Why You Don't Want To Miss This Year's MIFF

27 July 2016 | 1:42 pm | Anthony Carew

Film Carew tackles 80 films from the 2016 bill.

In the face of MIFF’s mammoth program, it can all easily feel like too much. But, fear not, your old pal Film Carew is here to help. Here are pithy reviews — penned without fear or favour — of 80(!) MIFF films to help you with your highlighting. Godspeed!

THE ACADEMY OF MUSES

Director: José Luis Guerin (Spain)

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Premise: Classic lit professor seduces his female students, either with big ideas or grand delusion.

Film Carewzin': This odd docudrama appears, at first, to be pure observation of classroom discussion. But, slowly it tilts towards Rohmer-esque romance, with a love-triangle charting the intersection of intellectual idealism and transparent philandering.

Go Watch It If: Pedagogy makes you randy.

THE AMERICAN EPIC SESSIONS

Director: Bernard MacMahon (USA)

Premise: Jack White assembles an all-star cast to record on a century-old machine.

Film Carewzin': For fans of Americana and/or vintage gear, there’ll be a certain charm watching White, Beck, Nas, Raphael Saadiq, Bettye LaVette, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, etc. roll live-in-the-studio cuts summoning blues traditionals. Otherwise, there’s little to cinematically recommend.

Go Watch It If: The various record-pressin’ hijinks of Third Man delight you.

AS I OPEN MY EYES

Director: Leyla Bouzid (Tunisia)

Premise: A headstrong young singer navigates the Tunisian police state.

Film Carewzin': Set in the dying days of the Ben Ali dictatorship, this lively coming-of-age film balances teen melodrama with cultural critique, setting coming-of-age tropes in a climate of fear and, especially, female oppression.

Go Watch It If: A sweet song of defiance stirs in your heart.

THE BACCHUS LADY

Director: E J-yong (South Korea)

Premise: An aging sex-worker looks after an abandoned boy, then helps her geriatric clients with their assisted suicides.

Film Carewzin': Despite the lingering presence of death, this is a lightweight comedy for the senior set.

Go Watch It If: You’re down to be delighted by a feisty old biddy and/or jaunty piano music.

BAD GIRL

Director: Fin Edquist (Australia)

Premise: A bad girl meets another bad girl.

Film Carewzin': This slickly-mounted local thriller begins as a portrait of obsessive friendship and teenage rebellion, only to get carried away with the genre reveals as it barrels headlong towards hysteria.

Go Watch It If: You’re ready to ride this thing right off the rails.

BARISTA

Director: Rock Baijnauth (USA)

Premise: Five competitive coffee-makers head to the American National Barista Championships.

Film Carewzin': Familiar-feeling portrait-of-a-subculture doc delivers all the waxed moustaches you could want.

Go Watch It If: You’re either super-serious about your coffee, or want to laugh at people who are.

BASKIN

Director: Can Evrenol (Turkey)

Premise: A crew of city-slicker cops descend into a depraved backwoods nightmare.

Film Carewzin': I’m not sure if the actual storytelling works, nor if the film is any good. But Evrenol stuffs his flick full of so much shadowy, creepy-ass imagery that it may not matter; Baskin delivering the underground-gimp-cannibals of your nightmares.

Go Watch It If: You wanna see the underground-gimp-cannibals of your nightmares.

BEING 17

Director: André Téchiné (France)

Premise: Two strapping teenage lads hate each other, then love each other.

Film Carewzin': Téchiné’s latest work of tortured homoeroticism is touched with tragedy, history, and a sense of social weight beyond its fighting-turns-to-fucking premise; blessed by a thoughtful Céline Sciamma-penned script, and eye-opening Alpine scenery.

Go Watch It If: Heaving adolescent hormones get you hot.

BLEAK STREET

Director: Arturo Ripstein (México)

Premise: In a shadowy Mexico City ghetto where all women are prostitutes, two midget wrestlers are robbed and murdered.

Film Carewzin': With its noir-worthy B&W cinematography and old auteur behind the camera, you might be expecting something more than a shouty soap-opera populated by clichés and liberal use of the word “faggot”. Don’t.

Go Watch It If: Your standards are real low.

BLOOD OF MY BLOOD

Director: Marco Bellocchio (Italy)

Premise: In a 17th-century convent, a woman is put on trial for witchcraft. Four centuries on, a Russian developer wants to buy the convent, only to be forced to negotiate with a local vampire.

Film Carewzin': 50 years after his debut, Bellocchio returns to the village where he shot the legendary Fists In The Pocket. His resulting diptych is a film whose sections feel too divided: the beautiful first half an aching portrait of grim superstition; the second a zany comedy of kooky caricature and all-too-Italian “humour”.

Go Watch It If: You’ve hatched a plan to leave at the halfway mark.

BORN TO BE BLUE

Director: Robert Budreau (Canada)

Premise: The life and times —kind of— of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker.

Film Carewzin': Budreau’s riff on the rock biopic announces its playful intentions in an opening sting where Baker (Ethan Hawke) is playing himself in a mooted movie about his life; its subject, between takes, talking about how things didn’t really happen that way, it’s just movie-makin’. In turn, there’s enough storytelling game-playing —and actorly work from Hawke and Carmen Ejogo— that Born To Be Blue survives its musician-as-junkie clichés.

Go Watch It If: Musician-as-junkie clichés don’t send you running.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF TIM HORTON

Director: Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson (Canada)

Premise: Guy Maddin makes a ‘Making Of’ of a Canadian war movie, in his own inimitable style.

Film Carewzin’: Maddin completists take note! Opening up for Charlie Lyne’s great Fear Itself comes another oddity from one of world cinema’s oddest auteurs. Tasked with filming a behind-the-scenes promo-reel for the war movie Hyena Road —a job he’s taken just for the cash— Maddin riffs on cinematic careerism, craft services, ice hockey, and insecurity; in a 31-minute short that satirises more than it promotes.

Go Watch It If: You’re already watching Fear Itself.

BUGS

Director: Andreas Johnsen (Denmark)

Premise: Two chefs from Copenhagen’s Nordic Food Lab travel the globe eating insects.

Film Carewzin': This insightful, thoughtful documentary begins as a study in the eating of various bugs, but becomes a contemplation on agricultural production; its chefs going from idealist to pessimist in the face of monocultural agri-business.

Go Watch It If: You’ve —like your old pal Film Carew— eaten witchetty grubs.

CHEVALIER

Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari (Greece)

Premise: On a yacht moored in the Mediterranean, a group of men stage an Alpha Male contest.

Film Carewzin': Tsangari’s Attenberg follow-up —penned by Yorgos Lanthimos’s screenwriter Efthymis Filippou— is an instant Greek weird-wave classic: a biting satire of macho competitiveness, male vanity, and the arcane rituals of archaic fraternities.

Go Watch It If: Deadpan becomes you.

CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER

Director: Brady Corbet (UK/France)

Premise: A petulant little shit shows signs that he’ll grow up to be a fascist despot.

Film Carewzin': Whilst its entire middle section is a stark, White Balloon-styled parlour drama about a disobedient dick, those sometimes-trying stretches are worth it for the film’s overture and epilogue: all frantic editing, wild camera pirouettes, and bonkers Scott Walker score.

Go Watch It If: You’ve always suspected that becoming the human embodiment of pure evil meant growing up to be Robert Pattinson.

CHRISTINE

Director: Antonio Campos (USA)

Premise: In Florida in 1974, a depressed journalist shoots herself live on air.

Film Carewzin': Campos’s ‘straight’ dramatic portrait of the final days in the life of Christine Chubbuck is a steely portrait of a deteriorating psyche, drawn forward by a great, mannered lead turn from Rebecca Hall.

Go Watch It If: You’re going to watch Kate Plays Christine, too.

COSMOS

Director: Andrzej Żuławski (France)

Premise: A pair of philosophical dudes arrive at a country guesthouse populated by screeching caricatures.

Film Carewzin': Endless fucking mugging and awful music.

Go Watch It If: Ham’s your flavour.

DEATH IN SARAJEVO

Director: Danis Tanović (Bosnia & Herzegovina)

Premise: On the 100-year anniversary of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, a Sarajevo hotel —playing host to centennial commemorations— is filled with state guests, politicians, documentarians, and its teeming masses of staff.

Film Carewzin': Tanović uses the intersecting-characters/ensemble-movie gambit to create a film in which the many conflicting opinions and divided loyalties of the Slavic states are embodied in various characters.

Go Watch It If: A restless, roving camera + didactic monologues = a good time.

THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV

Director: Albert Serra (Spain/France)

Premise: In Versailles in 1715, the Sun King lays on his deathbed.

Film Carewzin': After his Dracula-meets-Casanova snoozer Story Of My Death, Serra makes a better famous-person-slowly-dying-in-the-18th-century movie. Here, he haunts the chambers of the titular French king, its bedside scenes shot in painterly chiaroscuro light; the overall effect more artful Sokurovian minimalism than cinematic tedium.

Go Watch It If: Watching a film of an old man lying in bed won’t just send you to sleep.

THE DEMONS

Director: Philippe Lesage (Canada)

Premise: In a Montréal suburb in the 1980s, a 10-year-old youngest-child views the world —especially the beckoning, elusive realm of sexuality— with a mix of confusion, terror, and hostility.

Film Carewzin': Lesage’s meticulously-made, utterly unsettling film channels prime Michael Haneke: its static compositions calmly, coldly looking on at moments of both mundanity and horror; The Demons a portrait of individual and social anxieties at once complex and primal.

Go Watch It If: You still think about the closing shot of Caché.

DESTINATION ARNOLD

Director: Sascha Ettinger Epstein (Australia)

Premise: Two indigenous body-builders train to take part in a Schwarzenegger-branded competition.

Film Carewzin': Epstein’s film is blessed with charismatic subjects, but just as this pair of part-timers struggles to fit the gym in with their lives, the film, too, struggles with its seeming part-time brief: its most dramatic moments largely happening off camera, in the months between cuts.

Go Watch It If: Gym-devotion is an elusive dream.

DOWN UNDER

Director: Abe Forsythe (Australia)

Premise: Two carloads of idiots are on a collision course to meet in the wake of the Cronulla race riots.

Film Carewzin': An Australian film that you can describe with the phrase “shades of Christopher Morris’s Four Lions” is a welcome ‘centrepiece’ picture, indeed. Forsythe’s film is full of incisive mockery of Australian masculinity, but, ultimately, it’s a black comedy about the futility of violence.

Go Watch It If: In the wake of the election, you need to laugh at a country that would elect Pauline Hanson to the senate.

A DRAGON ARRIVES!

Director: Mani Haghighi (Iran)

Premise: Oh, shit. Um, here goes: a detective under interrogation recounts a 1964 trip to a remote Iranian island to investigate the suicide of a detainee who lived in the hulk of an abandoned ship. There, he and his fellow travellers —a filmmaker and a sound recordist— encounter local yokels, superstitions, earthquakes, and secret-police conspiracies; the whole film claiming, suspiciously, to be based on real events.

Film Carewzin': Haghighi’s playful, stylish Modest Reception follow-up is one of MIFF’s wildest, weirdest rides.

Go Watch It If: You buckle up.

EMO THE MUSICAL

Director: Neil Triffett (Australia)

Premise: It’s emos vs Christians in a bright, cutesy, queer-tinged High School Musical.

Film Carewzin': Whilst there’s occasions where the sing-song songs in this modern-day musical tilt, pleasingly, towards comic absurdity, too often everything about Emo —from the feather-light tunes to the soap-operatic air— feels toothless.

Go Watch It If: All of MIFF’s towering art-movies scare you.

EVERYONE ELSE

Director: Maren Ade (Germany)

Premise: While on holiday in Sardinia, a German couple slowly drift apart.

Film Carewzin': Ade’s three films are all screening as part of a MIFF mini-retrospective. Her middle work, Everyone Else, is a brilliant, bracing, aching portrait of coupledom: all palpable resentments, strained body language, and a mixture of affection and pissiness.

Go Watch It If: You want to feel stuck in someone else’s shitty relationship.

EVOLUTION

Director: Lucile Hadžihalilović (France)

Premise: On a remote, rocky island populated only by mothers and sons, when adolescent boys come of age, they’re sent off to the local shadowy hospital.

Film Carewzin': Finally delivering a follow-up to her luminous 2004 debut Innocence, Hadžihalilović delivers a sister picture: each film a rapturously-photographed, otherworldly parable where children are groomed for sinister purposes.

Go Watch It If: You’ve got your eyes —and mind— wide open.

THE EYES OF MY MOTHER

Director: Nicolas Pesce (USA)

Premise: When a young Portuguese-American farmgirl witnesses the murder of her mother, she grows up to have particularly-disturbed notions of love and intimacy.

Film Carewzin': At just 76 minutes, and with minimal story, Pesce crafts a sublime slice of Southern Gothic moodiness; the black-and-white cinematography and uneasy air making for a memorable cinematic nightmare.

Go Watch It If: Creepiness excites you.

THE FAMILY

Director: Rosie Jones (Australia)

Premise: An expose on the infamous local cult.

Film Carewzin': Jones’ duly grim, thorough examination of the institutionalised abuse in The Family from the 1960s through to the 1980s, and the society that enabled them, is oft gruelling going. It’s a hugely personal piece of cine-journalism, filled with interviews with cult survivors.

Go Watch It If: You’ve got the mettle.

THE FAMILY FANG

Director: Jason Bateman (USA)

Premise: After a childhood of getting roped into situationist hijinks, a pair of grown-up siblings (Bateman and Nicole Kidman) are drawn back into that old performance-art world —and into old memories and past hurts— when their parents go missing. The police think they’ve been abducted, but their kids know it’s just another artwork.

Film Carewzin': One of MIFF most boilerplate ‘indie’ films, The Family Fang hits familiar familial beats with enough black humour and writerly pathos to pass muster.

Go Watch It If: You love, I love, Christopher Walken. I guess at least we have got one thing in common.

FEAR ITSELF

Director: Charlie Lyne (UK)

Premise: An exploration of the way horror-movies tap into our deepest fears and psychological hang-ups, illustrated entirely in clips from horror-movies.

Film Carewzin': Lyne’s breathily-narrated essay film will be a delight for cineastes, its assorted clips illustrating her thesis more than appealing to pop-cultural nostalgia. The film is both a warm celebration of cinema and a deeply unsettling showreel of shadowy visions seemingly torn from our subconscious terrors.

Go Watch It If: Your favourite MIFF films of recent include Room 237 and The Nightmare.

A FLICKERING TRUTH

Director: Pietra Brettkelly (New Zealand/Afghanistan)

Premise: An Afghan film society seeks to restore films hidden, damaged, and thought lost during the reign of the Taliban.

Film Carewzin': At its most lyrical, Brettkelly’s documentary shows a country’s forgotten history coming to light in the glow of old celluloid. But, at times, it feels more like a film about a cranky boss lamenting his no-good workers.

Go Watch It If: Film preservation is dear to your heart.

FRANK & LOLA

Director: Matthew Ross (USA)

Premise: A tortured affair between a chef and a fashion designer in Las Vegas turns towards dark secrets and revenge.

Film Carewzin': Michael Shannon is Michael fuckin’ Shannon; Imogen Poots is an amazing actor too often stuck in shitty roles. Together, they’re an electric pair of leads to hang a drama on. But Ross’s macho morality-play is a little more so-so: at its best, it’s a portrait of male insecurity and possessiveness, at its worst, a witless rape-revenge drama.

Go Watch It If: You’d watch Michael Shannon in anything.

GARY NUMAN: ANDROID IN LA LA LAND

Director: Steve Read & Rob Alexander (UK)

Premise: Synth-pop icon Gary Numan was once famous, then not famous, and is now famous again.

Film Carewzin': Whilst this film is framed as an exploration of Numan’s battles with asperger’s and depression, it often feels like The Osbournes: old working-class Brit rocker and loudmouth wife living in a pet-filled mansion in LA.

Go Watch It If: You’ve got Numan nostalgia.

GIRL ASLEEP

Director: Rosemary Myers (Australia)

Premise: A new girl at school —in the suburban ’70s— must suffer the indignities of having her parents invite the whole school to her birthday party.

Film Carewzin': Beginning as ultra-twee Wes Anderson homage —all symmetrical framing, cutesy costuming, and stylised whimsy— soon Myers’ film goes to stranger, more singular places, moving through musical numbers into a full descent into a psychological, fairy-tale-etched dreamworld.

Go Watch It If: The phrase ‘ultra-twee Wes Anderson homage’ is a positive, not a negative.

THE HANDMAIDEN

Director: Park Chan-wook (South Korea)

Premise: In Japanese-occupied Korea, a pair of grifters attempt to seduce and exploit a Japanese lady who lives in a large manor-house.

Film Carewzin': Fuck yeah! Whilst Park’s English-language debut Stoker was pleasingly perverse, he’s returned to Korea with the wild stylisations that marked his Vengeance trilogy, and the eroticism of Thirst. His shadowy, operatic thriller boasts twists, turns, double-crosses, and a descent into a world of depraved perverts.

Go Watch It If: You’re down for MIFF’s most ludicrous, ridiculous, fun film.

HAPPY HOUR

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Japan)

Premise: Five hours of Japanese manners.

Film Carewzin': Hamaguchi’s long, leisurely, sweet-natured movie is, in theory, a portrait of the friendship between four 30-something women, but it’s really a film about communication; its singular theme explored in group-bonding workshops, book-reading Q&As, and divorce-court hearings.

Go Watch It If: You want extreme value-for-money on a single-session ticket.

HEART OF A DOG

Director: Laurie Anderson (USA)

Premise: An essay movie dedicated to Anderson’s late husband, Lou Reed, but all about her late pet, a rat terrier called Lolabelle.

Film Carewzin': Anderson’s first film in three decades is a dreamy, relaxation-video-ish cine-monologue filled with scattershot musings on life, death, art-making, pet ownership, and the canine mind.

Go Watch It If: You think dogs are the best people.

HIGH-RISE

Director: Ben Wheatley (UK)

Premise: A high-tech high-rise in 1970s London descends into lawlessness when the lower-class lower-floor dwellers revolt against the upper-classers dwelling upon high.

Film Carewzin': Wheatley’s wild adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s classic dystopian parable comes with top-shelf cast, lurid ’70s wardrobe, and a pleasingly-bonkers, over-the-top approach.

Go Watch It If: You love when Jeremy Irons chews scenery.

HIRED GUN

Director: Fran Strine (USA)

Premise: Session musicians!

Film Carewzin': Whilst there’s some nice-enough personal stories, herein, this rockumentary is filled with horrifying rockist clichés, endless chops-flaunting, and jams so bad you can never unhear them.

Go Watch It If: You’re into shredding, P!nk, general crimes against music.

HOW HEAVY THIS HAMMER

Director: Kazik Radwanski (Canada)

Premise: A fat middle-aged dad just wants to be left alone.

Film Carewzin': If mumblecore movies are just too over-the-top for you, Radwanski’s tiny domestic drama is so quotidian your perceptions of ‘entertainment’ are thoroughly reframed. Here, a grumpy, utterly charisma-free dad plays rugby, gawps silently at an online strategy game, eats chips, drinks beer, and falls asleep on the couch. Yes, this is the actual story.

Go Watch It If: You’re down for MIFF’s most radically banal film.

I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER

Director: Billy O’Brien (USA)

Premise: A small-town kid raised at a family mortuary believes he has the hallmarks of a future serial killer. When the bodies start piling up in his hometown, he becomes obsessed with the killings.

Film Carewzin': Max Records delivers a great central turn as the film’s unhinged teen, but after two acts suggesting a work of psychological exploration, the third turns into a horror-movie where everyone gets killed.

Go Watch It If: You always suspected Doc Brown was evil.

IN JACKSON HEIGHTS

Director: Frederick Wiseman (USA)

Premise: Grass-roots meetings in the titular Queens neighbourhood.

Film Carewzin': 46 features since his legendary 1967 debut Titicut Follies, the tireless Wiseman continues chronicling the inner workings of social institutions. And, yes, his latest is three hours of committee discussions.

Go Watch It If: You’ve got Wiseman-worthy patience.

IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY

Director: Tamer El Said (Egypt)

Premise: In Cairo in 2010, a filmmaker struggles to find an apartment and make a documentary whilst, around him, revolution brews.

Film Carewzin': It’s common for festival films to boast of being portraits of cities, but all of El Said’s themes —cultural memory, the power of place, socieities, the soul of cities on film— actually feed into this notion.

Go Watch It If: Cairo beckons.

JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE

Director: Amy Berg (USA)

Premise: The obligatory Janis Joplin rockumentary.

Film Carewzin': Normally a great provocateur, here Berg feels like she’s just taking a paid gig. It’s as you expect: all talking-heads and Woodstock-footage, its subject at once humanised and mythologised.

Go Watch It If: Feelin’ good is easy when she sings the blues.

KAILI BLUES

Director: Bi Gan (China)

Premise: An ex-con turned doctor heads out onto the road, and descends into a cinematic tone-poem.

Film Carewzin': For a film that introduces us to characters named Pisshead and Crazy Face, Kaili Blues soon submits to a radical reverie, its unbroken 40-minute tracking shot one of MIFF’s most audacious formalist gestures.

Go Watch It If: You want to see an unbroken 40-minute tracking shot.

KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE

Director: Robert Greene (USA)

Premise: Kate Lyn Sheil researches Christine Chubbuck, the Florida reporter who killed herself live on TV in 1974, for a film about the idea of playing her.

Film Carewzin': Following last year’s Actress, Green stages another docu-fiction hybrid exploring the psyche —and the frustrations— of an actor. Here, as Sheil grapples with attempting to summon the spirit of an elusive phantom, Kate Plays Christine becomes a commentary on artistic inspiration/exploitation, shot through with the tragedy of time.

Go Watch It If: You’re coupling it with the straight biopic Christine, its unintended companion-piece.

KEDI

Director: Ceyda Torun (Turkey)

Premise: The cats of Istanbul.

Film Carewzin': Torun’s documentary tails a handful of cats as they traipse around alleys and cafés, capturing some of MIFF’s most memorable characters.

Go Watch It If: 80 minutes of cat-watching sounds purr-fect.

THE LAND OF THE ENLIGHTENED

Director: Pieter-Jan De Pue (Belgium/Afghanistan)

Premise: Afghani conflict, lawlessness, smuggling, and warfare, partially re-enacted with gangs of boys.

Film Carewzin': It feels like some kind of production miracle that this singular docu-drama —shot on the ground in Afghanistan, with local kids, non-professionals, and soldiers— even exists. It’s most effective in those moments in which children wield weapons, staggering mountains looming in the background.

Go Watch It If: You’re already terrified by kids at play.

THE LOST ARCADE

Director: Kurt Vincent (USA)

Premise: The last video-game arcade in Manhattan is about to close down.

Film Carewzin': At its best, Vincent’s documentary is an affectionate portrait of a place in which various lost souls could find a home. At its worst, it feels like a shrine to the boys-club inclusiveness that’s so problematic in the world of gamers.

Go Watch It If: Hadouken! Hadouken! Shoryuken!

LOUIS THEROUX: MY SCIENTOLOGY MOVIE

Director: John Dower (USA)

Premise: Louis Theroux sets out to make a movie about Scientology, bumbles into shenanigans.

Film Carewzin': Theroux’s genial, dithering Englishman shtick proves the perfect foil for Scientology’s corporatised culture of bullying, delusion, and pompousness; the absurdity of the whole “’religion’” symbolised by two film crews arguing over who has the write to film whom.

Go Watch It If: The Scientologists haven’t already bought up all the tickets.

LOVETRUE

Director: Alma Har’el (USA)

Premise: Varying portraits of young love —parental, familial, romantic— told with elements of both documentary and fiction.

Film Carewzin': Har’el’s follow-up to Bombay Beach is another poetic portrait of life on the American fringe, which combines documentary, vérité, and pure flights of fantasy. Ultimately, it plays as dark meditation on contemporary life; a wayward surfer-dad’s lament “I wish we could make a movie just only about good things” painful in its hopeful naïveté.

Go Watch It If: Love hurts.

THE LURE

Director: Agnieszka Smoczyńska (Poland)

Premise: A man-eating mermaid musical.

Film Carewzin': Sadly, The Lure can never really live up to its premise. Once you get past sexy synth-pop sirens carolling Polish pop-hits in between tearing out dudes’ throats, the film lags way more than any —90-minute!— man-eating mermaid musical should.

Go Watch It If: You’re either a creep with a mermaid fetish, or someone who wants to mock creeps with mermaid fetishes.

MA

Director: Celia Rowlson-Hall (USA)

Premise: On the mythical open road of the American highway, the Virgin Mary myth is retold in symbolist imagery and striking silence.

Film Carewzin': Rowlson-Hall is a choreographer turned filmmaker, and her debut is one of MIFF’s most singular films: a procession of evocative images, dancerly movements, and sweet soundtrack cues.

Go Watch It If: You’ve Cremaster’d.

MADLY

Director: Gael García Bernal, Anurag Kashyap, Natasha Khan, Sebastián Silva, Sion Sono, Mia Wasikowska (Argentina/India/UK/USA/Japan/Australia)

Premise: Six short films about love, one globetrotting omnibus.

Film Carewzin': Omnibus movies are never great; and, here, there’s little uniting Silva’s heavy-handed streetkid melodrama with Sono’s broad, bawdy sex-comedy. But Wasikowska’s droll, vividly-photographed portrait of post-natal depression, and Khan’s directorial debut —foreshadowing her conceptual LP/movie project The Bride— will be sure curios for certain viewers.

Go Watch It If: You love that Bat For Lashes.

A MAGICAL SUBSTANCE FLOWS INTO ME

Director: Jumana Manna (Palestine)

Premise: Excavating 1930s radio-broadcasts, this documentary explores the history —and the very notion of— Palestinian music.

Film Carewzin': Utterly out of place in MIFF’s rockumentary-riddled Backbeat ghetto, Manna’s illuminated film is a sublime shrine to traditional musics, and a conversation on ethnic histories, national identities, and Middle Eastern politics.

Go Watch It If: Music is sweet succour to thee.

THE MAN FROM MO’WAX

Director: Matthew Jones (USA)

Premise: The rise and fall of Mo’Wax boss/UNKLE entrepreneur James Lavelle.

Film Carewzin': Blessed are the rockumentaries that’re unafraid of presenting their subjects as total dicks.

Go Watch It If: Film Carew is hosting the Q&A on August 5; come heckle me!

MEN & CHICKEN

Director: Anders Thomas Jensen (Denmark)

Premise: A pair of hapless brothers discover they were adopted, and that their family tree is full of genetic experiments.

Film Carewzin': This grotesque Danish knees-up features Mads Mikkelsen in prosthetic make-up, endless wacky mugging, high-comic hijinks, and desperate attempts to repulse.

Go Watch It If: You like your beer cold, your TV loud, and your comedy zany.

MISS IMPOSSIBLE

Director: Émilie Deleuze (France)

Premise: A rebellious 13-year-old girl, forced to repeat the 7th grade, finds respite when she starts playing in a rockband.

Film Carewzin': This lively coming-of-age comedy is blessed with a great lead: an angry adolescent pissed off at her parents, teachers, boys in general. Eventually, a charming teacher, new bandmates, and artistic expression serve as outlets.

Go Watch It If: Anyone’s ever critiqued your lyrics.

MONSIEUR MAYONNAISE

Director: Trevor Graham (Australia)

Premise: Filmmaker Philippe Mora (maker of the great Hitler-home-movie cut-up Swastika in 1973) explores the life of his father, who, prior to becoming a Melburnian restaurateur, was a German Jew in the French underground, smuggling children into Switzerland.

Film Carewzin': An accessible, at-times-cutesy documentary exploring the distant history of a famous Melbourne family; its greatest revelation where the name Mora, itself, came from.

Go Watch It If: You like your survivor stories told in brightly-coloured oil-pants, served with baguettes.

NATIONAL BIRD

Director: Sonia Kennebeck (USA)

Premise: Ex-military personnel lament their involvement in the drone program.

Film Carewzin': Whilst it lacks the long-view of Tonje Hessen Schei’s quizzical, artful, ultimately superior Drone, Kennebeck’s intimate, personal portrait of the post-traumatic effects of drone guilt grows into a sideways critique of a nation obsessed with persecuting its whistleblowers.

Go Watch It If: Drone strikes strike fear.

NO HOME MOVIE

Director: Chantal Akerman (Belgium)

Premise: Nearing the end of her own life, Chantal Akerman watches her frail mother inch slowly towards death.

Film Carewzin': Akerman’s final film is a slow-moving study in mortality, in which the director’s signature playing with time —her long, dry shots of banal domesticity— taps into the cold march of temporality.

Go Watch It If: Akerman’s 2015 death still aches.

NUTS!

Director: Penny Lane (USA)

Premise: The life and times of early-20th-century medical huckster John Brinkley, told in wry animation.

Film Carewzin': A man whose life was as ridiculous as Brinkley —he claimed to be able to transplant goat testicles into infertile men, sold tap-water tonics, ran for Governor of Kansas, built the world’s largest radio antenna— deserves a cinematic recounting as ridiculous as Nuts!

Go Watch It If: The gall of a shyster makes you laugh.

ON RICHARD’S SIDE

Director: Andrew Wiseman (Australia)

Premise: Now entering his 30s, Richard —who has suffered from a complex disability since birth— must enter a home, the burden of his care too great for his aging, infirm parents.

Film Carewzin': Wiseman occasionally submits to sentimentalising, but his documentary is blessed with three decades of filming; the passing of time, and the sense of loss, lingering in its story.

Go Watch It If: You know disability isn’t inspirational, but difficult.

 

OUR HUFF & PUFF JOURNEY

Director: Daigo Matsui (Japan)

Premise: A quartet of rural schoolgirls undertake an impulsive cross-country roadtrip to see J-pop stars Creephyp play in Tokyo

Film Carewzin': After last year’s super-kawaii Wonderful World End, Matsui returns with another film couched in the world of Japanese female adolescence. In classic roadtrip fashion, it’s a film about a journey, not a destination; and this journey comes with endless selfies, status-updates, and traded txts.

Go Watch It If: (▰˘◡˘▰)

PARIS 05:59

Director: Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau (France)

Premise: Two guys meet in an orgy, then go get an AIDS test together.

Film Carewzin': Starting off with 15 minutes of straight sex-club fucking, Paris 05:59 rolls through the smallest hours of the night in real time, making explicit references to Cléo From 5 To 7 and Céline And Julie Go Boating.

Go Watch It If: Looking: The Movie just made you cry.

RADIO DREAMS

Director: Babak Jalali (USA/Iran)

Premise: A long, strange, bickering day at a shoestring Iranian-American radio-station in San Francisco, where the Afghani rockband Kabul Dreams is scheduled to meet metal icons Metallica.

Film Carewzin': Waiting For Metallica.

Go Watch It If: Patience is your virtue.

RESET

Director: Thierry Demaizière & Alban Teurlai (France)

Premise: Benjamin Millepied choreographs his first work for the Paris Opera Ballet.

Film Carewzin': Given the observationist treatment in Frederick Wiseman’s 2009 doc La Danse, here’s a much sprightlier, more accessible portrait of bodies in motion, rehearsals in progress, and an ambitious director butting up against a conservative institution.

Go Watch It If: You can dance. For inspiration.

RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN

Director: Hong Sang-soo (South Korea)

Premise: A badly-dressed middle-aged filmmaker wanders around tourist spots, meets a younger woman, and embarrassingly attempts to seduce her. Then, the story is repeated a second time, with variations on the theme.

Film Carewzin': Anyone who finds that premise —and the diptych structure— familiar has sure seen a Hong joint before. But, with his 17th film, there’s now an added current of art-imitating-life: the middle-aged filmmaker actually seducing his leading lady (The Handmaiden’s great Kim Min-hee) during the filming, leading to Korean cinematic scandal.

Go Watch It If: You know you wanna see that Hong Hong Hong Hong Hong.

SIERANEVADA

Director: Cristi Puiu (Romania)

Premise: A Romanian family argues for three hours.

Film Carewzin': At a wake, the gathered masses squabble over 9/11 conspiracy, Communist history, adultery, borscht, suit measurements, parking spots, Church vs State; pretty much everything. Puiu makes the family home feel like a dark prison, his camera lurking in the shadowy hallway, peeking in at various rooms.

Go Watch It If: Family dinners are a source of endless suffering.

THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS

Director: Ben Rivers (UK)

Premise: A Spanish director, on location in Morocco, shoots an exotic desert epic. But then he’s captured by local nomads, and forced to endlessly dance in costume.

Film Carewzin': Following the black-metal séance A Spell To Ward Of The Darkness, Rivers’ latest is another mix of ethnographic cinema, art-movie minimalism, and musical ritual. After a slow, sweaty, 16mm-desert-landscapes beginning, things get stranger —and better— when its lead is turned into the King Of Cans, a Mighty Boosh-esque, tin-lid-covered character who lives a life of indentured dancing.

Go Watch It If: You’re game.

SONITA

Director: Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami (Iran)

Premise: 15-year-old Sonita dreams of being a rapper, despite the fact women are forbidden from publicly performing music in Iran, and her family back in Afghanistan want to sell her into marriage.

Film Carewzin': Maghami’s documentary questions the form itself, the filmmaker wrestling with notions of objectivity and her ‘observer’ status. Rather than just watch on as her subject is subjected to suffering, Maghami becomes an active, interventionist part of both her life and the film.

Go Watch It If: Music is your weapon of choice.

SOUR GRAPES

Director: Jerry Rothwell & Reuben Atlas (USA)

Premise: A hustler drives up the prices in the fine wine market, then floods it with counterfeits.

Film Carewzin': This delightful documentary puts a highbrow spin on true-crime. Casually skewering the rarefied realm of wine-sniffing, it’s an evocative portrait of the mutual delusion of the relationship between “the forger and the dupe”.

Go Watch It If: You want to see a fool and his money soon parted.

STARLESS DREAMS

Director: Mehrdad Oskouei (Iran)

Premise: A year at a juvenile detention centre for Iranian girls.

Film Carewzin': There’s a great moment in this profound documentary where, playing up to the camera, two girls start interviewing each other; breaking down not just the fourth wall, but the static observation. Thereafter, Oskouei slowly inches into the story, his presence in the prison a definitive part of their experience, his camera serving as sympathetic confessional.

Go Watch It If: You’re ready for your heart to break.

SUBURRA

Director: Stefano Sollima (Italy)

Premise: A waterfront-redevelopment proposal in Rome involves various crime families, local hoods, corrupt politicians, hookers, and the Vatican.

Film Carewzin': With its sad-synth score, stylised visuals, and top-notch acting, Suburra is essentially a fabulously-mounted collection of mafia-movie clichés.

Go Watch It If: The phrase ‘shootout in a supermarket’ excites you.

SUNSET SONG

Director: Terence Davies (UK)

Premise: A farmgirl must survive the unrelentingly-grim Scottish countryside and its abusive patriarchy.

Film Carewzin': Davies’ lyrical melodrama is an artful matinée, a tragic period-piece in which certain moments of filmmaking —most involving fields of wheat— are breathtaking. But there’s a manipulative quality to its drama, and the casting of ex-model Agyness Deyn in the lead role: the sufferings of its heroine deemed to be intolerable largely because she’s so beautiful.

Go Watch It If: You haven’t seen enough films where Peter Mullan plays an abusive drunk.

SUNTAN

Director: Argyris Papadimitropoulos (Greece)

Premise: On a tiny Greek isle, the depressed, doughy local doctor (Makis Papadimitriou, also of Chevalier) falls in thrall to a young, hot patient, and is drawn into Dionysian revelry and dark obsession.

Film Carewzin': A true MIFF standout, Suntan is a fabulously-photographed, tragicomic portrait of middle-age male desperation.

Go Watch It If: You’re not easily embarrassed.

TICKLED

Director: David Farrier & Dylan Reeve (New Zealand)

Premise: A journalist’s interest in the bizarre world of competitive tickling leads him down an investigative rabbit-hole.

Film Carewzin': One of the year’s most strange, unsettling films, Tickled is a true stranger-than-fiction tale, in which online tickling videos lead to a disturbing underworld of fraud, family money, fetishry, litigious bullying, and online shaming.

Go Watch It If: It tickles your fancy.

UNLOCKING THE CAGE

Director: Chris Hegedus & D.A. Pennebaker (USA)

Premise: An animal rights lawyer attempts to have chimpanzees granted legal ‘personhood’ status, in an attempt to change the conditions in which they’re allowed to be kept.

Film Carewzin': This patient, observationist doc is, essentially, a portrait of the shift in social values pushing ahead of the slow-turning wheel of justice.

Go Watch It If: You believe in the rights of all primates, from Chimpan-A to Chimpan-zee.

A WAR

Director: Tobias Lindholm (Denmark)

Premise: After his involvement in battle on the ground in Afghanistan, a Danish soldier must return home and answer to his actions in court.

Film Carewzin': As with his excellent A Hijacking, Lindholm never turns to easy answers or emotional manipulation, his film an exploration of legality, competing positions, and the ever-slippery notion of what is ‘right’.

Go Watch It If: You’re less into the conflicts of warfare, more into the ethics of warfare.

WEINER

Director: Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg (USA)

Premise: Disgraced, dick-pic-sendin’ politician Anthony Weiner throws himself into the New York mayoral race.

Film Carewzin': Instantly in the running for the greatest political documentary ever captured on camera, Weiner is a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at campaigning in the face of controversy, and, ultimately, idiocy.

Go Watch It If: You yearn to ask a politician “what is wrong with you?”