The 13 Best MIFF Films

Film nerds rejoice! The ultimate tonic to the darkest days of the Melburnian winter is here: the Melbourne International Film Festival. And your old pal Film Carew is already eyeballs deep in the MIFF program, having seen like 70-odd things when last I bothered to tally. So, for all you humans out there, highlighters in hand, frantically trying to work out what films, exactly, they should see, here is suitable illumination upon your shadowy scheduling: the best MIFF films I've seen so far.

But, let us tarry no longer: here they are: the 13 Best MIFF Films Film Carew's Seen So Far.

The Act Of Killing

Country: Denmark/Indonesia

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

What It Is: A borderline-inexplicable documentary in which the perpetrators of Indonesian genocide gleefully recreate their war-crimes as sub-local-theatre pantos.

Why You Should See It: Oppenheimer's remarkable film is an indictment of Indonesia, a corrupt country built on the bloodshed of genocide, that achieves its profundity by sidling up not to victims, but perpetrators. It's utterly horrifying, forcefully commanding, and secretly really funny.

Blackfish

Country: USA

Director: Gabriela Cowperthwaite

What It Is: A documentary investigation/evisceration of the All-American 'marine show' industry, in which captive orcas are turned into performing pets in a perversion of nature.

Why You Should See It: Because Cowperthwaite knows that the real story isn't the lives of the trainers killed by killer whales —or even the reprehensible cover-ups by the corporate crooks of Sea World— but the lives of the orcas themselves; tracing their scarred psychological states back to the traumatic experience of being stolen from their families during childhood.

Camille Claudel 1915

Country: France

Director: Bruno Dumont

What It Is: Dumont, cinema's most austere, ascetic evangelist, collaborates with Juliette Binoche in a portrayal of one week in the tragic life of the titular sculptor, who was forcibly assigned to an asylum at a remote abbey.

Why You Should See It: Because Dumont's brand of cinematic cruelty has, here, found a real-life martyr, with the filmmaker's sometimes-wayward muse tethered to the veracity of Claudel's actual correspondence. That, and to see one of the world's greatest actors in one of her greatest performances.

Computer Chess

Country: USA

Director: Andrew Bujalski

What It Is: The mumblecore OG makes a kooky masterpiece: his shot-on-1970s-video-tape oddity going from mockumentary of a 1980 computer-chess tournament to a psychedelic, stoner-philosophical think-piece steeped in shades of early Linklater.

Why You Should See It: Um, because it's the film of the year, dingus.

The End Of Time

Country: Canada

Director: Peter Mettler

What It Is: The Canadian cine-essayist dares tackle the very grist of existence —time itself!— talking the subject over with particle physicists, ad-hoc philosophers, and antisocial recluses.

Why You Should See It: Because if you don't want to see a dreamy cinematic tone-poem alive with thoughts on time, temporality, physics, evolutionary theory, and the very nature of the universe, then I'm not sure we can be friends anymore.

Frances Ha

Country: USA

Director: Noah Baumbach

What It Is: Baumbach's on-screen collaboration with off-screen girlfriend Greta Gerwig is a portrait of 20-something angst as embodied by its flightly, flawed, failing heroine.

Why You Should See It: Because Gerwig is a comedienne committed to character, Baumbach's writing is as quotably pithy as ever, and Girls beefcake Adam Driver blows through to steal a handful of scenes. And because the whole film expertly captures that time in which it feels like everyone has their shit together but you, and doesn't demand that Frances's malaise be cured by the arrival of a man.

Ginger & Rosa

Country: UK

Director: Sally Potter

What It Is: Potter's searing '60s soap-opera is a coming-of-age tale filled with cold-war terror, revolutionary fervour, damage rent by desire, and the persistence of the patriarchy.

Why You Should See It: Because in a cast filled with familiar faces (Christina Hendricks, Alessandro Nivola, Annette Bening, Oliver Platt, and Timothy Spall), 14-year-old Elle Fanning acts them all off screen, delivering a career-altering performance etched in pain and aching with truth.

It Felt Like Love

Country: USA

Director: Eliza Hittman

What It Is: A micro-budget, evocatively-acted coming-of-age drama about the awkwardness and humiliations of early sexual experiences, and the expectations placed on teenage girls in the hyper-sexualised modern world.

Why You Should See It: Hittman's debut is a dreamy study of teenage bodies —oozing casual carnality; ripe for their first STDs— and the darkness of the overwhelming adolescent urges within; one of the least romantic but most cinematic depictions of carnal rites-of-passage ever captured on film.

Macaroni & Cheese

Country: France

Director: Sophie Letourneur

What It Is: A guerrilla comedy made by Letourneur whilst a guest at the Locarno Film Festival, in which the festival's endless parties provide constant —but very limited— opportunities with making out with people from the same insular scene.

Why You Should See It: Forget the noxious trailer, which cuts it as bawdy, Sex And The City styled comic caper. Letourneur's film is, in contrast, a witheringly-sad, laugh-otherwise-you'll-cry portrait of the humiliations people will suffer in the pursuit of joyless, often-awful casual sex.

Michael H. Profession: Director

Country: France

Director: Yves Montmayeur

What It Is: A documentary chronicle of the career of Michael Haneke. Y'know, one of the greatest artists in the history of the moving image.

Why You Should See It: Filled with behind-the-scenes footage from so much of Haneke's career, none of it is more shocking that seeing him laughing jovially and hugging cast and crew whilst at work on Amour.

The Stranger By The Lake

Country: France

Director: Alain Guiraudie

What Is It: An eerie, aloof, formalist thriller centred around a rural French nude-beach where men trolling for anonymous sex form a small, cloistered, clandestine community so sworn to secrecy that they'll even protect a killer in their midst.

Why You Should See It: When the Mortality Police are calling for the censors, it's time to take a stand: unsimulated ejaculation in service of art is best appreciated on the big screen! Oh, and, Guiraudie's pic stirs up fond memories of Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre, even if it's far more dry and contained.

Upstream Color

Country: USA

Director: Shane Carruth

What It Is: Carruth's follow-up to his beloved no-budget science-fiction thinkpiece Primer, a time-travel movie equal parts infinite-possibilities-in-parallel-universes and eggheadish R&D. Here, he and fellow filmmaker Amy Seimetz star as a pair of fated lovers inhabited by the same parasite.

Why You Should See It: Impossible-to-synopsise and welcoming your own interpretation, Carruth's abstract portrait of bio-engineering pirouettes through a pure-cinematic palette of colour and sound, summoning the holy spirit of Terrence Malick as it does.

Vic + Flo Saw A Bear

Country: Canada

Director: Denis Côté

What It Is: The latest film by the oddball Québécois auteur has been called his 'most accessible', which means to say that in those familiar frigid backwoods wilds, he's finally found something almost resembling a regular ol' narrative.

Why You Should See It: Because Côté is growing to be one of the most casually unexpected and gloriously unhinged filmmakers kicking 'round, and Vic + Flo is a profound piece of cinematic formalism filled with bleak humour, stylistic panache, and genuine eeriness.

It should be noted, apologies and/or elephant stamps for all those other really, really good movies (like: A Hijacking, Coming Forth By Day, The Crash Reel, Downloaded, Gloria, I Used To Be Darker, The Punk Singer, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, Paradise: Love, Soldate Jeannette, Starlet, Tiger Tail In Blue, Tip Top, Valentine Road, Wrong Time Wrong Place) that are also worth a hearty recommendation. Which is to say nothing of those things (Bastards, Child's Pose, Final Cut: Ladies And Gentlemen, Leviathan, Mood Indigo, The Past, Teenage, etc.) I'm giddy to watch myself once the festival actually starts. Oh, and, let us not forget the worst things I've witnessed (Ain't Misbehavin', Foxfire, Hand In Hand, The Patience Stone, Tokyo Family, and far-and-away the worst of the worst, Nothing Bad Can Happen), all of which should be duly avoided.