Film Carew: 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival Extravaganza
Your comprehensive guide to almost 60 films on offer at this year's MIFF... the least you could do is go and watch some of them.
This week finds the opening of the 66th Melbourne International Film Festival, the annual movie-going monolith that brings with it almost too much cinema to consider. How much is too much? 266 features are due to screen over 17 days in Melbourne, from glittering galas to scuzzy all-night-sci-fi marathons.
If that all sounds too bewildering, yr old pal Film Carew is here to help: with reviews of every film I could possibly see before MIFF kicks off, for real, on Friday.
78/52
Director: Alexandre O. Philippe (USA)
Premise: An in-depth exploration of the shower scene from Psycho, in all its 78 cuts.
Film Carewzin': Cinema-nerds rejoice! Film school hits MIFF as nerdy talking heads break down the sights and sounds of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, from theme to composition, editing to sound.
Go Watch It If: Shot-by-shot breakdowns make your heart beat faster.
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ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL
Director: Steve James (USA)
Premise: Chinatown’s tiny, family-run Abacus Federal Savings Bank is indicted on specious claims, in a shameless show-trial staged as PR stunt.
Film Carewzin': The notion of a New York bank as a figure of sympathy seems unlikely, but James’ documentary finds a community bank as David in a vs-Goliath court-battle. And, it gins up the appropriate outrage at justice misdirected, small-timers run through the court after Wall Street criminals got off scot-free.
Go Watch It If: You’ve already got the appropriate outrage.
THE ALLINS
Director: Sami Saif (Denmark)
Premise: The life and crimes of the most infamous rock’n’roller ever, GG Allin, and the modern-day travails of the family left with his legacy.
Film Carewzin': If you’ve ever heard of GG Allin, it’s likely due to his on-stage acts of self-destruction and defecation. This surprisingly sentimental documentary goes beyond humanising its rockumentary subject, instead spending time with the heartbroken mother and legacy-capitalising brother.
Go Watch It If: You’ve ever wanted to meet GG Allin’s mum.
ANA, MON AMOUR
Director: Călin Peter Netzer (Romania)
Premise: The entire romantic history of a relationship, from giddy days as crazy kids in love, to eventually being married, miserable, middle-aged.
Film Carewzin': Netzer’s Child’s Pose follow-up is a long, slow descent into dissatisfaction, making it a hard film to recommend.
Go Watch It If: You want to see some of the greatest male-pattern-baldness wig-work in cinema history.
AUSTERLITZ
Director: Sergei Loznitsa (Germany)
Premise: Static cameras watch on as tourists walk the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp.
Film Carewzin': With the site of human atrocities turned into memorial museums, Loznitsa watches on, in silent judgment, at the crowds flocking to tragedy-tourism.
Go Watch It If: Being trapped amongst hordes of gawping, selfie-taking Americans isn’t your idea of a nightmare. Or, indeed, if it is.
THE BELKO EXPERIMENT
Director: Greg McLean (USA)
Premise: An officeful of corporate cubicle-dwellers are forced to kill each other off in a workplace Battle Royale.
Film Carewzin': For a film about office-workers made to play murderous sport, you’d be hoping for some incisive corporate satire. Instead, writer/producer James ‘Guardians Of The’ Gunn can only set up a one-by-one horror-movie kill-off, and McLean only seems interested in depicting grisly, bloody deaths.
Go Watch It If: Low standards apply.
BIG BIG WORLD
Director: Reha Erdem (Turkey)
Premise: Runaways on the lam.
Film Carewzin': A pair of handsome teens — orphans raised together, but who aren’t siblings by blood — escape their foster families and retreat into the isolation of a remote, Edenic lake. But their enclave is soon threatened by encroaching terrors, not least of which is their incipient sexuality.
Go Watch It If: You like stories about clever and reasonably attractive orphans.
BLUE
Director: Karina Holden (Australia)
Premise: Industrialised driftnetting + marine life slaughter + plastic waste + coral bleaching + climate change = the oceans dying around us.
Film Carewzin': Whilst most world-is-fucked documentaries lean on talking-heads and statistical slides, Holden’s elegy for the toxic seas is gloriously photographed, the beauty of its oceanic imagery — both above and below the waves — adding to the film’s central tragedy.
Go Watch It If: You’ve never seen a seabird spew plastic from its pumped stomach.
THE CHALLENGE
Director: Yuri Ancarani (France/Italy)
Premise: A host of ultra-rich Qatari men gather in the desert — via luxury sportscars, 4WDs, and motorcycles — for a falconry tournament. BYO pet cheetah.
Film Carewzin': MIFF’s surprising highlight is the Arabian-Falconry-Documentary-Of-Your-Dreams that you never knew you needed. The most visually stunning doc since the Harvard Sensory Ethnographic Laboratory’s Leviathan, Ancarani’s every frame is like a painting, every scene at once rapturously beautiful and absurdly funny. Its falcon’s-eye-view finale is a triumph, one of the great sequences of cinema you’ll see in the festival, or anywhere else.
Go Watch It If: God willed it.
CHAVELA
Directors: Catherine Gund & Daresha Kyi (USA)
Premise: The life and legacy of Chavela Vargas, queer icon of Latin-American song.
Film Carewzin': Vargas is a towering figure, whose 20th-century-spanning career crossed paths with everyone from Frida Kahlo to Pedro Almodóvar. Yet, Chavela feels borderline boilerplate, employing rockumentary tropes in service of your standard-issue talking-heads hagiography.
Go Watch It If: Almodóvar is your spirit animal.
CITY OF GHOSTS
Director: Matthew Heineman (USA)
Premise: A covertly filmed chronicle of the citizen journalists of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, an organisation out to document the horrors of daily life in the ISIS stronghold.
Film Carewzin': Heineman’s follow-up to his on-the-ground classic Cartel Land is another fraught picture filled with danger: assembled from footage shot by Syrian activists both at home and in exile, its subjects all living in ongoing fear of assassination.
Go Watch It If: You’ve got the stomach.
COLO
Director: Teresa Villaverde (Portugal/France)
Premise: A Portuguese family falls apart under the socio-economic strains of EU financial collapse.
Film Carewzin': “Real life is the shittest thing ever”, says one character, herein; yet Villaverde’s sombre, glowering, po-faced picture is neither a shrine to realism or an escapist tonic. It’s, instead, an unrepentantly dour art-movie that never quite takes hold.
Go Watch It If: You go to MIFF for the unrepentantly dour art-movies.
DAPHNE
Director: Peter Mackie Burns (UK)
Premise: A sassy single girl loses herself in a self-destructive downward spiral of swiping right, swilling booze, snorting drugs, banging her boss, and not caring when she sees a man stabbed.
Film Carewzin': Girls-Doing-Bad-Things comedies are wildly proliferating on screens both big and small, but Burns’ smartly penned character study is no cutesy comedy offering gross-out yucks and lessons learnt. Instead, it’s a work of searing misanthropy, its obvious cinematic forebear Mike Leigh’s Naked.
Go Watch It If: Your nights are your days.
DEATH IN THE TERMINAL
Directors: Asaf Sudry & Tali Shemesh (Israel)
Premise: The CCTV footage of an Israeli terrorist attack — and its troubling aftermath — broken down frame by grainy frame.
Film Carewzin': In the wake of a shooting at a Beersheba bus depot, enraged locals and gung-ho cops turn on the man they think did it. The resulting tragedy is an indictment of bellicose Islamophobia, but a potent symbol of mob mentality that ably applies to, say, insta-internet-outrage.
Go Watch It If: There’s no justice like angry mob justice.
THE DREAMED PATH
Director: Angela Schanelec (Germany)
Premise: Twin narratives set decades apart, in which relationships fall apart in awkward silence and deadpan set-ups.
Film Carewzin': ‘Changing European social structures reflected by decaying relationships’ is a great Hanekean theme, and Schanelec even brings a cold, steady gaze to proceedings. But the flat affect of her drama doesn’t take as either stylistic quirk or thematic element, and the result is a picture of ideas trapped in a dulled mise-en-scène.
Go Watch It If: You want to make sure you see MIFF films that have zero chance of subsequent cinematic release.
ETHEL & ERNEST
Director: Roger Mainwood (UK)
Premise: Comic artist Raymond Briggs tells the story of his parents, who met in the Depression, lived through the Blitz, and battled on through mid-century Britain.
Film Carewzin': MIFF’s #1 Hit Jam for Old People
. Go Watch It If: You’re enthused by hand-drawn animation, life during the Blitz, and/or the word “blimey!”
GIRL UNBOUND
Director: Erin Heidenreich (Canada/Pakistan)
Premise: Pakistan squash player Maria Toorpakai hopes to be women’s world champion, whilst her family deals with ongoing death threats and extortion demands.
Film Carewzin': Conflating sporting success with social worth is never a wise idea but, with Toorpakai — a defiant proponent of feminism from the Taliban-controlled ‘tribal lands’ of Waziristan — the cap fits.
Go Watch It If: Y’wanna cheer on a genuine winner.
GOOD TIME
Directors: Josh & Benny Safdie (USA)
Premise: Across one wild night in New York, a small-time criminal descends into a downward spiral of bad choices.
Film Carewzin': The Safdie bros earnt a MIFF retrospective in 2015, but the brothers — in only their early 30s — are only now just hitting their stride. Good Time is far-and-away their best picture, a hurtling, throttling, on-the-lam thriller soaked in Oneohtrix Point Never’s retro-synths and powered by an electric turn from Robert Pattinson.
Go Watch It If: It’s literally called Good Time, what more d’you want?
A GRAY STATE
Director: Erik Nelson (USA)
Premise: An alt-right conspiracy theorist, his wife, and daughter, are found dead in their home in 2014. But they leave behind 1000s hours of video footage and a host of journals, to clue in on the mystery of their deaths.
Film Carewzin': Nelson’s documentary draws you into the life of a self-made man — a former soldier out to make a dystopian blockbuster for far-right Infowars gun-nuts — whose devotion to conspiracy theories, not surprisingly, was the symptom of a paranoid, delusional mind. They call it the ‘lunatic fringe’ for a reason.
Go Watch It If: True Crime’s yr bag.
HELLO, GOODBYE
Director: Takeo Kikuchi (Japan)
Premise: Two schoolgirls — one the class’s queen bee, the other its most studious nerd — team up to help an old, Alzheimer’s-afflicted woman.
Film Carewzin': This incredibly sentimental adolescent drama features more emo piano music than you can imagine, and essentially feels like a lesson teaching kids that old people were once young, too. But, its story is pleasingly free from cliché, and unafraid of a central truth that life is hard, often cruel.
Go Watch It If: You love a drama that hinges on a handwritten letter.
I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
Director: Raoul Peck (USA)
Premise: A documentary on James Baldwin, the poet laureate of the Civil Rights movement.
Film Carewzin': Peck matches Baldwin’s words to images of dissent from Birmingham to Ferguson. “The story of the negro in America is the story of America,” he says, herein (via Samuel L. Jackson’s motherfuckin’ narration). “It is not a pretty story.”
Go Watch It If: You want to see archival footage of unrepentant mid-20th-century racists picketing against integration.
THE IDEA OF A LAKE
Director: Milagros Mumenthaler (Switzerland/Argentina)
Premise: A pregnant artist assembles a photography book based on memories — and images — from childhood summers spent at her family’s lakeside holiday house.
Film Carewzin': Mumenthaler’s beautifully composed and emotionally rich film is a study of memory, both for the individual and the collective. Its protagonist is obsessed with her vivid childhood memories (a game of flashlight-toting nocturnal hide-and-seek is striking), in part, because they get her closer to the phantasm of her father, who was ‘disappeared’ in the Dirty Wars.
Go Watch It If: You’re ready for the moment when a Herbie-inspired fantasy sequence turns a sublime film silly.
INSYRIATED
Director: Philippe van Leeuw (Belgium/Lebanon)
Premise: In Damascus, in the face of nearby fire-fights and incoming air-raids, a Syrian matriarch tries to keep the residents of an apartment block — friends, families, neighbours — together under the one roof.
Film Carewzin': It’s a classic invasion thriller — keep yourselves safe inside, and menacing interlopers outside — that’s loaded with trenchant theme, socio-political symbolism, and a sense of humanity.
Go Watch It If: You admire cinematic stories about the eternal collision between social chaos and individual control.
JAPANESE GIRLS NEVER DIE
Director: Daigo Matsui (Japan)
Premise: Haruko Azumi is missing.
Film Carewzin': After delivering two super-kawaii pics about adolescent female bonding/txting, Matsui makes something more ambitious: a complex, non-linear portrait of street-art, fanciful vigilantism, and feminist uprising. It’s wild, wacky, wonky, and out to take down Japan’s entrenched patriarchy.
Go Watch It If: Sassy Schoolgirls Take Out Armed SWAT Team is the scene o’ yr dreams.
JUNGLE
Director: Greg McLean (Australia)
Premise: On a camping expedition with some bearded pals, Harry Potter gets lost in the Bolivian jungle, and struggles to survive. Cue: triumph of the human spirit.
Film Carewzin': With ol’ Wolf Creek bean McLean behind the camera, it’s not surprising that MIFF’s opening night feature is less a heroic survival story, more a gruesome work of survival horror.
Go Watch It If: You want to see a worm pulled from a bloody wound in a man’s forehead.
THE LAST FAMILY
Director: Jan P. Matuszyński (Poland)
Premise: Dysfunctional family saga charting three decades in the life of Polish horror-surrealist painter Zdzisław Beksiński, and his wayward, loose-cannon son.
Film Carewzin': Rather than setting his march of time against the epochs of communism and capitalism, Matuszyński instead charts the passage of time via pop-culture and technology, the apartments of father/son each lairs stacked high with film reels, tapes, LPs, CDs, etc.
Go Watch It If: You want to stare death, madness, and camcorder home-movie close-ups in the eye.
LEMON
Director: Janicza Bravo (USA)
Premise: An LA acting teacher commits various blackly-comic acts of pettiness, prejudice, tone-deafness, and stupidity.
Film Carewzin': Setting human ‘lemon’ Brett Gelman loose amidst a game comic cast (Michael Cera, Gillian Jacobs, Judy Greer, Megan Mullally, Martin Starr, Jeff Garlin, Fred Melamed, etc), Bravo delights in social awkwardness and deadpan absurdity. Her film is halfway between farce and satirical tragedy, a scattershot collection of comic riffs that capture the chaos of being around an idiotic man trumped up on male entitlement.
Go Watch It If: Awkwardness is your default social state.
LIBERATION DAY
Directors: Morten Traavik & Uģis Olte (Norway/Latvia)
Premise: The first-ever North Korean concert for a Western rock band is staged by... Latvian industrial-metal conceptualists Laibach?
Film Carewzin': Given Laibach’s militaristic music was born as a parody of Eastern Bloc totalitarianism, it’s wild that, in 2015, they showed up in Pyongyang and performed a set of Sound Of Music covers, achieving a historic moment of cultural exchange. This documentary chronicle, however, shows the band’s smirking sedition slowly seeping away, Liberation Day ultimately a portrait of artists eventually catering to the demands of their overseers.
Go Watch It If: You can’t get enough of that crazy DPRK!
A LIFE IN WAVES
Director: Brett Whitcomb (USA)
Premise: Suzanne Ciani’s oft-overlooked career gets the rockumentary treatment.
Film Carewzin': Whilst it’s nice that Ciani — so long a maligned, female figure in a macho music-nerd world — gets a documentary all of her own, this is a very familiar-feeling film of little cinematic ambition.
Go Watch It If: You love watching old, kitschy ads.
THE LOST CITY OF Z
Director: James Gray (USA)
Premise: In the early 20th century, British explorer Percy Fawcett grows obsessed with finding a lost civilisation in the Amazon. It’s, ultimately, a search from which he’ll never return.
Film Carewzin': Gray’s latest slice of luminous celluloid is a widescreen jungle adventure, featuring for-real film-stars — Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson — shot, with due reverence, in 35mm widescreen glory. Whilst it’s about the march towards reason, and, in such, the decline of English imperialism, there’s a spiritual quality to the film, evoking the ineffability of ecological splendour, spiritualism of any stripe, and cinema itself.
Go Watch It If: You love an old-fashioned matinée.
THE LOVERS
Director: Azazel Jacobs (USA)
Premise: An aging husband-and-wife juggle their respective extra-marital affairs with a rediscovered passion for each other.
Film Carewzin': One of MIFF’s most surprising films, The Lovers takes a sitcom set-up and mines it for both laughs and dark human truths. Jacobs remains, as ever, fascinated by family dynamics; at the way the intimacy of domestic units breeds both love and hate.
Go Watch It If: ‘Pleasing arthouse comedy’ feels like a space safe to head amidst all the grim auteurism.
MANIFESTO
Director: Julian Rosefeldt (Germany)
Premise: Cate Blanchett plays 13 different characters reading aloud 13 different artistic manifestos.
Film Carewzin': The play-in-cinemas version of the ol’ ACMI video-art installation, there’s pleasing playfulness in the way Rosefeldt puts Blanchett in various absurdist situations (as snob, hobo, teacher, puppeteer, newsreader), as she recites various manifestos, from Fluxus to Dada to Dogme.
Go Watch It If: I’m Not There summoned a desire for chameleonic Cate Blanchett turns and art-as-fluid-identity monkeyshines.
MAUDIE
Director: Aisling Walsh (Canada/Ireland)
Premise: The dramatised, Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke-starring life-and-times of Canadian outsider folk-artist Maud Lewis.
Film Carewzin': A little too telemovie for my tastes.
Go Watch It If: Folksiness is your favourite cinematic trait.
MOTHERLAND
Director: Ramona S. Díaz (Philippines/USA)
Premise: Inside the busiest maternity ward in the world.
Film Carewzin': Amidst the hubbub of an overtaxed Filipino hospital, Díaz seeks out moments intimate, stilled, personal; the film’s most memorable images of the parents of premature babies who incubate their newborns by wearing them constantly pressed to their chests.
Go Watch It If: Hospital dramas usually seem, to you, too insincere.
NEWTON
Director: Amit V. Masurkar (India)
Premise: In the Indian election, everyone gets a vote. Even a handful of disinterested stragglers in the war-torn jungles of Chhattisgarh.
Film Carewzin': Both a satirical mockery of electioneering and a warm-hearted tribute to those bureaucrats and volunteers who make the electoral process possible.
Go Watch It If: Vote Yes on nice movies.
NOCTURAMA
Director: Bertrand Bonello (France)
Premise: A multi-cultural cast of attractive French youths detonate a host of explosions, then hole up in a department store.
Film Carewzin': I’ll ride hard for Bonello’s first four films — The Pornographer, Tiresia, On War, and House Of Tolerance — but maybe he’s wobbling. After his loopy bootleg Saint Laurent, this stylish-but-pretty-vacant portrait of domestic terrorism and conspicuous capitalism doesn’t quite work. It’s a provocative measure to take the theatre of terror from the province of hysterical zealotry into the realm of existential ennui; especially by positing Parisian attacks as being, like US school-shootings, some familiar rite of adolescent-outsider passage. But beyond its audaciousness, the film ultimately functions as extension of its central antagonists: in depicting a grand gesture without meaning, Nocturama feels somewhat the same.
Go Watch It If: You want to spend a night in a department store with a bunch of teenage dicks.
THE PARTY
Director: Sally Potter (UK)
Premise: A host of celebrity actors arrive at a bourgeois dinner-party, and proceed to spill secrets one after the next.
Film Carewzin': Potter is the subject of a MIFF retrospective, despite a spotty career and a new film that’s a thin comedy with very obvious limits. Stagey and over-written (replete with Chekhov’s Gun, that most tired theatrical trope), it relies wholly on the titillation of scandalous revelation.
Go Watch It If: You’ve ever barked “Filthy! But genuinely arousing…” at a soap-opera.
PHANTOM BOY
Directors: Alain Gagnol & Jean-Loup Felicioli (Belgium/France)
Premise: A boy with cancer and a wounded cop solve crimes as a pair of ghost fighters. No, really.
Film Carewzin': Whilst the story is a collection of cobbled-together clichés delivered with the aggressive stupidity of people who look at kids condescendingly, this film is also from the peeps who animated A Cat In Paris. Which means it’s hand-drawn and wobbly, inspired by cubism and featuring a villain as if painted by Picasso.
Go Watch It If: Your heart’s not as black as mine.
POP AYE
Director: Kirsten Tan (Thailand)
Premise: A road-trip movie starring a sad, ageing architect and an elephant.
Film Carewzin': Come for the elephant, stay for the feelgood, Sundance-approved roadtrip drama about escaping your oppressive life and healing old wounds.
Go Watch It If: Isn’t that what we’re all asking: Where’s my elephant?
A QUIET DREAM
Director: Zhang Lu (South Korea)
Premise: A trio of deadbeat dudes all pursue the same bar-girl in a provincial Korean town.
Film Carewzin': There’s shades of Hong Sang-soo in the story, but none of Hong’s playful formalism. Instead, Zhang’s shaggy-dog tale makes do with depictions of sadness amongst Chinese/North Korean ex-pats in South Korea, and a host of roles played by Korean directors.
Go Watch It If: You’re not just watching MIFF’s 3x Hong films instead.
RAILWAY SLEEPERS
Director: Sompot Chidgasornpongse (Thailand)
Premise: A cross-section of Thai society rides the country’s railways, in a classic direct-cinema doc.
Film Carewzin': Railway Sleepers’ title refers both to the building materials of railways, and to the people who snooze on long-distance journeys. It can also refer to the many audience members who’ll fall asleep in this minimalist, meditative movie.
Go Watch It If: That hypnotic clack-a-clack of the rails makes you restful.
REVOLUTION OF SOUND: TANGERINE DREAM
Director: Margarete Kreuzer (Germany)
Premise: The obligatory Tangerine Dream rockumentary.
Film Carewzin': Proggy jammers turned seminal synth-score authors turned new-age embarrassment turned treasured video-game soundtrackists, the long and winding career of Edgar Froese’s cosmic crew is artistically interesting. But there’s little, here, that doesn’t just play like a rockumentary trope.
Go Watch It If: Synthesisers become thee.
REY
Director: Niles Atallah (Chile/France)
Premise: In the 19th century, a French lawyer tries to marshal the native tribes of Patagonia to band against Spanish colonialists, and create their own kingdom. Of which he, naturally, will be king.
Film Carewzin': This oddball true tale gets a psychedelic retelling in a big MIFF highlight. Whilst ‘experimental’ cinema can, sadly, oft be a place for the po-faced, Rey is powered by an impish sense of mischief, and a sense of genuine fun. This is evident in the director’s inspired — stylistically, thematically, and promotionally — decision to shoot footage then bury the film-stock underground for five years. The dug-up images are full of wild degradation, and offer a commentary on time, collective memory, and cinema.
Go Watch It If: Motley, mottled celluloid is the currency of your memory.
SEXY DURGA
Director: Sanal Kumar Sasidharan (India)
Premise: A pair of runaway lovers — one from the North, one from the South — descend into a night-from-hell when they try and hitch their way to the train station.
Film Carewzin': Whilst there’s limits to its improvised scenes, Sasidharan’s strange film juxtaposes styles and ideas: ethnographic portraits of Kerali culture set against a paranoia-thriller laced with India’s fear of its backwoods ethnic minorities; the reverence for Goddesses set against the social status of lower-caste women in modern Indian.
Go Watch It If: You’ve ever climbed into the back of a sketchy, shadowy van.
THE SILENT EYE
Director: Amiel Courtin-Wilson (Australia)
Premise: In a New York apartment, Min Tanaka dances whilst Cecil Taylor plays the piano.
Film Carewzin': Courtin-Wilson is Australia’s most interesting filmmaker, and here he takes an odd detour into an intimate, experimental performance-piece — interpretive jazz meets interpretive dance meets interpretive editing — that’s so slight it’s hard to recommend as standalone cinematic event.
Go Watch It If: You’re ready to get interpretive.
SLEEPING BEAUTY
Director: Ado Arrietta (France/Spain)
Premise: A riff on the classic fairytale, equal parts old-fashioned storybook and wry modernist.
Film Carewzin': I’m not sure the world really needs more riffs on classic fairytales, but here you go.
Go Watch It If: Given the leads are Niels Schneider and Agathe Bonitzer, you’ve got a thing for ginge babes.
SONG TO SONG
Director: Terrence Malick (USA)
Premise: Hollywood celebrities spin around in circles, hang out by swimming pools, and speak in ponderous voiceovers. And sometimes Patti Smith shows up.
Film Carewzin': Malick’s descent from towering auteur into horrible self-parody is complete with the lamentable Song To Song. Like its predecessor
Go Watch It If: You think hanging out backstage at music festivals is actually cool.
SPETTACOLO
Directors: Chris Shellen & Jeff Malmberg (USA)
Premise: In a tiny hilltop village in Tuscany, local residents stage an annual summer theatre-piece in which they turn their lives into theatre.
Film Carewzin': If you’ve a thing for citizen theatre, art as activism, or shots of the Tuscan countryside, well, lookie here.
Go Watch It If: All your world’s a stage.
SPOOKERS
Director: Florian Habicht (New Zealand)
Premise: A warm-hearted look at the staff who work at the only dedicated horror theme-park in the world, housed in an abandoned psychiatric ward south of Auckland.
Film Carewzin': Habicht’s sense of friendly curiosity is on show throughout Spookers, the oddball Kiwi gathering the stories of all the oddballs and lost kids who’ve ended up working there. What results is a surprisingly sentimental shrine to overcoming trauma and finding your own form of family.
Go Watch It If: The phrase ‘sad clown’ doesn’t terrify you too much.
STONEHEAD
Director: Xiang Zhao (China)
Premise: A host of ten-year-old boys at a rural Chinese school fight over possession of a soccer ball, then over blame for who punctured it.
Film Carewzin': There’s a host of classic Iranian films starring children, in which a simple task — replacing a window, buying some shoes, bringing home a goldfish — becomes mythical, and begets poignant parable. Stonehead doesn’t measure up, but it’s still a vivid portrait of youthful anxieties of rural youths whose parents have moved to cities to find work.
Go Watch It If: The youthful obsession with status objects still burns within.
SWAGGER
Director: Olivier Babinet (France)
Premise: A stylised documentary made about — and in collaboration with — the kids living in a ghetto tower-block in the Parisian suburbs.
Film Carewzin': Giving a swaggering finger to condescending ‘plight of’ movies, Babinet’s film is about both the grim realities and lurid fantasies of immigrant kids, the director putting his music-video history to good use in a host of stylised sequences.
Go Watch It If: You ever wanted to strut down your school corridor in a fuck-you fur-coat.
TOKYO IDOLS
Director: Kyoko Miyake (Japan)
Premise: A whole J-pop industry exists around squeaky-clean pop idols and their armies of loyal fans, who pay fan-club memberships and for exclusive meet-and-greets. The catch? The girls are all teenagers, their fans all lonely middle-aged men.
Film Carewzin': Who knew people could come up with such an elaborate, cartoonish, ridiculous, sexless form of prostitution?
Go Watch It If: Witnessing MIFF’s most secretly creepy film entices thee.
TOP OF THE LAKE: CHINA GIRL
Directors: Jane Campion & Ariel Kleiman (Australia)
Premise: Campion’s beloved procedural soap-opera returns for a second season, in which a dead girl washes up, in a suitcase, on Bondi Beach.
Film Carewzin': There’s plenty to like about the oddball characterisation and self-aware dialogue, here, one character speaking writing tropes aloud, the story forever a story. But, at its heart, Top Of The Lake remains merely an artful riff on that most familiar of detective-tale clichés: This Time, It’s Personal!
Go Watch It If: You yearn to hear Kirin J. Callinan say “it’s not like I’m gettin’ me dick out” in Award-Winning television.
THE VOID
Directors: Steven Kostanski & Jeremy Gillespie (Canada)
Premise: Endless supernatural horror clichés descend on a rural hospital, in one long work of Carpenter fanboi homage.
Film Carewzin': Likely MIFF’s worst film.
Go Watch It If: You put no stock at all in your old pal Film Carew’s advice.
WAITING FOR GIRAFFES
Director: Marco de Stefanis (Belgium/Netherlands)
Premise: In the occupied territories, the walled-off enclave of Qalqilya plays host to the only zoo in Palestine.
Film Carewzin': De Stefanis matches the tone of its central subject — the local vet with dreams of turning the archaic zoo into something modern, wonderful — with the film itself. Whilst life under modern-day apartheid could play as tragedy, here it’s all set to a jaunty, strummin’ soundtrack; this a place where dreams are held with due reverence.
Go Watch It If: Zoo symbolism isn’t lost on you.
WHERE YOU’RE MEANT TO BE
Director: Paul Fegan (UK)
Premise: Arab Strap’s drunken raconteur Aidan Moffat tours bawdy Scots folksongs around backwater pubs, striking up an unexpected friendship with old folk traditionalist Sheila Stewart.
Film Carewzin': By the time you stop off on the shores of Loch Ness for a knees-up, you may suspect you’re watching the most Scottish film e’er made.
Go Watch It If: You went out for the weekend, and it lased forever.
WINNIE
Director: Pascale Lamche (France/South Africa)
Premise: A documentary portrait of the political career of the ever-controversial Winnie Mandela.
Film Carewzin': The second half of a matching his/her pair — following 2004’s Accused #1: Nelson Mandela — Lamche makes another straight-laced documentary about the veritable parents of modern South Africa. Yet, a straight-laced documentary seems out of place for portraying this Mandela. Its controversial subject is an eternally-slippery figure, a dissident, politician, and powerful woman on whom no two opinions are ever alike.
Go Watch It If: You can handle the Talking Heads + Archival Footage formula.
THE WOUND
Director: John Trengrove (South Africa)
Premise: Bristling masculinity, homoeroticism, and sexual transgression meet at a rural rites-of-passage initiation for Xhosa youth.
Film Carewzin': As a portrait of black masculinity, and the taboo of queerness in cultures prizing masculine ‘hardness’, it’s no surprise that The Wound has been called the ‘South African Moonlight’. Which is certainly snappier than calling it ‘like Moonlight, only with added barbaric adult circumcision rituals’.
Go Watch It If: “What’s the purpose of a dick, anyway? Is it really such an important instrument?” are questions you’ve long asked yourself.
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