SUFF 2014 PREVIEW: SUBVERSIVE SCHEDULE SET TO RATTLE SYDNEY PSYCHE

The 2014 Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF) enters its 8^th year topped and tailed by two of international cinemas most buzzed-about films, ensuring the event, overseen by the dedicated duo of Stefan Popescu and Katherine Berger, further strengthens its reputation as a genre festival of global standing.

Opening the event on September 4 is New Zealand horror comedy Housebound, the directorial debut of Gerard Johnstone and coming to SUFF from a triumphant South-by-Southwest screening. It represents the second time this year that the Kiwi film community has snared a coveted festival slot across the ditch; in June, the vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows closed out the Sydney Film Festival.

The centrepiece of the Closing Night festivities on September 7 will be the German adaptation of Charlotte Roache’s  coming-of-sexuality bestseller, Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete), from fearless filmmaker David Wnendt (Combat Girls, 2011). Carla Juri (pictured, right) stars as Helen, Roache’s teenage protagonist obsessed with the sights, sounds and smells of her changing body. Wnendt was drawn to the project after a campaign pleaded that the novel never be made into a film due to its graphic nature; thumbing his nose at puritanical convention, the director opens his film with excerpts from the letter that kickstarted the movement.

Ten Australian Premieres highlight one of the strongest SUFF line-ups in recent memory. These include Leah Meyerhoff’s dark, fantastical spin on adolescent romance, I Believe in Unicorns, which scored the Grand Jury honours at this years Atlanta Film Festival; the highly-anticipated Amazonian cannibal epic, The Green Inferno, from horror maestro, Eli Roth; Zack Parker’s prickly pregnancy thriller, Proxy, starring Joe Swanberg and Alexia Rasmussen (pictured, top); the bleak, bare-bones misfit romantic odyssey Shadow Zombie, from filmmaker Jorge Torres-Torres; Richard Bates Jr, whose debut effort Excision wowed Sydney Film Festival audiences in 2012, returns with his sophomore effort, Suburban Gothic; and, Japanese ‘Guru of Gore’ Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, a relentlessly energetic, fiercely original assault on the senses from the director of the SUFF 2011 entrant, Guilty of Romance.

No more defining figure captured the complex purity of the underground cultural movement than William S Burroughs. SUFF, in conjunction with scholar and longtime supporter of the Festival, Jack Sargeant, will honour the great man with the Special Event screening of Andre Perkowski’s Nova Express, a radical, confrontational vision based upon the Burrough’s sci-fi novel of the same name.

Fifteen factual films make up the Feature Documentary strand of the program, including several hitting our shores for the first time. The bizarre, blood-soaked career of the ultimate shock-rocker is examined in the Canadian pic, Super Duper Alice Cooper, from co-directors Sam Dunn, Reginald Harkema and Scot McFadyen; Matt Wolf traces the evolution of the first century of youth culture in his demographic defining work, Teenage; Phil Healy’s and JB Sapienza’s character study ode to American oddness, My Name is Jonah (pictured, right); and, direct from its world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Michael Dahlstrom’s meditative, unforgettable study of food industry practices, The Animal Condition.

The craft of filmmaking and the warped personalities that populate the fringes of our cinema landscape feature in several SUFF sessions. The enigmatic visionary that is director Leos Carax (Holy Motors; The Lovers on The Bridge; Pola X) is afforded his own mesmerising semi-hagiographic study in Tessa Louise-Salome’s Mr X; having wowed audiences in across the world, Andrew Leavold brings to Sydney his obsessive study of The Philippines’ biggest, smallest film star in The Search for Weng Weng; and, Allison Berg and Frank Kerauden study the warped, wonderful life of John Wojtowicz, the real-life anti-hero and hedonistic icon whose short career as a bank robber inspired the classic film, Dog Day Afternoon.  

The vibrant global short film community always welcomes the annual SUFF gathering, which provides rare big-screen sessions for films that are often on the very edge of the experimental and avant-garde. Six different short film strands are scheduled this year, with works from the US (including the World Premiere Paul Turano’s Toward the Flame); Sweden (Sara Koppel’s provocatively-titled Little Vulvah & Her Clitoral Awareness; pictured, right); Brazil (the World Premiere of Julia Portella and Melina Schleder’s Damn You, Vougue); Canada (Veronica Verkley’s The Working Cat’s Guide to The Klondike); and, Austria (the first Australian screening for Markus Wimberger’s Bloody Monster).

And continuing an alliance established several festivals ago, SUFF will screen a selection of works from the Fetisch Film Festival, which unspools annually in the German city of Kiel and presents works of confronting eroticism. This year, the strand presents Jan Soldat’s BDSM-themed A Weekend in Germany; Canadian Matthew Saliba’s humiliation-vs-true-love drama, Eroticide; and, Loops, an episodic Danish work from Steen Schapiro which poses the question, ‘Why do we separate daily life and sexual needs?’

The 2014 Sydney Underground Film Festival runs Thursday September 4 to Sunday September 7 at The Factory Theatre, Marrickville. Full details can be found at the official website here.