the littered lives left behind by the rapacious sports-entertainment industrial complex.

Go Watch It If: You know Joakim Noah has a heart of gold.

THE LIAR

Director: Kim Dong-myung (South Korea)

Premise: A mythomaniac invents an increasingly-elaborate alternate life for herself.

Film Carewzin': Kim’s second picture is an incisive portrait of class in Korea, and the desperate desire for upward mobility in a consumerist culture that’s promised you can buy your way to a better life.

Go Watch It If: You know it’s not a lie... if you believe it.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer (Denmark/Indonesia)

Premise: A companion piece to his astonishing documentary The Act Of Killing, Oppenheimer turns the lens from the perpetrators of Indonesian genocide to the victims.

Film Carewzin': Whilst it lacks the astonishing, absurd qualities of The Act Of Killing —one of this century’s most remarkable pieces of cinema— this successor shows Oppenheimer doing the noblest artistic work, pushing Indonesia towards national catharsis via the vehicle of cinema.

Go Watch It If: You want to put a human face to both company-man villainy and traumatised victimhood.

MAGIC MAGIC

Director: Sebastián Silva (USA/Chile)

Premise: Juno Temple plays a young American whose first overseas trip leaves her stranded in a rural house with creepy Michael Cera, weird Agustín Silva, and bitchy Catalina Sandino Moreno. But are they really out to get her, or has she just watched too many horror-movies?

Film Carewzin': Silva’s subversive semi-English-language debut was marketed as straight horror-movie, when it’s, instead, almost a parody of paranoia-thrillers, a droll manifestation of the anxieties and ego of Americans travelling abroad.

Go Watch It If: You’re ready for the best moment of unexpected cinematic hypnosis since Julio Medem’s The Red Squirrel.

MAGICAL GIRL

Director: Carlos Vermut (Spain)

Premise: A 12-year-old girl with leukaemia, her desperate father, a manipulative housewife, and a jailed former teacher are drawn into an intricate puzzle of blackmail.

Film Carewzin': Few films in the festival exercise as much meticulous cinematic control as Vermut’s blackly-comic, utterly claustrophobic triptych, which plays like an Almodóvar melodrama imprisoned in grim tableaux.

Go Watch It If: You want to see what might be MIFF’s best film.

MY SKINNY SISTER

Director: Sanna Lenken (Sweden)

Premise: A fat younger sister idolises her elder sibling, a gamine ice-skating prodigy whose obsessive training regime has tipped over into anorexia.

Film Carewzin': Lenken pens occasional moments of sharp family-dynamic observation, but her film feels too bound by convention.

Go Watch It If: You want to see an earnest issue movie.

NASTY BABY

Director: Sebastián Silva (USA)

Premise: A single woman (Kristen Wiig) recruits her gay friends (Silva, Tunde Adebimpe) to have a baby.

Film Carewzin': For its first two acts, Silva stages a shaggy, shambling, charming indie comedy. Then, a radical switch-up turns the final act into a thriller so badly-judged, tonally-off, and cliché-peddlingly awful that you wonder if Silva is sabotaging his own film.

Go Watch It If: Films that fall into the toilet are a perverse fascination.