Our Top Picks From Melbourne International Film Festival

The 63rd Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) kicks off on Friday 31 July, taking over Melbourne’s city cinemas and streets once more, with a program so staggeringly vast (341 films! From 52 countries!) it’s hard to take it all in. Here, then, is a handy guide to the highlights:

10.000km

Fri 8 Aug, 4pm, ACMI & Thu 14 Aug, 9pm, Kino Cinemas 

10.000km begins with a lengthy, captivating, real-time scene of a pair of lovers in a Barcelona bed, limbs mingled, lives wholly intertwined. Then one moves to Los Angeles and their now-divided lives are chopped up into digital fragments of tenuous connection/s. Its leads, David Verdaguer and Natalia Tena, give performances loaded with humanity, humour, conflict and contradiction, and Marques-Marcet is alive to the philosophical symbolism of a drama played out over Skype.

Thu 7 Aug, 6.30pm, Forum Theatre & Sat 9 Aug, 1.30pm, ACMI 

Breillat is no stranger to turning herself into a character in her films (see: 2002’s Sex Is Comedy), but her 14th feature is profoundly personal. With Isabelle Huppert as Breillat stand-in, it coldly, cruelly chronicles her recovery from a 2004 stroke, and her relationship with a conman (rapper Kool Shen) who grifts her of €600,000.

Sat 2 Aug, 4pm, Forum Theatre & Wed 6 Aug, 6pm, The Capitol  

One of 2014’s true cinematic events, Linklater’s landmark movie was shot over 12 years, lead, Ellar Coltrane, aging from six to 18 as they went. After some early dramatic wobbles – a terrible drunk stepdad storyline seems borrowed from an after-school special – the film rounds into sublime form once Coltrane becomes a Linklater-ish teen, talking wild and philosophical like those kids from the margins of Slacker or Dazed And Confused.

Sat 2 Aug, 9pm, ACMI & Thu 14 Aug, 6.30pm, Forum Theatre

Östlund is a clear student of Michael Haneke, his prior pictures – like 2008’s Involuntary and 2011’s Play – cold, philosophical, provocative studies of human behaviour at its most primal, cruel and conflicted. Force Majeure takes those tendencies onto a bigger, bolder canvas, its acclaim at Cannes signalling the moment when the student inches closer to the master.

Sat 2 Aug, 7.15pm, Forum Theatre & Sat 16 Aug, 6.30pm, The Capitol 

A charming, disarming ‘animated conversation’ in which Michel Gondry sits Noam Chomsky down to talk life and philosophy, using his words as a springboard for childlike hand-drawn animation. The result is scant in narrative direction, but alive with ideas and wild with dreams.

Thu 7 Aug, 6.30pm, ACMI & Sun 10 Aug,
4pm, Kino Cinemas

Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Laboratory was behind 2009’s sublime Sweetgrass and last year’s mind-altering film of the year, Leviathan. Manakamana is every bit as amazing: 12 single-take shots of ‘pilgrims’ ascending to a Nepalese mountaintop monastery via a cable-car, a journey juxtaposing mundanity with divinity. It makes for a meditative, transcendent experience.

Tue 5 Aug, 1.30pm, ACMI; Tue 12 Aug, 11am, ACMI & Sat 16 Aug, 4pm, Kino Cinemas

MIFF’s ‘Next Gen’ is hardly for kids, the section once again loaded with excellent pictures (like the Mexican teen rock band rumpus We Are Mari Pepa, the otherwordly animé Patema Inverted and Jean Denizot’s sterling piece of rural socio-realism, The Good Life). The standout is Bertuccelli’s School Of Babel, a classic-feeling documentary that spends a year with a class of multicultural adolescents freshly arrived in Paris, united by their shaky French and outsider anxieties.

Stray Dogs

SD: Fri 1 Aug, 6.15pm, Forum Theatre; Fri 15 Aug, 9.15pm,  Hoyts. JTTW:  Sat 3 Aug, 11.30am, Kino Cinemas & Sat 16 Aug, 1.30pm, Kino Cinemas

It’s been seven long years since MIFF was graced with the presence of Tsai, one of the greatest filmmakers of the past 20 years. As if to make up for it, 2014 brings two new works from the Taiwanese master: Stray Dogs, a solemn study of fractured figures fallen through society’s cracks, and Journey To The West, an hour-long piece of video art that takes Tsai’s fondness for ‘slow’ cinema to a conceptual extreme.

Sat 2 Aug, 6.30pm, The Capitol

Fresh from its acclaimed premiere at Cannes, the Dardennes’ latest piece of poignant socio-realism stars Marion Cotillard as a downsized factory worker who must convince her co-workers to sacrifice their bonuses in order for her to keep her job. As always, in the Dardennes world, money is the cruellest of currencies, and emotion is slowly, surely earned.

Sun 3 Aug, 4pm, The Capitol & Thu 7 Aug, 6.45pm, Hoyts

Moodysson is back in the feelgood form of his early days (think 1998’s Fucking Åmål, 2000’s Together) with this wildly entertaining tale of pre-teen dames forming a punk band in early ’80s Stockholm. Based on the coming-of-age experiences of Moodysson’s wife, graphic novelist Coco, it’s a film that radiates both warmth and truth, and Moodysson’s direction of his screen debutantes allows their natural boisterousness, nervousness and joy to shine.