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The 58th Sydney Film Festival runs from the 8th to the 19th of June. For some of us, it's the year's main event. In a city without a dedicated centre for the moving image nor repertory movie houses, where arthouse cinemas seem to all play the same half-dozen films, this is our annual fix for quality world cinema.
First: a few tips:
- If you're a serious cinephile, prioritize the films in the Official Competition (for a $60,000 prize): they were put there for a reason. You don't just get to sit in a cinema with jury president Chen Kaige and his colleagues, you get to dish out informed opinions once the winner is announced ("Kaige and his cronies *so* got it wrong on Attenberg..." etc)
- The print program lets you know which titles have Australian distribution (look for a recognizable distributor listing in the main credits). Some are hard to resist, but you might want to leave others until later in the year when they hit cinemas, leaving more time for those films which will never screen in this country again!
- If you're on twitter keep an eye out on the #SydFilmFest hashtag: it brings together punters and critics' opinions on the films in the festival and is a great way to keep an eye on what's hot and what's not.
- During the Fest, get to Grasshopper in between screenings. That's where filmmakers, industry, critics and hardcore cinephiles will hang out to share their recommendations.
- Start sniffling and coughing conspicuously in your workplace a few days before the Festival starts so it's less suspicious when you call in sick to catch a morning screening of Scorcese's A Letter To Elia.
At the end of the Festival, I'll publish my Sydney Film Festival 2011 critics poll (here's last year's), aggregating opinions from local film critics (if you write about film professionally and you'd like to be included, drop me a line!).
Even though it's a leaner line-up this year, the size of the program can be daunting. Last year audiences were up 20% and a whopping 66 screenings sold out. To help you (and I) make sense of it, I've asked a handful of local film critics and cultural commentators to give me - informally - their #1 most anticipated film at the festival...
Joshua Blackman (The Brag, Atonal Film): HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN
There are more respectable offerings that I'm equally excited about, but the B-movie, horror-schlock geek in me can't wait to get hold of Hobo with a Shotgun. Rutger Hauer stars as the titular hobo - angry at the world and eager to dismember, decapitate and otherwise cause grievous bodily harm to, presumably, those more unfortunate than him. This is the type of movie you want to see at a late night festival showing with a packed, receptive audience. It's unlikely going to be anything more than gleeful trash, but the insanity and humour of the trailer below certainly makes it look more focused than last year's Machete, Robert Rodriquez's similar attempt at the same kind of thing. And Rutger Hauer? In a starring role? I'm there.
Katia Nizic (And Cut!; various publications): TROLL HUNTER
With each separate viewing of the trailer, Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren) is looking more and more like a hybrid of The Blair Witch Project and Nazi zombie comedy Død snø, which charged out of Norway courtesy of Tommy Wirkola in 2009. This is a good thing—very, very good.
Shot in an obvious mockumentary format, Troll Hunter shows a group of students (led by Glenn Erland Tosterud as Thomas and Johanna Mørck as Johanna) investigating a series of bear killings, when the strings begin to unfurl and they realise they are in fact following the Trolljegeren (Otto Jespersen).
In his first feature since 2000's Future Murder, Writer/Director André Øvredal presents audiences with a self-explanatory concept that is virtually limitless in its potential to thrill, delight, and scare the bejeezus out of us. Check out the trailer below for hilarity and madness wrapped in a Norwegian package.
Julian Buckeridge (AtTheCinema): TYRANNOSAUR
While Thomas McCarthy’s Win Win and the Berlin Festival dominating A Separation are high on my list, Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur is my “must-see” film at SFF. Maybe I am a sucker for bleak British dramas or maybe I am obligated to see anything that has an association to Hot Fuzz, Boy A and Peep Show. An extension of the stunning 2007 short film Dog Altogether, Tyrannosaur is a raw drama that has steadily gained buzz. With both Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman grabbing praise for their performances and Considine taking the World Cinema Directing Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, I believe Tyrannosaur will be one of the most intense and profound experiences at the festival.
Matt Clayfield (The Australian, various publications): THE MILL AND THE CROSS
Peter Greenaway has more or less cornered the market for arthouse-films-about-art, but Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross looks like a far more inventive contribution to the genre. The trailer is a small compendium of strange and stunning images: a spider web glistening in the dew, an endless wooden staircase in the dark, a man’s face being eaten out by a crow as he lies prostrate and bloody atop a high-hoisted pole. And it will be interesting to see whether Rutger Hauer can play a Fleming with a paintbrush as well as he can a hobo with a shotgun.
Giles Hardie (SMH.com.au): SENNA
So many vying for contention yet the film I can't get out of my head is Senna, I'm not even a formula one fan, but this looks like it should be a truly amazing documentary.
Simon Miraudo (Quickflix): ATTENBERG
Alright Greece, you have my attention. I caught Yorgos Lanthimos’ deliciously demented Dogtooth at the Revelation Perth Film Festival last year, and it landed at #7 on my Top 10 Films of 2010. Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg shares more than enough DNA with that film to arouse my interest (not only did Tsangari produce Dogtooth, but Lanthimos is part of the cast), and is without question my most anticipated film of SFF. Like Dogtooth, Attenberg purportedly features a young woman whose understanding of the world is decidedly warped.. Living in isolation, Marina (Ariana Labed) studies David Attenborough docos – mispronounced ‘Attenberg’, geddit? – and imitates the behaviour of those featured animals in her day-to-day life. Labed picked up the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival - although they gave the Best Actor Cup to Wesley Snipes back in ‘97, forever making the sheen of its prestige forever dull. Regardless, if Attenberg explores the twisted ties between love, sexuality and biology half as wonderfully as Dogtooth did, I’ll be satisfied.
Dwayne Lennox (Cafe Society, The Lennox Files): LIFE, ABOVE ALL
Life, Above All was one of the films Roger Ebert was full of praise for during Cannes 2010, where he noted the “audience rose up as one person to cheer it”. Given that it's a year later and there appears to be no Australian cinema release scheduled for Life, Above All, the 2011 Sydney Film Festival may be our one and only chance to catch the South African film, which deals with the issue of AIDS in a country not exactly known for its effective handling of the disease. No doubt Life, Above All will screen on SBS in the not-too-distant future (and there's nothing wrong with that), but I'd rather have the same cinema/festival/communal viewing experience as Ebert, and hopefully with the same positive result.
Sarah Ward (The Reel Bits, DVD Bits): MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE
It’s not often that a feature starring a member of the Olsen family features on a “must-see” list (or even a “see” list, for that matter), however Martha Marcy May Marlene has been breaking with tradition across the board. With Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley, front and centre in writer / director Sean Durkin's full-length debut, the film has amassed considerable buzz courtesy of its casting alone, with the
newcomer joining Academy Award nominee John Hawkes as well as Sarah Paulson and Hugh Dancy. Add the 2011 Sundance Film Festival best director’s award to the mix, and subsequent selection in Un Certain Regard at the current Cannes Film Festival, and the scene is set for a keenly awaited effort of any genre. That the dramatic thriller is reported to weave normal and abnormal events into an already elaborate and ambiguous narrative only further whets the appetite, making Martha Marcy May Marlene my most anticipated film of the 2011 Sydney Film Festival.
Alice Tynan (Various outlets): THE TREE OF LIFE
We've been waiting with breath that is bated for some five years now and finally Terrence Malick's Tree of Life it set to shimmer on the silver screen. Malick has been a favourite of mine for years - I'm even a fan of The New World (yes, the one with Colin Farrel's eyebrows) - so after that gorgeous poster and breathtaking trailer, I'm uber keen to sit back and contemplate life, death and immortality with Malick and his masterful collaborators.
Ian Barr (Drum Media): THE TURIN HORSE
Ok, really it's The Tree of Life. But that film gets a general release a few weeks afterwards; The Turin Horse is only the second of Bela Tarr's films - Werckmeister Harmonies being the first - to play at the Fest, and
none have been released on DVD locally. ScreenDaily described it as follows: "a film for anyone who feels that Samuel Beckett is just too flippant in his view of the human condition, Tarr’s latest is about as bleak as cinema gets". It could be a punishing masterpiece or a punishing unintended self-parody, but Tarr's films have always had enough apocalyptic conviction to make 99% of films look puny by comparison. Most assuredly not coming soon to a cinema near you… and looking at the program, you can’t say that about many others.
Richard Gray (The Reel Bits, DVD Bits, KOFFIA Blog, At The Cinema): MEEK'S CUTOFF
From the preview announcement in April, it was clear that this would be a strong year full of highly anticipated films. Yet one film has stood out for this critic throughout the whole pre-program hype: Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff. Apart from reuniting with her Wendy and Lucy star Michelle Williams, this (along with last year’s True Grit) gives us the hope that the Western will finally be returned some of the legitimacy it has lost as an art form over the last few decades. From all glimpses of the movie to date, it promises to be a visually stunning and original take on a saddle-sore genre that has not managed to find many strong female voices up until now. If for no other reason, it may just be our only chance to see the film in Sydney in the near future.
5Sprocket (3D World): SLEEPING BEAUTY
I am most excited to see Sleeping Beauty. I want to see it because it looks like pants. Nice pants. That are tough and uncomfortable at first, and still are, but they're pants that itch you even though you've taken them off to go to sleep. Pants that tear into your soul, bringing up memories that you don't want to think about. You want to talk to people about these pants, and see if they have had similar issues with their pants. Wearing these pants is an intensely personal experience, both terrifying and itchy and necessary. I want this movie to be pants.
Victoria Waghorn (AWOL Monk): SLEEPING BEAUTY
Choosing just one is hard. There are a few films i'm really excited about, including The Future and How To Die In Oregon, however my pick is Sleeping Beauty. Harbouring an age-old fascination for Alice In Wonderland and the subversive, the lurid world Julia Leigh conjures - where fantasy and reality mesh in an accessible tapestry of sensuality and exploitation, with a likely gen-Y symbol heroine journeying down the titular rabbit hole to meet the consequences of her casual neo-liberalism face to face - is all-pervasive and utterly compelling.
Scott Henderson (Dark Habits, The Vine): BOXING GYM
If you've met me you'll know one of the great love stories of my life has been US culture and one town in particular, Austin. I lived in the state capital of Texas, a sanctuary for liberals and creatives surrounded by an ocean of red politics, for a year in 2007 and it was one of the best cinematic years of my life. Throw in a huge affinity for documentary film and sport and you'll be someway to understanding why Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym is my pick for SFF '11.
Matt Ravier (this here blog): I WISH I KNEW
Jia Zhangke's Still Life is probably the best Chinese film I've ever seen. I feel I learned more about contemporary China - its complexity and contradictions - from that film than from a hundred news reports. I Wish I Knew is a portrait of Shanghai, and I'm hoping Jia Zhangke's documentary will focus on the intersection of the political and the personal with visual flair, sly humour and a keen eye for compassionate satire. I often think of China as "the future", which would make his films crystal balls... wouldn't you want to stare long and hard into that?
Even though it's a leaner line-up this year, the size of the program can be daunting. Last year audiences were up 20% and a whopping 66 screenings sold out. To help you (and I) make sense of it, I've asked a handful of local film critics and cultural commentators to give me - informally - their #1 most anticipated film at the festival...
Joshua Blackman (The Brag, Atonal Film): HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN
There are more respectable offerings that I'm equally excited about, but the B-movie, horror-schlock geek in me can't wait to get hold of Hobo with a Shotgun. Rutger Hauer stars as the titular hobo - angry at the world and eager to dismember, decapitate and otherwise cause grievous bodily harm to, presumably, those more unfortunate than him. This is the type of movie you want to see at a late night festival showing with a packed, receptive audience. It's unlikely going to be anything more than gleeful trash, but the insanity and humour of the trailer below certainly makes it look more focused than last year's Machete, Robert Rodriquez's similar attempt at the same kind of thing. And Rutger Hauer? In a starring role? I'm there.
Katia Nizic (And Cut!; various publications): TROLL HUNTER
With each separate viewing of the trailer, Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren) is looking more and more like a hybrid of The Blair Witch Project and Nazi zombie comedy Død snø, which charged out of Norway courtesy of Tommy Wirkola in 2009. This is a good thing—very, very good.
Shot in an obvious mockumentary format, Troll Hunter shows a group of students (led by Glenn Erland Tosterud as Thomas and Johanna Mørck as Johanna) investigating a series of bear killings, when the strings begin to unfurl and they realise they are in fact following the Trolljegeren (Otto Jespersen).
In his first feature since 2000's Future Murder, Writer/Director André Øvredal presents audiences with a self-explanatory concept that is virtually limitless in its potential to thrill, delight, and scare the bejeezus out of us. Check out the trailer below for hilarity and madness wrapped in a Norwegian package.
Julian Buckeridge (AtTheCinema): TYRANNOSAUR
While Thomas McCarthy’s Win Win and the Berlin Festival dominating A Separation are high on my list, Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur is my “must-see” film at SFF. Maybe I am a sucker for bleak British dramas or maybe I am obligated to see anything that has an association to Hot Fuzz, Boy A and Peep Show. An extension of the stunning 2007 short film Dog Altogether, Tyrannosaur is a raw drama that has steadily gained buzz. With both Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman grabbing praise for their performances and Considine taking the World Cinema Directing Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, I believe Tyrannosaur will be one of the most intense and profound experiences at the festival.
Matt Clayfield (The Australian, various publications): THE MILL AND THE CROSS
Peter Greenaway has more or less cornered the market for arthouse-films-about-art, but Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross looks like a far more inventive contribution to the genre. The trailer is a small compendium of strange and stunning images: a spider web glistening in the dew, an endless wooden staircase in the dark, a man’s face being eaten out by a crow as he lies prostrate and bloody atop a high-hoisted pole. And it will be interesting to see whether Rutger Hauer can play a Fleming with a paintbrush as well as he can a hobo with a shotgun.
Giles Hardie (SMH.com.au): SENNA
So many vying for contention yet the film I can't get out of my head is Senna, I'm not even a formula one fan, but this looks like it should be a truly amazing documentary.
Simon Miraudo (Quickflix): ATTENBERG
Alright Greece, you have my attention. I caught Yorgos Lanthimos’ deliciously demented Dogtooth at the Revelation Perth Film Festival last year, and it landed at #7 on my Top 10 Films of 2010. Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg shares more than enough DNA with that film to arouse my interest (not only did Tsangari produce Dogtooth, but Lanthimos is part of the cast), and is without question my most anticipated film of SFF. Like Dogtooth, Attenberg purportedly features a young woman whose understanding of the world is decidedly warped.. Living in isolation, Marina (Ariana Labed) studies David Attenborough docos – mispronounced ‘Attenberg’, geddit? – and imitates the behaviour of those featured animals in her day-to-day life. Labed picked up the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival - although they gave the Best Actor Cup to Wesley Snipes back in ‘97, forever making the sheen of its prestige forever dull. Regardless, if Attenberg explores the twisted ties between love, sexuality and biology half as wonderfully as Dogtooth did, I’ll be satisfied.
Dwayne Lennox (Cafe Society, The Lennox Files): LIFE, ABOVE ALL
Life, Above All was one of the films Roger Ebert was full of praise for during Cannes 2010, where he noted the “audience rose up as one person to cheer it”. Given that it's a year later and there appears to be no Australian cinema release scheduled for Life, Above All, the 2011 Sydney Film Festival may be our one and only chance to catch the South African film, which deals with the issue of AIDS in a country not exactly known for its effective handling of the disease. No doubt Life, Above All will screen on SBS in the not-too-distant future (and there's nothing wrong with that), but I'd rather have the same cinema/festival/communal viewing experience as Ebert, and hopefully with the same positive result.
Sarah Ward (The Reel Bits, DVD Bits): MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE
It’s not often that a feature starring a member of the Olsen family features on a “must-see” list (or even a “see” list, for that matter), however Martha Marcy May Marlene has been breaking with tradition across the board. With Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley, front and centre in writer / director Sean Durkin's full-length debut, the film has amassed considerable buzz courtesy of its casting alone, with the
newcomer joining Academy Award nominee John Hawkes as well as Sarah Paulson and Hugh Dancy. Add the 2011 Sundance Film Festival best director’s award to the mix, and subsequent selection in Un Certain Regard at the current Cannes Film Festival, and the scene is set for a keenly awaited effort of any genre. That the dramatic thriller is reported to weave normal and abnormal events into an already elaborate and ambiguous narrative only further whets the appetite, making Martha Marcy May Marlene my most anticipated film of the 2011 Sydney Film Festival.
Alice Tynan (Various outlets): THE TREE OF LIFE
We've been waiting with breath that is bated for some five years now and finally Terrence Malick's Tree of Life it set to shimmer on the silver screen. Malick has been a favourite of mine for years - I'm even a fan of The New World (yes, the one with Colin Farrel's eyebrows) - so after that gorgeous poster and breathtaking trailer, I'm uber keen to sit back and contemplate life, death and immortality with Malick and his masterful collaborators.
Ian Barr (Drum Media): THE TURIN HORSE
Ok, really it's The Tree of Life. But that film gets a general release a few weeks afterwards; The Turin Horse is only the second of Bela Tarr's films - Werckmeister Harmonies being the first - to play at the Fest, and
none have been released on DVD locally. ScreenDaily described it as follows: "a film for anyone who feels that Samuel Beckett is just too flippant in his view of the human condition, Tarr’s latest is about as bleak as cinema gets". It could be a punishing masterpiece or a punishing unintended self-parody, but Tarr's films have always had enough apocalyptic conviction to make 99% of films look puny by comparison. Most assuredly not coming soon to a cinema near you… and looking at the program, you can’t say that about many others.
Richard Gray (The Reel Bits, DVD Bits, KOFFIA Blog, At The Cinema): MEEK'S CUTOFF
From the preview announcement in April, it was clear that this would be a strong year full of highly anticipated films. Yet one film has stood out for this critic throughout the whole pre-program hype: Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff. Apart from reuniting with her Wendy and Lucy star Michelle Williams, this (along with last year’s True Grit) gives us the hope that the Western will finally be returned some of the legitimacy it has lost as an art form over the last few decades. From all glimpses of the movie to date, it promises to be a visually stunning and original take on a saddle-sore genre that has not managed to find many strong female voices up until now. If for no other reason, it may just be our only chance to see the film in Sydney in the near future.
5Sprocket (3D World): SLEEPING BEAUTY
I am most excited to see Sleeping Beauty. I want to see it because it looks like pants. Nice pants. That are tough and uncomfortable at first, and still are, but they're pants that itch you even though you've taken them off to go to sleep. Pants that tear into your soul, bringing up memories that you don't want to think about. You want to talk to people about these pants, and see if they have had similar issues with their pants. Wearing these pants is an intensely personal experience, both terrifying and itchy and necessary. I want this movie to be pants.
Victoria Waghorn (AWOL Monk): SLEEPING BEAUTY
Choosing just one is hard. There are a few films i'm really excited about, including The Future and How To Die In Oregon, however my pick is Sleeping Beauty. Harbouring an age-old fascination for Alice In Wonderland and the subversive, the lurid world Julia Leigh conjures - where fantasy and reality mesh in an accessible tapestry of sensuality and exploitation, with a likely gen-Y symbol heroine journeying down the titular rabbit hole to meet the consequences of her casual neo-liberalism face to face - is all-pervasive and utterly compelling.
Scott Henderson (Dark Habits, The Vine): BOXING GYM
If you've met me you'll know one of the great love stories of my life has been US culture and one town in particular, Austin. I lived in the state capital of Texas, a sanctuary for liberals and creatives surrounded by an ocean of red politics, for a year in 2007 and it was one of the best cinematic years of my life. Throw in a huge affinity for documentary film and sport and you'll be someway to understanding why Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym is my pick for SFF '11.
Matt Ravier (this here blog): I WISH I KNEW
Jia Zhangke's Still Life is probably the best Chinese film I've ever seen. I feel I learned more about contemporary China - its complexity and contradictions - from that film than from a hundred news reports. I Wish I Knew is a portrait of Shanghai, and I'm hoping Jia Zhangke's documentary will focus on the intersection of the political and the personal with visual flair, sly humour and a keen eye for compassionate satire. I often think of China as "the future", which would make his films crystal balls... wouldn't you want to stare long and hard into that?
What's your most anticipated film of SFF 2011?
