PREVIEW: 2020 SYDNEY UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

COVID-19 forced organisers to abandon the physical event, but the 2020 Sydney Underground Film Festival forges ahead as an immense online program as only the typically defiant ‘SUFF’ team could muster. Another round of the Take48 filmmaking challenge, the academic forum Inhuman Screens and new films from Guy Maddin, Yorgos Lanthimos and Matt Dillon (pictured, below) suggests the 14th annual celebration of all things alternative won’t be dictated to by a global pandemic.

Structured as a three-tiered event, SUFF 2020 launches at 7.00pm AEST, Friday August 28th, with Take48, a 2-day filmmaking challenge that demands your production unit (maximum 10 people) must write, shoot, edit and submit your short by 7.00pm AEST, Sunday, August 30th. Just moments prior to the start time, this year’s theme will be announced and must be incorporated in the finished work. Prize packages from Sony Australia, Red Giant and RentACam are on offer.

Phase two will be the launch of the core film strands, which will be available via the festival website from September 10-20. The decision was made to forego feature-length content and focus on the traditionally popular short film strands that have been central to the festival experience since its earliest editions. ‘Love/Sick’ is a collective dozen short films that will engage the mind and fire up the loins (including Eve Dufaud’s urination celebration, Le Jet; pictured, right); the mind-altering impact of cinematic psychedelia is embraced in 10-strong strand, ‘LSD Factory (featuring the World Premiere of Wrik Mead’s pixelated sexual odyssey, Broken Relationship).

The short film roster continues with ‘Ozploit!’, twelve films from idiosyncratic, independent local directors, amongst them Michael Gosden, who will be holding the World Premiere of his bushland-set horror/comedy Stick; the contemporary social collections known as ‘Reality Bites 1 & 2’, the highlight being character actor Mark Metcalfe (Animal House; Seinfeld; Buffy the Vampire Slayer) reflecting on his life in Vera Brunner-Sung’s Character (pictured, left; Metcalfe with his director; and, horror goes underground in the sidebar ‘Sh!t Scared’, particularly notable this year for featuring Australian actress Caitlin Stasey in Parker Finn's Laura Hasn't Slept (pictured, below).

Some legitimate star power emerges in the line-up of 10 shorts called ‘WTF!’ Matt Dillon (The House That Jack Built; There’s Something About Mary) stars for three-time Oscar-nominee Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite; The Lobster) in the surreal subway story, Nimic. And Canadian cinema figurehead Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg; Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) co-directs the monochromatic fairground drama, Stump the Guesser. 

An adults-only animated strand called ‘Late Night Cartoons’, featuring such non-child friendly titles as Turd and Sweet Sweet Kink, and a celebration of Ukrainian short-film prowess called ‘Pickles, Bombs & Borsch’ (including ADG-nominee Stefan Bugryn’s second War Mothers film, Unbreakable) round out the vast online SUFF offerings.

Finally, the Inhuman Screens online conference will unfold over 8 hours on Friday 11th September, exploring themes and issues associated with ‘The Crisis of The Human and The Non-Human’. Attendees include author Lisa E. Bloom, a theorist in the fields of visual culture, film studies and feminist art history and Angela Ndailanis, a research professor in media and entertainment culture.

All details regarding the 2020 SYDNEY UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL, including streaming options and ticketing, can be found at the event’s Official Website.

PREVIEW: 20th REVELATION PERTH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Flying the flag for two decades in the name of provocative, socially aware and artistically challenging films might test the mettle of your average film festival programming team. But not, it would seem, the Revelation crew. The 20^th anniversary of Perth’s internationally recognised film event offers an expanded film line-up, bolstered academic strand and plenty of opportunity to party when it kicks off July 6.

Once again under the combined stewardship of festival director Richard Sowada and program director Jack Sargeant, 2017 Revelation Perth International Film Festival offers up an impressive list of statistics to woo local and, in increasing numbers, interstate and overseas patrons. 86 Australian films are amongst the 200 films scheduled to screen over the 14 day event, an exhaustive calendar that boasts 15 world premieres and 41 Australian premieres.

Opening Night honours have been bestowed upon Becoming Bond, Josh Greenbaum’s rousing celebration of the one-shot Bond, Australian George Lazenby. Starring Lazenby himself recounting his life and fleeting stardom and featuring actor Josh Lawson (pictured, right) as Lazenby in scenes recreating key moments in the Sydney car mechanic-turned-great non-actor's life, the film also stars ex-Bond Girl Jane Seymour and played to wildly enthusisatic crowds at SXSW, where it earned Audience Award honours. In a major coup for the festival, Lazenby will be guest of the fest, present a retrospective screening of his solo 007 effort On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and front a hot-ticket Q&A evening hosted by FilmInk senior contributor Travis Johnson.

An enticing array of feature film offerings run the gamut from starry vehicles from idiosyncratic auteurs (Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, with Oscar winner Brie Larsen; David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, with Rooney Mara; Colm McCarthy’s The Girl With All The Gifts, with Gemma Arterton; Todd Solondz’s Wiener Dog, with Greta Gerwig); festival favourites with indie cred (Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song; Claude Barras’ My Life as a Zucchini; Laurent Micheli’s Even Lovers Get The Blues; Geremy Jasper’s Patti Cake$; Bruce McDonald’s Weirdos) and, as is the ‘RevFest’ way, the truly bizarre (Peter Vack’s Assholes; Johannes Nyholm’s The Giant; Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley’s Sylvio; Xander Robin’s Are We Not Cats).

The feature documentary strand runs to an incredible 31 films. As one would anticipate, there are a great many from Australia (Gillian Leahy’s Baxter and Me; Kriv Stenders’ The Go-Betweens: Right Here; Jennene Riggs’ Secrets At Sunrise) and the USA (Keith Maitland’s Tower; Jennifer M Kroot’s The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin; William A Kirkley’s Orange Sunshine; Alexandre O. Phillippe’s 78/52); there are also two Australia/USA co-productions (Jai Love’s Dead Hands Dig Deep; Kate Hickey’s Roller Dreams).

Having solidified a global reputation, submission to Revelations were received from and slots allocated to factual films from The Netherlands (Susanne Helmer’s Melanie), Ireland (Colm Quinn’s Mattress Men; Brendan Byrne’s Bobby Sands 66 Days); Spain (David Fernandez’s The Key to Dali); Denmark (Max Kestner’s Amateurs in Space); and, Austria (Ulrich Seidl’s Safari; pictured, right). Co-productions include Matteo Borgardt’s You Never Had It: An Evening with Bukowski (USA/Italy/Mexico); Pierre Bismuth’s Where is Rocky II? (Germany/Belgium/Italy/France); Florian Habicht’s Spookers (Australia/New Zealand); and Ziga Virc’s Houston We Have a Problem (Slovenia/Croatia/Germany/The Czech Republic/Qatar).

Always the innovators, Revelation will launch Next Gen Webfest, a celebration of local web-content creators; utilise the interior of Perth’s historic St George’s Cathedral for the audiovisual spectacular, Suspended Voices; enter the burgeoning world of Virtual Reality with the presentation, Only at the Air Only at Each Other; present Night of The Living Dead Re-Composed, a re-imagining of Romero’s classic undead masterpiece to the music of local experimental music collective, Genrefonix; and, collaborate on Life in Pictures, a competitive film-making competition undertaken with the government sector and the arts community to present narratives that explore issues relating to the ageing in modern society.

Travelling from San Francisco for the festival will be Denah Johnston (pictured, right), an academic-curator-filmmaker and former executive director of The Canyon Cinema Foundation, a Bay area collective that promotes and makes accessible the works of experimental visual artists. She will be presenting a showcase of 16mm film works from woman directors collated from the Canyon archives, entitled Always Something There to Remind Me, as well as a headline-grabbing line-up called ‘Stinky Wieners and Dreamy Beavers’, a retrospective of the late Curt McDowell, a brazen and bold visualist in the style of his mentor and underground cinema legend, George Kuchar.

Returning strands include the now iconic ‘Revel-8’ film competition, which challenges entrants to construct an in-camera 3½ minute work on super 8 film; the Experimental Showcase, featuring 12 paradigm-shattering shorts certain to befuddle and astound; and, Mini Rev, a family-themed celebration of the art of filmmaking and the joy of film watching.

2017 REVELATION PERTH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL screens at various venues across Perth from July 6-19. Full session and ticket information can be found at the official event website.