PREVIEW: 2023 FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL AUSTRALIA

Daring, unconventional, cutting-edge cinema is returning to Melbourne and Sydney with the 2023 edition of the Fantastic Film Festival Australia (FFFA). Running from April 14-30, FFFA has a panoramic celebration of new and provocative films locked in place for the more courageous filmgoer.

With a line-up of 27 features, the Festival is offering its biggest program yet. From animated cowboys to queer magical realism, s**t-stained deathtraps to outback horrors, this year's program of often weird, occasionally wonderful screening options will unfold alongside Q&A panels, live performances, a scratch-and-sniff movie experience, music video blind dates, and the bold and bawdy ‘nude session’.

According to Festival Director, Hudson Sowada, "This year's program pushes the limits of storytelling and challenges conventional notions of reality. We're excited to showcase such an eclectic range of films, and we encourage audiences to take risks and embrace the strange."

Opening Night honours go to writer/director Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society, a distinctive genre mash-up that premiered earlier this year at Sundance Film Festival. The crowd pleasing film follows Ria Khan (Priya Kansara, in a star-making performance), a martial artist-in-training on a mission to save her sister Lena from an arranged marriage.

International features set for Australian Premieres include the biggest grossing film in Belgium last year, Zillion (pictured, above), chronicling the odyssey undertaken by a computer genius who creates the biggest discotheque in the world; Holy Shit!, a gross-out comedy and survival thriller set entirely in a Portaloo packed with explosives; and, the latest in the Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Rise, which will unfurl at a midnight showing.

Australian films in the 2023 line include The Survival of Kindness, an allegorical journey across a plague-ravaged wilderness by legendary filmmaker Rolf de Heer, who will be in attendance for a Q&A at the first Sydney screening; Sam Curtain’s Beaten to Death, a savage cat-and-mouse game set in remote Tasmania; Blur, a Giallo-style psycho-horror with supernatural mystery and ghastly practical effects from filmmaker Andrew Miles Broughton; and, Zac Cooper’s The End of History, which follows Australian techno producers Darcy and Pat's pursuit of creative greatness in changing and challenging Berlin.

Venturing beyond the traditional cinema experience is the world's first scratch and sniff session, called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Stink-O-Vision. Audiences are taken on a olfactory journey through the sewers of New York City, accompanied by a menu of bespoke scents; simply scratch the corresponding number on the scent card when the icon flashes on screen. The other key retro screening on the roster is Audition, cult director Takashi Miike's 1999 classic starring the unforgettable frightening Eihi Shiina (pictured, right).

 And while details are remaining understandably vague, FFFA is rumoured to be screening a work, direct from its Toronto Film Festival premiere, that is so courted in controversy it can’t even be named in the program.  This secret presentation of what FFFA is calling ‘An Untitled and Perfectly-Legal Coming-Of-Age Parody Film’ will give audiences a rare chance to be among the few people in the world to watch this film. The director will be joining for a series of in-person Q&As.

Closing the Festival in showstopping style is the modern exploitation film LION-GIRL, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film about the last defender of humanity against the ANOROC, a new species that emerged after a tsunami of meteors. Featuring character design by the legendary Manga artist Go Nagai, the film promises an outrageous and unhinged story, along with practical effects and gratuitous nudity.

FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL AUSTRALIA runs Friday, 14 April to Sunday 30 April 2023 at the Lido Cinemas, Hawthorn in Melbourne and the Ritz Cinemas, Randwick in Sydney.

Visit the event’s Official Website for session and ticketing details.

FIVE MUST-SEE MIFF MOVIES

The 2020 Melbourne International Film Festival is not letting Stage 4 restrictions in its home state of Victoria and a nation coping with COVID-19 to get in the way of presenting one of the most diversely curated programs on the Australian calendar. MIFF 68½ will offer 60 feature films and bundles of short works via their digital platform from August 6 through 23, leading off with Kelly Reichardt's First Cow and wrapping up with Pablo Larraín’s Ema. SCREEN-SPACE offers up five features that are on our Must-See list; capacity is limited, so jump on the Official Website without delay....

ROSE PLAYS JULIE (100m • Directed by Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor • English • Ireland, UK • Australian Premiere) 
From the MIFF Program: “Rose, an Irish veterinary student, tracks down her birth mother, successful actress Ellen. When they meet, however, Rose learns something terrible about her biological father, celebrity archaeologist Peter (played by Game of Thrones’ Aidan Gillen). Methodically, she decides to approach him ‘in character’ using the name Ellen gave her at birth, Julie – but, as she soon discovers, she’s playing a dangerous game.” 

THE GO-GO’S (97m • Directed by Alison Ellwood • English • UK, USA • Australian Premiere) 
From the MIFF Program: “They sprang, fierce and fresh, from the Los Angeles punk scene, determined to make music their way. Their 1981 debut album spent six weeks at number one, and they’re still the bestselling all-female band of all time. Belinda Carlisle, Charlotte Caffey, Jane Wiedlin, Gina Schock and Kathy Valentine are the Go-Go’s, and they got the beat!”

WENDY (1h 51m • Directed by Benh Zeitlin • English • USA • Australian Premiere) 
From the MIFF Program: “In this reimagining of Peter Pan, Wendy hails from a rural town in the American South. One day, she catches a boy hopping onto a train and, lured by mystery and a chance to escape her monotonous life, she jumps aboard, her two brothers in tow. Soon enough, she meets Peter and his island of verdant foliage, forever-young mischief-makers and a glimmering, gigantic underwater creature called ‘Mother’.”

SHIVA BABY (76m • Directed by Emma Seligman • English • USA • Australian Premiere) 
From the MIFF Program: “For twentysomething student Danielle (played by comedian and performer Rachel Sennott), funeral customs and courtesies are a minefield. But when her older lover and an ex-girlfriend-turned-frenemy both turn up to the shiva, too, the screwball stakes are raised. To get out of this alive, Danielle has to survive neurotic parents, nosy relatives, passive-aggressive jibes with her ex, and the baby for whom her sugar daddy is an actual daddy.”

NO HARD FEELINGS (92m • Directed by Faraz Shariat • German, Farsi, with English subtitles • Germany • Australian Premiere)
From the MIFF Program: “Parvis spends his nights hitting the clubs or hooking up with Grindr randoms. But his hedonism – and his shame around his Iranian heritage – is challenged when petty theft sentences him to community service in a refugee shelter. There, he meets Iranian refugee Amon and his sister Banafshe, and as love blossoms between the two young men, a renewed love for their shared origins likewise grows.”

PREVIEW: 2019 MELBOURNE DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

There is a heightened sense of expectation surrounding the line-up of the 2019 Melbourne Documentary Film Festival (MDFF). Having been one of the underdog capital city festivals for much of its existence, the event came of age in 2018 – it was named Best Documentary Film Festival by the respected Film Daily site; the Best Documentary Festival in the Southern hemisphere by Guide Doc; and, for the third year running, a Top 100 film festival as voted by the industry’s leading submission portal, Film Freeway.

Drawing upon a year during which documentarians were energised by global socio-political upheaval, the 2019 MDFF will be screening works sourced from 44 local and international festivals, including Sundance, Venice, Tribeca, Hot Docs and SXSW. The programme statistics are impressive, indicating founder and festival director Lyndon Stone takes his newfound global status seriously; on offer are 112 works, comprising 50 features and 62 short-form films, amongst them 6 World premieres and 59 Australian premieres.      

As in 2018, when the festival launched with Tony Zierra’s Kubrick-themed Filmworker, this year’s two-pronged Opening Night sessions will also examine mad geniuses and their impact on cinema. Veteran filmmaker Peter Medak recounts the summer of 1973 and the insanity-inducing experience of filming with Britain’s most eccentric and volatile comic in The Ghost of Peter Sellers (pictured, above). And the fiery, complex reputation of one of Europe’s most reviled directors is addressed in the first-person when Uwe Boll (pictured, right) fronts up for F*ck You All: The Uwe Boll Story.

Four Australian docs will have their global debut at MDFF - Fiona Cochrane’s Strange Tenants: Ska’d For Life, a profile of Australia’s most influential ska band; Aidan Prewitt’s Woodstock at 50: A Venue for the End of the World, a special anniversary screening of the award winning film with new and improved footage from the iconic music festival; Art of Incarceration, director Alex Siddons’ profile of The Torch, a not-for-profit arts initiative that supports creative endeavours for indigenous prisoners; and, Helen Gaynor’s The Candidate, a fly-on-the-wall insight into Green’s senate hopeful Alex Bhathal’s run for parliament.

The Melbourne Documentary Film Festival will draw on some legitimate star power in 2019. Amongst the celebrities in front of and behind the lens are Werner Herzog (subject of Herbert Golder’s Ballad of a Righteous Merchant); Alicia Vikander (pictured, right; narrating Jennifer Baichwal’s and Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene The Human Epoch); Oscar winning director Barbara Kopple (director of New Homeland); Bill-&-Ted star-turned-filmmaking agitant Alex Winter (director of Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain); and, legendary musos Tommy Emmanuel (star of Jeremy Dylan’s The Endless Road) and Rolling Stones’ guitarist Ronnie Wood (in conversation with director Stuart Douglas for his short There’s a Hell of a Racket Coming From Your House, Mrs Wood).

Certain to be an emotion-charged highlight of the festival will be a screening of Forged from Fire, a chronicle of the building of The Blacksmith’s Tree. A monument to the victims of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires that swept through rural Victoria, director Andrew Garton’s camera follows a local movement launched by traditional blacksmiths to build a tree of steel, a declaration of remembrance that garnered an international following. Proceeds from the screening, timed to coincide with the 10^th anniversary of the disaster, will go to the Victorian Volunteer Firefighters.

The MDFF’s reputation as one of the premiere outlets for the documentary short format strengthens further in 2019. The always-popular Music strand will feature Felix Bechtolsheimer’s Somewhere in Their Heads (pictured, right), a study of the creative process behind the recording of Curse Of Lono’s second album ‘As I Fell,’ and J.P. Olsen’s Big Paradise, a profile of cult combo, The Numbers Band; the LGTBIQ sidebar will play The Gender Line, T.J. Parsell’s biography of transgender rock star Cidny Bullens, and Nicky Larkin’s Becoming Cherrie, a peek inside the life of Belfast’s most famous drag queen; and, Indigenous narratives will be examined in films such as Running 62, Torres Strait Islander Zibeon Fielding self-directed account of his long-distance marathon charity efforts, and Goh Iromoto’s African odyssey, The Wonder. 

2018 MELBOURNE DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL runs July 19-30 at the Cinema Nova and Backlot Studios venues. For ticket sales and session details, visit the official website.

SCREEN-SPACE is a media partner of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. Editor Simon Foster will be hosting Q&A events throughout the festival as a guest of the organisers.

FORM, BEAUTY, AMBITION CELEBRATED IN MELBOURNE DESIGN WEEK FILM FESTIVAL

The third annual Melbourne Design Week will this year examine how cinema and design co-exist as art forms with a screening program of films celebrating vision, invention and ambition. The unique festival-within-a-festival has been constructed by Richard Sowada, a programmer whose status as one of our best curatorial minds was honed overseeing Perth’s Revelation and Sydney’s American Essentials seasons. “There's some real spirituality in many of the titles and they're filled with beautiful clean lines and wonderful philosophy,” he told SCREEN-SPACE, ahead of the 10-day schedule set to unfurl in Australia’s first UNESCO City of Design…

“The brief for this program was ‘experimentation’ and that's precisely what these films are about,” says Sowada (pictured, below), who has chosen films from such fields as architecture, photography, industrial and product innovation, futurism, urban planning and the history of design, as well as the aesthetics of the natural world. “They're about experimentation with space, philosophy, mechanics, texture, people, psychology and colour. With those parameters, cinema and design exist in the same space and place.”

Among the 11 films that will screen as part of the Melbourne Design Week Film Festival are Adrian McCarthy’s Portrait of a Gallery, an all-access insight into The National Gallery of Ireland’s enormous refurbishment project; Rob Lindsay’s Relics of the Future, photographer Toni Hafkenscheid’s study of iconic 1960s architectural structures once considered ‘futuristic’; Mies on Scene. Barcelona in Two Acts, a stirring account of the history of the iconic Barcelona Pavillon from directors Xavi Camprecios and Pep Martin; and, Chad Friedrich’s The Experimental City, which explores the plans to construct a full-size eco-friendly city from scratch in the isolated woods of northern Minnesota.

“The films have a different kind of character to other documentaries and they by and large marry style and content very well,” says Sowada. “They are works of art/design in their own right, filled with light, space and texture.” He points to two examples in particular as most synonymous with his programming objectives – Mark Lewis’ Inventions, a whirling tour of cityscapes that pays homage to the City Symphony films of the 1920s; and, Homo Sapiens (pictured, top), a breathtaking, heartbreaking testament to forgotten structures from Austrian visualist Nikolaus Geyrhalter. “No dialogue, true symphonic pieces that demand to be seen on the big screen in the highest fidelity,” he say, noting, “This is one of the things I think films in this genre embrace - scale.”

Further emphasizing the theme of scale and mankind’s relationship to both the natural world and landscapes of our own creation are Jennifer Baichwal’s Watermark, a visual essay on our often tenuous co-existence with water, as shot by the great photographer Edward Burtynsky; Mark Noonan’s biographical feature on arguably America’s greatest living structuralist, Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect; and, In Between the Mountains and The Oceans (trailer, below), a chronicle of the building of the great Japanese temple Ise Jingu as captured by acclaimed photographer Masa-aki Miyazawa. (Pictured, above; a still from Rob Lindsay's Relics of the Future)

Richard Sowada hopes that his line-up of films will strengthen and more clearly define the common bond between cinema and design construction. “Ultimately, they're about emotion and connection with the viewer/user,” he says. “If they're to have a lasting effect they need to come from an authentic place and have a reason to be. These deeper connections cut across time and borders - they are understandable in a universal way. They’re so clean and pure but also are filled with drama and challenge.”

The MELBOURNE DESIGN WEEK FILM FESTIVAL will run from March 14-24 at the Lido Cinemas, Hawthorn, and Classic Cinemas, Elsternwick. Full session and ticketing details can be fount at the official website.

MELBOURNE DOC FEST HONOUREES CAPTURE THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Wrapping its nine-day celebration of factual film last night, the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival announced works that run the gamut from tragic loss to inspirational triumph amongst the winners of its 2018 award roster.

Director Stefan Bugryn’s short film War Mothers (Матері Війні), a harrowing account of how three women have dealt with the deaths of their sons in the Ukrainian warzone, was afforded the prestigious Special Jury Prize. Burgryn (pictured, above; with war mothers Svetlana and Galina) embedded himself with the grieving mothers in high-conflict combat zones along the Eastern Front, crafting a deeply empathetic account of loss and sorrow; that dedication to truth and his craft also earned the young Melbourne-based filmmaker the Best Director (Short Film) trophy.

The Best International Short Award was bestowed upon Ex Nihilo (pictured, right), director Timo Wright’s multi-national co-production that examines via a non-linear, three-tiered narrative scientific advancements in the fields of cryonics, robotics and our own mortality. The Best Australian Short Award went to Wolfe, director Claire Randall’s examination into the psychology of a young man whose imaginary friend revealed deep secrets about his existence. A graduate of Queensland’s Griffith University, Randall has found universal acclaim for her remarkably assured debut, having already secured a Crystal Bear trophy at the Berlinale earlier this year.

The Supreme Jury Prize for Feature Documentary went to Jack Yabsley’s Kings of Baxter, a rousing account of two Shakespearean-trained actors who set out to create a version of Macbeth using teenage detainees being held at the Frank Baxter Juvenile Justice Centre near Gosford on the New South Wales central coast. The director also secured the Best Director gong for his work, made in conjunction with the revered Bell Shakespeare Company and his production company shingle, Grumpy Sailor.

The Best International Documentary prize was awarded to Susanna Styron’s Out of My Head, an in-depth study of the truths, lies and latest revelations about migraine headaches. Afforded a personal perspective via the struggle faced by her daughter and featuring interviews with high-profile migraine sufferers such as writer Joan Didion, Styron’s documentary presents a modern medical emergency that science is only now beginning to comprehend.

The recent Australian theatrical release Kangaroo, from husband-&-wife co-directors Michael Mcintyre and Kate McIntyre-Clere, earned the Best Australian Documentary nod. The controversial examination of the nation’s love/hate/abusive relationship with the beloved marsupial has itself experienced polar opposite responses from for-and-against advocates for its often shocking exposé approach. The hometown award for Best Melbourne Documentary went to Fish Out of Water (pictured, right), filmmaker Israel Cannan’s profile of two upwardly mobile types who forego their career paths to row a wooden boat the length of the North Atlantic Ocean.