First Films For 2014 Sydney Film Festival Revealed: A Guide

The Sydney Film Festival has unveiled its first announcement for its 2014 program.

This year's festival - the 61st - will feature a '70s-centric retrospective of legendary American auteur Robert Altman, called Altman on Altman, that screens his definitive films That Cold Day In The Park, M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs Miller, Nashville, 3 Women, A Wedding, Short Cuts, and A Prairie Home Companion. There will also be a 40th-anniversary, digitally-restored showing of Tobe Hooper's seminal horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

SFF has also announced 25 features that will be screening at the festival, the highlights of which are:

FRANK

Director: Lenny Abrahamson

How does Michael Fassbender in a giant papier-mâché grab you? In Abrahamson's dark, odd comedy, Fassbender plays the titular character, the cultish leader of a situationist punk band whose members include Maggie Gyllenhaal and Domhnall Gleeson.

GOD HELP THE GIRL

Director: Stuart Murdoch

The frontman for legendary Scottish indie-poppers Belle & Sebastian turns director, with his to-screen adaptation of his own God Help The Girl album; which was written and recorded as a set of songs to be turned into a full musical. It stars Emily Browning, Olly Alexander, and Skins/Game Of Thrones waif Hannah Murray as a trio of young Glaswegians who form a band.

IS THE MAN WHO IS TALL HAPPY?

Director: Michel Gondry

In what feels like a nerd's dream made real: the latest film for Gondry - the ever-inventive French filmmaker and greatest music-video-maker ever - is a playful, philosophical conversation between he and legendary thinker Noam Chomsky. Yet, rather than sit with talking heads, Gondry uses animation and visual effects to illuminate the ideas at play.

JOE

Director: David Gordon Green

After losing his way into the nefarious Hollywood bro-comedy realm (like: Your Highness), DGG attempts to get back to his roots; making a piece of modern-day Southern Gothic drama whose kids-and-crime vibes harken back to 2004's Undertow.

LOVE IS STRANGE

Director: Ira Sachs

Sachs' issue-movie-ish drama earnt plenty of plaudits at Sundance for its portrayal of a pair of long-time gay lovers - played by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina - who, after finally being given the opportunity to be legally married, find their once-cosy domestic union falling to pieces.

PULP

Director: Florian Habicht

As a documentary chronicling the 'final' hometown concert, in Sheffield, for reunited Brit-pop pin-ups Pulp, Pulp sounds as uninspiring in premise as it is in title. But, two things suggest that this won't be your regular slice of concert-spectacular blandeur. 1) Jarvis Cocker is involved. 2) The director is Florian Habicht, the weirdo New Zealand filmmaker last seen letting a Russian girl eat cereal out of his concaved chest in his meta-movie Love Story.

RUIN

Directors: Amiel Courtin-Wilson & Michael Cody

Courtin-Wilson is Australia's most interesting filmmaker, and Ruin seems like prime evidence. Shot on location in Cambodia and with non-professional actors - set in the 1970s, in the wake of Pol Pot's genocide - it's a dreamy piece of pure-cinema that Courtin-Wilson describes as “like Badlands down the Mekong”.

TOM AT THE FARM

Director: Xavier Dolan

French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan has long been a Sydney Film Festival favourite: in 2010, when he was just 20 years-old, he won the Sydney Film Festival Prize for his hipster-love-triangle style-piece Heartbeats. His latest film - based on Michel Marc Bouchard's play - finds Dolan going to the childhood home for the funeral of his closeted lover, and being subjected to cruel, psychological game-playing.

UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL

Director: Kitty Green

Debutante Australian director Kitty Green relocated to Ukraine to make her intimate portrait of the women behind Femen, a feminist movement whose topless protests are out to defy the perception of their nation as a land ripe with mail-order brides and sex-slaves ready for export. These protests eventually lead them into conflict with authorities, orthodoxy, patriarchy; providing a glimpse into life on-the-ground in the hotbed of post-Soviet social tumult.

THE UNKNOWN KNOWN

Director: Errol Morris

Morris is in the pantheon of cinema's all-time-great documentarians, and anything he does is required viewing. Ten year's after his Academy Award-winning portrait of a dark figure of American imperialism, The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. McNamara, Morris has made a companion-piece: a conversation with Donald Rumsfeld, the Machiavellian villain of George W.'s America.

WATERMARK

Directors: Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky

Baichwal and Burtynsky last collaborated on Manufactured Landscapes, a contemplative look at the unimaginable vastness of man-built spaces. Watermark is an ever more explicit environmental provocation, the filmmakers looking at bodies of water and how humans have used and abused them.

WE ARE THE BEST!

Director: Lukas Moodysson

The divisive, inconsistent Moodysson has been at his best when dealing with adolescence (see: his 'glory years' run of Fucking Åmål/Show Me Love, Together, and Lilya 4-ever). He returns to it with a sense of delirious delight with We Are The Best!, a crowdpleasin' tale of three 13-year-old girls in early '80s Sweden who form a punk band.

The full program will be revealed for SFF on Wednesday 7 May. The festival runs from Wednesday 4 to Sunday 15 June. For more details, head to the official website.