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

previously: part 1 || part 2 || part 3 || part 4

STINKING HEAVEN

Director: Nathan Silver (USA)

Premise: The ups-and-downs of a year —1990— in a suburban commune for recovering addicts.

Film Carewzin': Silver’s Soft In The Head follow-up is shot on grainy, consumer-grade ’80s VHS tape, using such hip technology as a form of time-travel. His flick is a picture of group dynamics, but the actors-workshop vibes mean disbelief is often not suspended.

Go Watch It If: You’ve ever resented your turn to wash the dishes.

STORIES I WANT TO TELL YOU IN PERSON

Director: Erin White (Australia)

Premise: A playwright turns her life —from befriending elderly neighbours to consulting fortune-tellers to not bothering to write the play she’s be commissioned to— into a series of comic anecdotes.

Film Carewzin': This is a 54-minute, shot-for-TV adaptation of a stage-play that never seeks to be anything beyond that. But its writer/star, Lally Katz, martials enough humour for it not to matter.

Go Watch It If: You have a Hope Dolphin swimming in your toilet.

SUNRISE

Director: Partho Sen-Gupta (India)

Premise: A grizzled cop working Mumbai’s missing-children beat is obsessed by the abduction of his own daughter.

Film Carewzin': Though set in Mumbai, Sen-Gupta’s highly-stylised action-thriller is dowsed in so much darkness and unending rainfall it seems set in the unnamed city from Seven.

Go Watch It If: This time... it’s personal!

SWORN VIRGIN

Director: Laura Bispuri (Italy)

Premise: An Albanian girl (Alba Rohrwacher) who’s sworn to live her life as a man in ancient mountain ritual, confronts her true identity when, years later, she ends up living in Italy.

Film Carewzin': Bispuri’s portrait of the fluidity —and social expectations— of gender plays as plenty timely.

Go Watch It If: You’ve got your mother in a whirl.

TALES

Director: Rakhshan Bani-E’temad (Iran)

Premise: Tales of Tehranis told over one night, in stitched-together, inter-related micro-stories.

Film Carewzin': A film that’s both an intricate piece of formalist screenwriting choreography, and a deeply-human drama.

Go Watch It If: You know the opening of subway-train doors can be like the parting of a theatre curtain.

TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER

Director: Nick Broomfield (USA)

Premise: A trip into the rough-and-tumble ghetto that produced the most prolific serial killer in American history.

Film Carewzin': Broomfield, that eternal muckraker, finds the perfect subject for his walking-in-the-frame-holding-the-boom style. Effectively ‘playing’ the ignorant, bumbling Englishman, he gets those who knew Lonnie Franklin Jr. to open up; his collection of to-camera testimonies growing creepier, more disturbing, more chilling as it goes. His film becomes its own work of activism, pursuing justice for those —black crackheads and streetwalkers— the LAPD felt didn’t deserve it.

Go Watch It If: Horrifying on-the-street testimonies of predatory behaviour won’t worry you.

THANK YOU FOR PLAYING

Director: David Osit & Malika Zouhali-Worrall (USA)

Premise: When his one-year-old son is diagnosed with a terminal illness, a video-game designer sets out to make a game called That Dragon, Cancer.

Film Carewzin': Both the documentary and the video-game within are attempts to look mortality nobly in the eye, only for both turn to tear-jerker machinations and feelgood-Christian platitudes when they do.

Go Watch It If: You’re ready and willing to cry.

THEORY OF OBSCURITY: A FILM ABOUT THE RESIDENTS

Director: Don Hardy (USA)

Premise: A documentary chronicle of the career of experimental-rock institution The Residents.

Film Carewzin': Were this just a film in which famous fans wonder about the central mystery of The Residents —40 years in, still anonymous— it may not offer much. But Hardy speaks to a host of folk who’ve worked with the band over the years; getting as close as he can to behind the curtain.

Go Watch It If: You don’t care about who’s behind the masks, just about the idea of art collectivism.

THESE ARE THE RULES

Director: Ognjen Sviličić (Romania)

Premise: When their teenage son is badly beaten, a Bucharest couple’s life falls apart.

Film Carewzin': At times there’s echoes of other, better Romanian new-wave films —the hospital bureaucracy of The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu, the desperate parental action of Child’s Pose— but this is, essentially, an artful, minimal take on an every-parents-worst-nightmare movie.

Go Watch It If: You’re suspicious of hospitals.

THOSE WHO FEEL THE FIRE BURNING

Director: Morgan Knibbe (Netherlands)

Premise: When a ship of African migrants sinks en route to Italy, the ghost of one of its dead watches over the lives of newly-arrived refugees.

Film Carewzin': Folding in both his prior short films and obliterating the lines between documentary and narrative, Knibbe alights on scenes of traditional observationist vérité from a ‘floating’ visual device reminiscent —somewhat incongruously— of Enter The Void.

Go Watch It If: You wish more humanitarian documentaries were metaphysical tone-poems.

TOTO & HIS SISTERS

Director: Alexandre Nanau (Romania)

Premise: A pre-adolescent kid and his teenage sisters raise themselves, without parents, in a Bucharest smack den.

Film Carewzin': “Oh, bitter life, look what you’re doing to me,” sighs the eldest sibling, fresh out of a heroin-related prison stint, frustrated with the difficulty of attempting to go straight. Her sister is determined to stay on the straight-and-narrow, whilst their scampish younger brother just wants to dance. Nanau’s incredibly intimate documentary is a deeply human, often harrowing portrait of coming-of-age under the most extreme circumstances.

Go Watch It If: You’re up for it.

TWO SHOTS FIRED

Director: Martin Rejtman (Argentina)

Premise: The failed suicide of a bourgeois Buenos Aires teenager begins a series loosely-connected comic tableaux.

Film Carewzin': A forerunner —and outlier— to the Argentine new-wave, Rejtman specialises in deadpan comedy and philosophical remove. Here, he handballs the narrative from character to character, from 20-something slackers to their parents’ and parents’ friends; its funniest scenes involving the trials and tribulations of a baroque wood-flute quartet.

Go Watch It If: Having no idea where a narrative will head next excites you.

TYKE ELEPHANT OUTLAW

Director: Susan Lambert & Stefan Moore (Australia)

Premise: In 1994 in Honolulu, a circus elephant mauled its trainer, and escaped onto city streets.

Film Carewzin': Following in the footsteps of Blackfish, this 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.

Go Watch It If: You know an elephant never forgets.

WELCOME TO LEITH

Director: Christopher K. Walker & Michael Beach (USA)

Premise: A notorious neo-Nazi moves into a remote North Dakota town, with plans to buy up property and make it America’s capital of White Supremacy.

Film Carewzin': This on-the-ground documentary plays like some disturbing new-millennial spin on the Western, as a black-hat villain rides into a tiny frontier town —Pop. 24— inevitably pushing things towards a high-street showdown —and possible shoot-out— between the lawful and the lawless.

Go Watch It If: You want to witness the lunatic fringe up close.

WONDERFUL WORLD END

Director: Daigo Matsui (Japan)

Premise: A 17-year-old social-media starlet forms an obsessive friendship with one of her biggest fans, a 13-year-old runaway who shows up on her doorstep.

Film Carewzin': With its screens filled with scrolling txts and emojis, and its frames-within-frames, Matsui’s drama is attuned to life in the adolescent now. It’s a film about the search for personal identity and individual agency amongst a kawaii culture that demands chirpy supplication.

Go Watch It If: ◎[▪‿▪]◎

A YOUNG PATRIOT

Director: Du Haibin (China)

Premise: A Mao-loving teenager stands as symbol of a new generation of nationalist Chinese millennials.

Film Carewzin': Chantong begins this fascinating documentary as a (literally) flag-waving patriot, full of communist fervour and a fixture at nationalist youth rallies. But when an imminent government development requires the demolition of the house he grew up in and the new house his parents are building, his idealism starts to waver.

Go Watch It If: You’re interested in the internal conflicts between individualism and nationalism.