In the wake of COVID-19, Australia’s most dedicated film festivals have kept the moviegoing dream alive via online screening events. Festivals both old (Sydney, Melbourne, St Kilda) and new (Gold Coast) have relied upon sympathetic filmmakers, tech gurus and strong bandwidth to keep curated schedules and, importantly, commercial interests in place. As audiences have grown to expect, Perth’s iconic Revelations International Film Festival is expanding upon the 2020 film festival experience with their own online event, ‘Couched’.
A first wave of 13 titles have been announced - seven dramatic narratives, six documentaries - that represent a cross-section of cutting-edge local and international filmmaking, with a total of 25 to be on offer come the launch date of July 9. “We exist to show films, and that’s something we will continue to do,” says Jack Sargeant, Program Director. “Most films will be available Australia wide for the duration of the fest and several will be made available internationally. This gives us an opportunity to showcase movies across the world, and give people a small taste of what we do.”
The line-up includes the Australian Premiere of Bidzina Kanchaveli’s trippy German sci-fier 1000 Kings, a digital journey into a beehive-like society where light is the ultimate currency; Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Ukrainian drama Atlantis, a despairing drama about a scarred returned serviceman and the idealist he clings to; the spectacularly bizarre VHYes, director Jack Henry Robbins’ VHS-shot dissection of family and memory, produced by his parents Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins; and, Bob Byington’s mumblecore masterpiece Frances Ferguson, starring the wonderful Kaley Wheless (pictured, right) as a disengaged small-town millennial for whom scandal barely registers.
The Australian sector will be repped by Robert Woods’ rural-set comedy/horror An Ideal Host, a WA-shot indie about a dinner-party that goes apocalyptically off the rails, that will have its World Premiere via Couched. Also set for its festival debut will be The Florist, a feature-length adaptation of director Andrew Ryan’s short starring Rebecca Murphy. Two docs round out the local content - the sexuality-positive account of middle-class suburbanite-turned-sex-worker Morgana, directed by Isabel Peppard and Josie Hess, and Shaun Katz’s musical meander down a very loud memory lane in Underground Inc, a chronicling of the ‘90s post-punk alternate-music scene.
Other documentaries to debut on the ‘RevFest Couch’ are Adam Kossoff’s speculative WWII thesis Through The Bloody Mists of Time; Iván Castell’s retro-music electro-odyssey Rise of the Synths, narrated by John Carpenter; the career retrospective, Forman vs Forman, in which co-directors Jakub Hejna and Helena Trestíková track the extraordinary life of director Milos Forman; and, Danish director Mads Brügger’s thrillingly convoluted murder mystery, Cold Case Hammarskjöld (pictured, right).
Films will be available for rent for a 24 hour period through the fest, with titles available via the streaming service, Eventive. Patrons can buy single screening tickets, providing unlimited access to a film for 24 hours, or the more economical multi-film pass. With five years of the successful RevOnDemand streaming service behind him, Festival Director Richard Sowada has advantageous experience over the nation’s other festival heads, most of whom are new to the online space.
“We’ve been leading in that space for a fair while now,” says Sowada. “Fortunately that experience and reputation has allowed us to dive deeply into the contemporary international film scene and surface with a program of international features and documentaries presented on a platform that delivers a first class audience experience." That experience will resurface later in the year, with the real-world version of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival set to re-emerge, although the revised dates have not been confirmed.
Read the SCREEN-SPACE review of VHYes here.
Read the SCREEN-SPACE review of Morgana here.