A Life In Film

10 best film festival posters of the year

2011-12-23T16:09:00.001+11:00

As an organizer of film festivals who works with designers each year, on a tiny budget, to come up with appealing event visuals, I know too well how hard it can be to come up with a striking, beautiful and functional film festival poster. As a result, I have a tremendous amount of admiration for those who get it right.

Not many people do. So many rely on rote images: film reels, director's chairs, popcorn, celluloid strips and projectors to get their point across. Men with movie cameras for heads, for example, are frightfully common. Cliches are useful: they communicate what your event is about with effective visual shortcuts. Moving past them without losing the message is harder than it sounds.

The poster needs to say cinema and it needs to say festival. And beyond that it hopes to communicate - to the right audience - what kind of cinema it wishes to defend, what kind of festival it wants to be. Beauty, originality, humour or provocation may also be part of the equation.

Here are some of my favourite film festival posters of 2011. If you're interested in this subject, I recommend filmfestivalposters.com, which collates visuals from all around the planet.

10. SITGES FILM FESTIVAL

Catalonia's Fantastic Film Festival has it all: a great line-up of genre films, a sun-drenched setting, parties on the beach, even a zombie walk... The Sitges Film Festival began life in 1968 and hasn't looked back, making it one of the best festivals in Spain and perhaps the best fantastic film fest in the world.

Every year I look forward to their poster, as they rarely disappoint. This year they have two, very simple portraits, one male, one female. The photography is striking yet incredibly straightforward. There's something intense and vaguely unsettling about these portraits, as if the models weren't entirely human. At the same time, it's hard to point to the exact cause of this visual disconnect. As a result, you want to know these characters' stories, you yearn to find out who they are and where they come from. You have to admire a festival able to elicit that sense of curiosity and that desire to be told a story just through its poster...

Update: a friend has kindly pointed out what many of you probably knew, the models are in fact robots, Geminoids to be exact.

9. KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The Czech Republic's illustrious Karlovy Vary Film Festival is one of the most well-respected showcases in Europe. The festival often plays with typography in its posters, and this is one of the more successful attempts. Projections of light onto the body of woman, at night, spell out the festival name and dates. The photographic fragments of the contact sheet combine to give the illusion of moving image.

8. & 7. (TIE) TWIN CITIES ARAB FILM FESTIVAL & NEWPORT BEACH FILM FESTIVAL

Well-executed typography gives a poster impact. While it's harder to communicate specific ideas about cinema through typography, let alone to describe the event itself, it does align the festival with a very contemporary aesthetic which can strike a chord with new audiences. It also puts the emphasis on the text, and therefore drives home the identity of the festival and its remit. Here are two good examples: the 7th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, and the 12th Newport Beach Film Festival.

6. THE WOODY ALLEN FILM FESTIVAL

A small festival dedicated to the films of Woody Allen is blessed with this fun, tongue-in-cheek poster by Californian graphic designer Elizabeth Chiu. Simple, memorable.

5. CAMERA_JAPAN_FESTIVAL

The Dutch are design-savvy and this piece of marketing collateral is no exception. Traditional Japanese imagery fuses with pop art to create the arresting poster designs for Camera Japan, Rotterdam's 6th Japanese Film Festival. The tagline, "Made in Japan?" invites us to ponder the global cycles of influence which shape world cinema. The event itself focuses on the intersections between film and other art forms, from architecture to music and dance. Many of the screenings are interactive or enhanced with live performances. Looks pretty awesome, if you ask me.

4. HELSINKI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The poster for the 24th Helsinki International Film Festival grabs your attention and holds it: bright colours, strange visual, gorgeous type. A childishly drawn character in a suit, holding an ax and what looks like a can of petrol. "Olen Valmis". "I'm ready". The "title" of the festival - in beautiful exotic red script - is "Rakkautta & Anarkiaa" which means "Love & Anarchy". How cool is that? Incidentally, the festival opens with Almodovar's baroque & grotesque queer noir The Skin I Live In, and the design feels somewhat appropriate. There's no reason this should work, but it does. I'm ready too.

3. NASHVILLE FILM FESTIVAL
Designer: Sam Smith

Sam Smith is one of my favourite graphic designers. He's known for his re-imagined, film poster screenprints for the Belcourt Theatre, in his home town of Nashville, one-sheets for arthouse distributors and a string of ace Criterion covers. When he's not creating awesome designs, he tours the world playing drums with Ben Folds, as you do.

For the Nashville Film Festival he designed this clever poster, clearly inspired by Palme D'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

2. JOHN HOPKINS FILM FESTIVAL
Designer: Post Typography

This poster doubles as a "Real Life Media Player" with a die-cut window in the poster's center that allows viewers to experience their environment as if they are watching a YouTube video. The poster also incorporates usage instructions and encourages viewers to upload their own videos to the festival website, all relating back to the festival's 2011 theme of film and video embedded in everyday life. The John Hopkins Film Festival was established in 1997 and is run out of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

1. CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

The poster of the 64th edition of Cannes is a stunning, minimal black-and-white shot of Faye Dunaway photographed by director Jerry Schatzberg in 1970 for his film Puzzle of a Downfall Child. The number "64" is both huge and in type so thin as to be nearly invisible. The result is pure elegance, movie glamour without hint of red carpet.

Sydney Film Critics: Best of 2011

2011-12-22T14:37:00.005+11:00

Every year I ask Sydney-based film critics to send me their top 10 films of the year. You can check out last year's poll, topped by The Social Network right here. Below is an overall Top 20 collating results from all participants. It comprises two lists: one for titles released theatrically in Australia in 2011 and one for unreleased titles (either coming in 2012 or currently without theatrical distribution).

The methodology was simple: 10 points for 1st position, 9 points for 2nd etc. Bullet point lists are those submitted by critics who refuse to rank their films (each title gets 5.5 points). Of course no sample is representative, no comparison objective, no ranking scientific - it's just an informal poll.

Because of how it's set up, films that have been seen by more journalists have an advantage over films seen by fewer. And films seen later in the year tend to be fresher in everyone's minds.

SYDNEY FILM CRITICS' TOP 20 FILMS RELEASED IN 2011:

Drive

Black Swan

Melancholia

The Tree of Life

Incendies

Senna

We Need to Talk About Kevin

True Grit

Certified Copy

Midnight in Paris / Sleeping Beauty (tie)

Super 8

Project Nim

Bill Cunningham New York

Take Shelter

Bridesmaids / Snowtown (tie)

Another Year / The Trip (tie)

Beginners

SYDNEY FILM CRITICS' TOP 20 UNRELEASED FILMS OF 2011:

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A Separation

The Turin Horse

The Muppets

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Tyrannosaur

Shame

Tomboy / Hugo (tie)

The Artist

The Arbor

Kill List / Dogtooth (tie)

How to Die in Oregon / The Descendants (tie)

End of Animal / The Troll Hunter (tie)

Young Adult / Cold Weather (tie)

Here are a few observations:

Dennis Villeneuve's Canadian drama Incendies is the only subtitled film to make the top 20 in theatrical releases (not counting the multilingual Senna), pointing to a rather disturbing absence of foreign-language films in Australian theatres (the unreleased list, in contrast, features no less than six).
A good year for Australian cinema, with Cannes entries Snowtown and Sleeping Beauty both making the top 20. The latter was rejected by audiences and divided critics (witness the bashing Julia Leigh's film gets at SBS Film). The Tall Man, Burning Man, The Hunter, Oranges & Sunshine and Wasted on the Young also got votes from the panel.
Documentaries continue impress. Senna made grown men cry, Project Nim taught us about human nature and Bill Cunningham New York proved the most entertaining superhero film this year.
Some films aged better than others. 127 Hours was runner-up best unreleased film last year, but failed to break the top 20 theatrical releases of 2012. Others such as Black Swan endured in our collective memory as potential future classics.
The Sydney Film Festival played a strong role for most of the critics polled, and half of the unreleased list is made up of films which premiered at the prestigious June event.

Following are the individual Top 10 lists from all participating journalists.

_____________________________________________________

ANDREW BUCKLE

BEST RELEASED:

Senna
The Tree of Life
Incendies
Project Nim
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Drive
127 Hours
Black Swan
Take Shelter
Midnight in Paris

BEST UNRELEASED:

A Separation
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Armadillo
The Muppets
The Descendants
Trust
20 Cigarettes
Even the Rain
The Troll Hunter
Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within

2011 has been the biggest viewing year of my life to date, clocking in well over 100 films. I have enjoyed a lot of the films I have seen, and personally, I think this year has been a strong year. Rango was the first great official 2011 release and I still think it is the year’s top animated feature. Then Incendies, after being unsuccessful in the Foreign Language category, came along and blew me away. The Sydney Film Festival was a highlight. I saw a string of great films – many of which have since received theatrical releases (but some, like the Golden Bear winner, A Separation, have yet to have a release scheduled). The blockbuster season was disappointing, dominated by sequels and an endless stream of superhero films. There were some big duds (Transformers: DOTM and Pirates 4: On Stranger Tides) but also some surprises (Super 8, Kung-Fu Panda 2 and Rise of the Planet of the Apes). October and November have brought us more solid films – with Midnight in Paris, Take Shelter, Drive, Moneyball, The Ides of March and We Need to Talk About Kevin all hitting cinemas. Boxing Day will serve up something for everyone. Spielberg delivers on one of his two films (Tintin), while Almodovar is in top form with The Skin I Live In. But in addition to the films, I will remember 2011 as the year I met some talented industry professionals and bonded with a worldwide network of film bloggers, for which I am most grateful.

Andrew Buckle blogs at Andy Buckle’s Film Emporium

KATIA NIZIC

BEST RELEASED:

Drive
Submarine
Melancholia
Red State
Midnight in Paris
Attack the Block
Super 8
Burning Man
Restless
The Tall Man

BEST UNRELEASED:

Martha Marcy May Marlene
Tyrannosaur
Polisse
Being Elmo: a Puppeteer's Journey
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The FP
King of Devil's Island (Kongen av Bastøy)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Comic-con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
The Corridor

2011 was, in my opinion, a very good year in film. I like to feel intensely when I go to the cinema—whether it be joy, sadness, disgust, anger, longing, or very importantly, fear—it's got to have that sort of kick to leave me with a lasting impression. One of my favourite films of the year, Drive, allowed me inside the mind of a troubled, reserved, deeply loyal individual. For every word Driver (Ryan Gosling) left unsaid in that film, the unbidden urge to crawl inside that world and comfort that character. The tension, the small details in the script (that elevator scene, which my colleague, Alexeem Boyle, writes about here), and the sound design formed a picture that was just my angst in 2011. I'm also in no doubt that Nicholas Winding Refn's film will be ignored by the Academy: too edgy, a film that isn't easy to categorise, nor fully understand the heightened, blood-pumping enjoyment you experience while watching it. Gilded accolades seem to matter very little, given the cult following the film has gained in a remarkably short period of time.

Katia Nizic is a film blogger and writer, who will be jumping the fence in 2012 to study a Graduate Diploma in Producing at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. Her work can be found at The 500 Club, FILMINK, RAVE Magazine, and her own blog, And Cut!.

DANIEL CRICHTON-ROUSE

BEST RELEASED:

Drive
Take Shelter
Senna
The Trip*
Black Swan
Hanna
Submarine
Crazy, Stupid, Love.
The Tree Of Life
Sleeping Beauty

*I still consider this to be a TV series, and in that format it works so much better, but I'm including it here in the hope that it rates well.

BEST UNRELEASED:

The Turin Horse

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Life In Movement

Arrietty

Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy

Shame

The Troll Hunter

Elena

Sydney Film Festival this year was particularly strong for me, but Drive was the clear winner as soon as Kavinsky started playing over the opening credits. I only saw a few films this year that weren't theatrically released - more than the six that I have listed, but not all of them worth including. Everything I caught at SFF seemed to get a national or limited run. For me, 2011 is defined by the films that I wanted to see but never quite got to - which includes a total of 41 films from the At The Movies list of 2011 theatrical releases. The film I'm most ashamed of not having yet seen is Snowtown. The film I still want to watch more than any other is Le Quattro Volte. Here's to having the time to watch more in 2012.

Daniel Crichton-Rouse is the national Arts Editor at Street Press Australia. His words can be found on printed paper and dotted across iPad screens in Drum Media, Inpress, and Time Off.

NICK DENT

BEST RELEASED:

True Grit
The Guard
Bridesmaids
Midnight In Paris
We Need To Talk About Kevin
War Horse
Incendies
The Fighter
Rio
Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Nick Dent is the editor and film editor of Time Out Sydney and writes film reviews for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

IAN BARR

BEST RELEASED:

The Tree Of Life
Certified Copy
Le Quattro Volte
Drive
Melancholia
Another Year
We Need To Talk About Kevin
The Skin I Live In
Snowtown
13 Assassins

BEST UNRELEASED:

The Turin Horse
Martha Marcy May Marlene
The Kid With A Bike
Mysteries of Lisbon
Hail
Terri
Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
Policeman
Good Bye
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

An unusually strong year for Aussie theatrical releases, so I’ll rattle off some runners-up that could’ve easily made the top ten depending on mood: Take Shelter, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Meek’s Cutoff, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, This is Not a Film. Other film-related highlight: Peter Tscherkassky retrospective & masterclass at MIFF, not just for the quality of his films or his animated discussion with audience members – his work’s bracing (and fun!) engagement with the materiality of film itself felt like the most poignant eulogy for 35mm in a year rife with (often dopey) written ruminations on the transition to digital production/projection. Worst of 2011: The Iron Lady, OFLC, Jim Schembri’s Scream 4 review/spoiler gaffe.

Ian Barr is a film critic for Drum Media, and more of his writing on film can be found at http://sydneyfilmhappenings.blogspot.com

JOSHUA BLACKMAN

BEST RELEASED:

Senna

Black Swan

Never Let Me Go

Melancholia

Drive

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Bridesmaids

Midnight in Paris

The Tree of Life

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

BEST UNRELEASED:

Kill List
The Muppets
Martha Marcy May Marlene
The Artist
My Week with Marilyn

2011 was a relatively average year, despite their being new films from Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and two from Steven Spielberg. Hugo and Dragon Tattoo have been shoved to January on local shores, I haven’t seen War Horse, and Tintin, despite its technical mastery (there’s never been a Spielberg action pic quite like it), doesn’t quite hang together as well as it should. What’s left is the astonishing and infuriating Tree of Life (at #9), and the overblown symbolism, by way of Wagner, of Melancholia (at #4). Drive reminded everyone that too much style – and directorial fastidiousness – is never enough. Never Let Me Go is a delicate gem, while Bridesmaids affirmed Kristen Wiig as a viable big-screen star (and also passes the Bechdel test more easily than any other mainstream films in recent memory). Asif Kapadia’s brilliant doco Senna tops my list for telling a true story, entirely with archival footage, that’s more dramatically satisfying that most fiction films. Honourable mentions include Source Code, for confirming Duncan Jones as the director (w/ Neil Blomkamp) to watch for smart science-fiction, and Rango, for its audacity and madcap inventiveness. Captain America, too, however simple in design, I think is underrated for how well it captures the pulpy-1940s spirit, and for featuring an old-skool romance that actually sparkles.

Josh Blackman writes for FilmINK and atonalFILM.

BETH WILSON

BEST RELEASED:

Incendies

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Drive

Bill Cunningham New York

Another Year

Melancholia

Pina 3D

Project Nim

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Attack the Block

BEST UNRELEASED:

The Arbor

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Tomboy

How to Die in Oregon

A Separation

The Interrupters

The Hollywood Complex

Tiny Furniture

Freedom Riders

Tyrannosaur

2011 has been the year of the documentary, and as a massive fan of the medium I have enjoyed them all, even the ones about boring sports (Senna and TT3D). They have come in all shapes and sizes; the delightful (Bill Cunningham New York), the inspiring (Freedom Riders, The Interrupters), the tragic (How to Die in Oregon, Project Nim) and the jaw-dropping (The Hollywood Complex). Some have pushed the boundaries of what a documentary can be (The Arbor, Catfish), others have embraced 3D and shown Hollywood how it should be done (Pina, TT3D). While most of my documentary watching has come from festivals this year, it is heartening to see more and more docos getting a cinema release.

Beth Wilson is the film editor of Trespass Magazine.

RICHARD GRAY

BEST RELEASED:

The Tree of Life

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Midnight in Paris

BEST UNRELEASED:

The Muppets

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Milocrorze: A Love Story

Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel

Arrietty

From the return of the Western, to kids fighting aliens, 2011 was one of the best. In a year when two great filmmakers looked at the origins and the ends of the Earth, there was little choice but to place Terrence Malick at the top of the list. Malick’s most challenging work to date may defy conventional description. Stunning and provoking, it is sure to divide audiences in its unabashedly pretentious examination of the meaning of existence. Beautiful and haunting, The Tree of Life is what cinema was created for. Of course, if The Muppets had been released in Australia in 2011, it may have been a different story. A celebration of all things joyous in its own right, it reminded us that life's a happy song, when there's someone by your side to sing along. This is undoubtedly something Lars Von Trier may need to be reminded of occasionally, although Melancholia may just be his masterpiece.

Richard Gray is the Editor of online film magazine The Reel Bits, and the co-host of podcasts Behind the Panels and Film Actually.

MARC FENNELL

BEST RELEASED:

127 Hours

The Ides of March

Super 8

Black Swan

We Need to Talk about Kevin

Red State

Moneyball

Crazy Stupid Love

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

2011 gave us a murky field. It was a year of giant ups and downs in the quality of cinema. So much so that it wasn’t really until I sat down to compile this list that I realised just how many great films there had been. There is one moment that I look for when making a list like this. It’s that split second in the cinema where you find yourself leaning in and think to yourself “This is not what I expected”. It was that spark, that moment of suprise that I looked for. These were the movies that pushed me to the edge of that chair, and pulled me closer to that screen. Honourable mentions: Catfish, Submarine, The Help, Attack the Block, True Grit, Hanna, Warrior, Oranges and Sunshine and Source Code (except for the last 10 minutes). Missed: Senna, The Guard, Incendies, Melancholia.

Marc Fennell is a film critic (triple j, ABC Radio and The Circle), media mischief maker and the author of That Movie Book.

5SPROCKET

BEST RELEASED:

Drive

Melancholia

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never

Meek's Cutoff

The Lion King 3D

Bill Cunningham New York

Unstoppable

Kaboom

Scenes From The Suburbs (Arcade Fire)

BEST UNRELEASED:

Rubber
Head (1968, Criterion DVD)

Dogtooth

Nine Types Of Light (TV on the Radio)

Super Night Shot (Sydney Festival)

Drive is like having your nipples tickled by Ryan Gosling. Melancholia is heartbreaking and beautiful, and absolutely overwhelming. Uncle Boonmee's world is a place I'd like to stay forever. There are few things as bizarre as watching the Justin Bieber in a cinema packed with 'tween' girls, screaming hysterically as their arms stretch to touch the face of their (now in 3D!) icon. Kelly Reichardt is one of the great contemporary US filmmakers, who along with Gregg Araki (Kaboom) and Tony Scott (Unstoppable), continue to hone their craft. Rubber is hysterical, and Scenes From The Suburbs is an admirable failure that could all too easily be lost to history… Also, HEAD! What a film!! What a year!!

5sprocket writes about TV and Film for 3D World magazine.

DAVID MARIN-GUZMAN

BEST RELEASED:

The Tree of Life

Melancholia

Sleeping Beauty

Snowtown

Wasted On The Young

Black Swan

Certified Copy

The Skin I Live In

Norwegian Wood

Contagion

BEST UNRELEASED:

The Turin Horse

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Woman

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

End of Animal

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A Separation

The Grey

Coriolanus

The Descendants

Australian films featured heavily in the top half of my ten films of 2011. Amazingly, all three came from debut filmmakers. But while Snowtown attracted the most praise, Sleeping Beauty and Wasted On The Young appear destined to face critical oblivion as both audiences and critics turn their backs. Here’s hoping these two extraordinary films are rediscovered. The rest of the year was dominated by a strong showing of foreign language films interrupted by Hollywood flicks with a distinctly European feel (Black Swan, Contagion). My top two - The Tree of Life and Melancholia - should really be a tie. Each connects the personal with the cosmic but in entirely different ways. Both offer astounding cinematic experiences. It'd be unfair to choose between two works that are each so completely in a league of their own.

David Marin-Guzman reviews films on Eastside FM's Cinemascape program as well as his own blog http://daveguzman.blogspot.com

GILES HARDIE

BEST RELEASED:

Black Swan

Incendies

Oranges and Sunshine

Project Nim

The Help

Crazy, Stupid, Love

Midnight in Paris

Drive

Warrior

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

BEST UNRELEASED:

Young Adult

J Edgar

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Tyrannosaur

Tomboy

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Best Exotic Marigold

The Muppets

A Separation

As ever I make my lists in a slightly different manner to everyone else. First I list my fifty-ish favourite films from the year, then break them into ten sub-categories, then choose a favourite in each. It means films I love lose out, but there’s more breadth to the ten. As ever, they could really be in any order. This year that highlighted how many good Australian films there have been, how many good action films (no that’s not a contradiction in terms) and lead to me anointing a new genre ‘Extremely violent drama’ which had some killer entries – Drive, The Fighter, Warrior. A comparatively weak year for animation. As ever the films from the beginning of the year either fade or improve with my dubious memory.

Giles Hardie is the Entertainment Editor at SMH Online.

DWAYNE LENNOX

BEST RELEASED:

Beginners

Bridesmaids

Drive

Midnight In Paris

Project Nim

Rango

Snowtown

Super 8

The Tree of Life

True Grit

The Future

BEST UNRELEASED:

The Artist

How To Die In Oregon

Hugo

Le Havre

Like Crazy

The Muppets

Shame

Weekend

Young Adult

It seems churlish to say 2011 was a good-not-great year in film when we had releases from Allen, Aronofsky, the Coens, Refn, Spielberg (x2), von Trier, and a magnum opus by Malick. Still, I can't decide on a #1, so Best Released are my 10 favourites in alphabetical order. Most of my Best Unreleased films will be receiving an Australian cinema release in the first three months of 2012. While they are listed alphabetically, I can state categorically that Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist is my #1 choice. Believe everything you've heard about The Artist: it's a beguiling piece of movie making magic.

Dwayne Lennox is the film reviewer for Sydney's Cafe Society magazine since 2004 and the founder of The LennoX Files.

ALICE TYNAN

BEST RELEASED:

Drive

Bill Cunningham New York

Melancholia

The Tree of Life

Black Swan

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Midnight in Paris

Incendies

Bridesmaids

Jane Eyre

BEST UNRELEASED:

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A Separation

Shame

Hugo

Tomboy

The Arbor

Tiny Furniture

The Forgiveness of Blood

Attenberg

How to Die in Oregon

Another cinematic year has shot by and I’m left grappling with my sieve-like memory: Black Swan was released in 2011, right? Indeed I feel a bit sorry for the films from early in the year, especially lighter fare like Tangled or Rango - both of which I was giddy about at the time – as they seem to have found themselves elbowed out by art-house behemoths like Tree of Life and Melancholia. In fact it strikes me that my list reads a little like a who’s who of art-house snobbery, so forgive me! I promise films like The Guard, The Trip and even True Grit were vying for position on this list. And what of local cinema? The brilliant Burning Man, the delightful Griff the Invisible or Fred Schepisi’s impeccable The Eye of the Storm definitely deserve honourable mentions. As does Snowtown…for haunting my nightmares. Bring on 2012 (minus the apocalypse, please!)!

Alice Tynan is a film critic for Limelight Magazine, The Movie Club, 702 ABC Sydney, The Vine and The Big Issue. See more at The Plot Thickens.

SCOTT HENDERSON

BEST RELEASED:

Drive
Certified Copy
Senna
Black Swan
127 Hours
Moneyball
True Grit
Beginners
Bill Cunningham's New York
Sleeping Beauty

Have to qualify my 2012 top 10 list by saying I missed out on Tree Of Life, Melancholia and The Skin I Live In. All three are high on my to see list before the year is out, just didn't squeeze them in before this write up. Some oldies on there due to the nature of the Australia release calendar but looking back Black Swan, 127 Hours and True Grit are films that lingered long in my thoughts, which is a major qualifying feature of my selection. While Certified Copy was easily the most stimulating intellectual experience I enjoyed at the movies in 2012, Senna was equally as gripping; immersed in tragedy, inspiration and technical prowess. But my top film was a genre-bending, populist, pulp adventure from director Nicolas Winding Refn, whose thriller Drive delivered a symphony of aesthetic, emotive and acoustic harmony rarely equaled.

Scott Henderson writes for The Vine and Empire Magazine.

MATT RAVIER

BEST RELEASED:

Tree Of Life
Certified Copy
Sleeping Beauty
Black Swan
Incendies
Melancholia
Take Shelter
Pina
Beginners
Drive

BEST UNRELEASED:

Cold Weather
My Sister's Sister
Dogtooth
Take This Waltz
Martha Marcy May Marlene
The Story of Film
Oslo, 31 August
Beauty
Kill List
Nuit #1

I traveled a lot this year, visiting six different countries and watching a lot of films in the process. It's endlessly reassuring to me to see that diversity can still be found on screens around the world (if one looks hard enough) and that we don't all have to watch (& talk about) the same 60 movies. The films that left a strong impression were the ones that seemed to shake up their genre, or in some cases the very foundations of cinema. There were a lot of very good films that left me somewhat indifferent: they were quickly forgotten. Great titles that didn't quite make the list but to look out for in the new year include ALPS, Perfect Sense, Into The Abyss, Le Havre, Wetlands, Shame, Samsara, Rampart, I Wish, Trishna, The Deep Blue Sea, Jeff who Lives at Home and Monsieur Lazhar.

Matt Ravier runs The Festivalists, which programs & produces film festivals. This is his blog and he also writes for a variety of publications including Metro Magazine and The Big Issue.

DAVID MICHAEL BROWN

BEST RELEASED:

Black Swan
Drive
Melancholia
The Skin I Live In
Another Year
X-Men: First Class
The Hunter
Super 8
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
Submarine

BEST UNRELEASED:

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The Muppets
Hugo
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Kill List
Troll Hunter
Tyrannosaur
Hobo With A Shotgun
Exporting Raymond
Cedar Rapids

2011 has been a hell of a year for movies. Yes, the blockbusters have scampered into obscurity but any year that features new films by Darren Aronofsky, Lars von Trier and Nicolas Winding Refn must be saluted. Released in January and the much vaunted companion piece to the machismo posturing of The Wrestler, Aronofsky ballet horror, Black Swan, handed Natalie Portman a well-deserved Oscar, despite accusations of ballet stand-ins. Winding Refn’s Drive was a glorious slice of neon lit ‘80s tarmac featuring Ryan Gosling at his toothpick chewing best, with an awesome soundtrack and able support from Albert Brooks and Carey Mulligan, Drive was an exhilarating ride and a close contender for pole position. In Antichrist Lars von Trier destroyed the lives of a grieving couple, in Melancholia he destroyed the world. A masterful collision of Dogma aesthetics and sci-fi tropes, Melancholia was a glorious end to our civilization. It’s the end of the world as we know, and Lars feels fine.

David Michael Brown is senior editor at Empire Magazine. You can read his work at www.empireonline.com.au.

DEE JEFFERSON

BEST RELEASED:

Beginners
Drive
Melancholia
Take Shelter
Tree Of Life, The
The Future
True Grit
Black Swan
Ides Of March
Incendies
Le Quattro Volte

BEST UNRELEASED:

Alps
Attenberg
Shame
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
People Mountain People Sea
A Separation
Faust
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Descendants

Dee Jefferson is a film journalist and the Arts Editor at The Brag.

_____________________________________________________

This is an informal poll and doesn't represent an official organization or critics group. Apologies to any Sydney-based film journalists who haven't been included, I tried to reach out to everyone but not everyone was in town etc. Please get in touch so I can include you in future polls.

I'm inviting all film lovers out there to post their own analysis and top 10 lists in the comments below. Happy new year everyone!

In Conversation: Jody Shapiro

2011-07-26T11:14:00.002+10:00

Here's a conversation I had with talented Canadian filmmaker, producer and cinematographer Jody Shapiro at Metro Screen as part of the 2011 Sydney Film Festival.

Jody Shapiro is well known for his work with Guy Maddin and Isabella Rossellini. He was recently in town to present his new feature documentary How To Start Your Own Country, as well as Animals Distract Me, a uniquely personal documentary collaboration with Isabella Rossellini.

Jody has carved out a fascinating shared creative space for himself and the artists he most admires, no mean feat in an era when the odds seem stacked against the financing, production and distribution of truly independent films. There's a lot to learn from his holistic, passion-driven approach: his is an inspiring story of independence, intuition and artistic integrity.

Thanks to Metro Screen for hosting this chat, and to the Sydney Film Festival for inviting me to facilitate.

Cinephilia as Activism (Project: New Cinephilia)

2011-07-02T16:35:00.002+10:00

Recently I was asked to participate to a fascinating international round-table for PROJECT: NEW CINEPHILIA, a conversation hosted by MUBI.com and the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

The online round-table sought to define contemporary cinephilia (here's its curatorial statement). You can read the full round-table discussion here, and you should check out PROJECT: NEW CINEPHILIA's great resources and original essays too.

The discussion sought to answer some of the following questions. What does it mean to be a cinephile in the 21st century? How has film discourse adapted to today’s environment? What is the impact of the other arts on film writing? How are we naturally equipped to “read” a film? What are best practices for teaching film appreciation? How have new modes of distribution affected what we see and how we interpret film?

Here's an excerpted version of my contribution.

RECLAIMING THE SCREENS: CINEPHILIA AS ACTIVISM

I’ll start by claiming cinephile pride. Perhaps it’s because I’m French, but the word “cinephile” works for me. I like “fan”, but how many people out there don’t consider themselves fans of film? A distinction seems necessary, and in years of watching (reading about, writing about, dreaming about) cinema, no better term has been suggested to me. It describes – from Ancient Greek to French to English – someone with a passionate interest in cinema. That’s us, isn’t it?

In recent years (as I write this even!) the way in which we make, watch, share and talk about films has changed. Merci technology. More people seem to be joining the conversation and that conversation seems to be both more fragmented and less inhibited (by class, by education, by gender, by geography).

I believe you can be a cinephile even if the majority of your film watching happens outside the cinema. (As an aside, some of my friends’ home cinema set-ups, and the inclusive generosity with which they are used, puts the so-called “cinema experience” to shame.) Mostly, cinephiles have more tools at their disposal (…and there are more films to talk about), but has the conversation itself really changed? One outlet for cinephilia has changed: professional film journalism, but the conversation rages on.

The lack of diversity and representation are still problematic. On the one hand, technology is levelling the playing field: making films, sharing films, watching films and talking about films is, more than ever, accessible to everyone. On the other hand cinema, in the name of free trade and globalization, is slowly but surely being shoved away from the protective embrace Governments have traditionally reserved for the arts, left to fend for itself in a liberal economy defined by supply and demand.

As a result, I feel the multiplicity of voices behind and around the camera is less reflected in mainstream culture, media and awareness than it could be. The diversity of what’s on our screens is under threat. And, due partly to ignorance about alternatives, it isn’t being demanded. This offers a tremendous opportunity to define new cinephilia as a form of activism or resistance.

The end of paid criticism has a silver lining: editorial freedom. Couple that editorial freedom with the inexpensive and accessible new ways of making, distributing, discussing and promoting films. Fuel it with a cinephilia that seeks to reach out and preach to the unconverted (rather, perhaps, than with fandom, which brings together people around a hermetic sub-culture?), and you have a tremendous force at your disposal. Do cinephiles have a responsibility?

I don’t have a background in film theory or in filmmaking. I’m an arts administrator and a festival programmer. My modest activism as a cinephile expresses itself through the organization, financing, production, marketing (and yes, programming) of film festivals, by repeated attempts (often thwarted by compromise: festivals are the realpolitik of evangelical cinephilia) to bring together creators and an audience.

But everyone is different. A cinephile activist is anyone who lets true cinephilia inform their actions. Cinephile activists can include published academics, cultural policy makers, archivists, media studies professors, passionate film distributors, independent critics, educators and of course, filmmakers. It can manifest itself on a global scale (Mubi.com,Cannes, TIFF Lightbox, Benten Films, the International Cinephile Society) or at your doorstep (underground film festivals, zines, street art, public disobedience, guerrilla screenings).

Cinephile activism is an inclusive, open-minded enthusiasm unshaped by dominant market forces, unburdened by self-censorship, unafraid of questioning itself, one which is informed by personal history and experience as much as by received wisdom, buoyed by critical thinking, sharpened by constructive discussion, curious of under-represented voices, aware of the underground, and which eventually dedicates itself to enhancing cinematic diversity, innovation and originality.

It isn’t new, but has it ever felt more urgent? Has it ever been more within reach?

I’m thrilled about how information technology is changing the way films are made, seen, disseminated and talked about. It’s opened up new opportunities for many who were previously excluded from this creative universe. It’s turned cinephilia from a secret club for the privileged to a “Broad church” in which anyone can worship.

I don’t think this new unfettered access, even defined as overexposure, poses a threat to thoughtful criticism. Those sensitive to its charms had to seek it out in the past, they will seek it out in the future. The same can be said of contemplative cinema. Isn’t part of our role to aggregate, demystify, point the way? If anything, I think the abundance of un-sponsored, unedited, multifaceted voices helps bridge the gap between an audience too often treated like a market, and a cinema too often marginalized by its inability to compete for attention in a media-saturated landscape. For all the trash that washes up on its beaches, the internet is still a place where one can access treasures of cinema, gems of criticism. It’s an ocean of information, not a tidal wave.

Cinephilia is about time, and sometimes it seems cinema and thoughtful criticism move to a different timescale than the internet and online banter. Negotiating this disconnect, moderating our unlimited access to knowledge and materials, these are the challenges of the age (and not just for cinephiles). It requires incredible self-discipline, but isn’t it a fascinating, stimulating exercise?

I’m less interested in the size of the screen at the moment than in what’s on it. I have a multitude of devices on which I can (and do) watch moving images. And yet like everyone here, there is nothing I like more than watching films the way most were meant to be seen: in a cinema, in a comfortable seat, on a big screen, with proper sound. But it’s not something I can take for granted anymore.

I live in Sydney. There is no cinematheque here. There is no centre for the moving image. The last repertory cinemas have been turned into office buildings. Independent cinemas are all but extinct. Five or six so-called art houses all show the same 7 or 8 movies. A quick glance at some of the titles screening there this weekend: Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Water for Elephants, Insidious, The Hangover 2. And then there’s the multiplex.

This is not some provincial backwater, this is the biggest city in the country, a city of over 4 million people in one of the world’s richest economies. This is the place small town youth flee to in search of culture. The films of Denis or Breillat, Tsai or Weerasethakul, Costa or Lanthimos, they cannot be seen in a cinema here, outside of a festival. Ozon’s Potiche, for many here, is as leftfield as cinema gets.

I’m all for the purist’s cinema experience, but not at the expense of diversity. Is it better to stream Tropical Malady on a TV, computer or home projector, or never to see it at all? If we must resort to other screens to awaken and preserve interest in the work of true artists, past and present, so be it. If tweets and podcasts are helpful to share that enthusiasm and alert people to alternatives, then bring it on.

Cinephiles run film festivals here because without them, the cinema experience would boil down to consuming event movies with popcorn. The internet has levelled the playing field, provided accessible and powerful opportunities for promotion and discussion, allowed us to keep in touch with audiences and filmmakers year-round and to champion under-represented cinema. The aim is still to bring people together in a darkened, acoustically-sound cinema, and in the case of my next event, to introduce them to the work of promising Quebec auteurs such as Sebastien Pilote and Stephane Lafleur.

Alongside traditional film festival, I started a monthly short film night here called Kino Sydney 5 years ago, where we show uncurated short films made specifically for the night. It’s the other end of the spectrum. The films are of varying quality, the sound is average, cushions replace red velour seats and everyone’s drinking and talking. But we’re drinking and talking about film. We’re sharing our experience (and our understanding) of shooting and assembling videos, and how that relates to our experience (and our understanding) of cinema. The lines are blurred.

There are so many new ways to engage with filmmaking, criticism and viewing. Each has become more accessible than it’s ever been. If there is a new cinephilia, then perhaps it’s one which allows us to seamlessly alternate between taking on, learning from and commenting on each of these three roles. The possibilities are endless.

Sydney Film Festival: Critics' Poll 2011

2011-06-20T20:10:00.002+10:00

SFF competition jury: producer Mark Herbert, director Sarah Watt, director Chen Kaige, actress Kerry Fox & critic Julie Rigg.

The 58th Sydney Film Festival has just wrapped. Asghar Farhadi is the recipient of the $60,000 Sydney Film Prize for A SEPARATION, a film which, according to jury president Chen Kaige, "best demonstrates emotional power and resonance, a film which is audacious, cutting-edge, courageous and goes beyond the usual treatment of the subject matter." The Iranian film has already won the Golden Bear at this year's Berlin Film Festival and will screen at the Melbourne Film Festival next month. A special mention was also awarded to Mohamed Diab's Egyptian entry CAIRO 678, "for it’s courage in using a popular form of cinema to successfully communicate the frustration and anger of women in Egypt with sexual harassment, and their determination to change this."

Festival director Clare Stewart

It's festival director Clare Stewart's fifth and last year at the Sydney Film Festival, and the consensus within the small community of critics and cinephiles with whom I spent the past 12 days is that the 2011 line-up, while leaner, was eclectic, diverse and full of genuine discoveries.

Once again, the #sydfilmfest hashtag on twitter acted as a water cooler around which many conversations began. Many of these continued in real life in the lobby of the cinema, or in the bars nearest the State Theatre. Interestingly this year, several SFF-selected filmmakers who couldn't attend actively took part in the conversation with us on Twitter, including Paddy Considine (Tyrannosaur), Asid Kapadia (Senna) and Ben Wheatley (Kill List).

Miranda July on the red carpet for The Future

I polled a sample of local film and visiting critics about the films they've seen at the Festival. The star rating system is obviously very limited, it certainly isn't criticism. Taken together however, these ratings create an insightful snapshot of the overall critical reaction to this year's line-up. I'm thrilled that this year's poll includes contributions from visiting critics based in Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane.

I've also included links to the contributors' writing about the festival if you'd like to read a more in-depth analysis of the program. Some reviews will continue popping up on line and in print in the day and weeks to come.

Click on the pictures below to enlarge. Films in blue were in competition. Note that the films which do not appear on the list were not seen by anyone on the panel.

Feature Films

Feature Documentaries

Short Films

Here are some initial observations:

A Separation was the highest rated competition film. It actually won the Sydney Film Prize, showing the critics alignment with the jury this year. Terrence Malick's eagerly anticipated The Tree Of Life was close behind.
Tomboy was the highest rated film, though only two people in the panel saw it.
Sleeping Beauty, Norwegian Wood and The Future seemed the most divisive. Julia Leigh's Cannes entry certainly seemed to inspire the most heated conversations during the past fortnight.
In the documentaries, Asif Kapadia's portrait of the Brazilian F1 champion Senna was a clear favourite, transcending the subject matter to move and inspire even those allergic to formula one.
Too few of us saw too few the shorts for the results to mean much, but I thought I'd include them any way. Here are the Dendy Award winners.

Thanks to all who took part!

A gaggle of critics

Read / hear more:

Joshua Blackman (The Brag, Atonal Film)
Julian Buckeridge (AtTheCinema)
Matt Clayfield (The Australian, various publications)
Simon Miraudo (Quickflix)
Dave Marin-Guzman (Eastside FM)
Sarah Ward (The Reel Bits, DVD Bits)
Alice Tynan (Various outlets)
Ian Barr (Drum Media)
Richard Gray (The Reel Bits, DVD Bits, KOFFIA Blog, At The Cinema)
Scott Henderson (Dark Habits, The Vine)
Daniel Crichton-Rouse (Street Press Australia)
Matt Ravier (this here blog, The Brag, The Big Issue)
Richard Haridy (Rich On Film)
Dee Jefferson (The Brag)

If you're a Sydney based film critic and you'd like to take part in future polls, get in touch!

Here are other recent polls:

In conversation with Canadian filmmaker Jody Shapiro

Did you see any films at the Sydney Film Festival program? Do you agree with these local critics? Which were your favourites?

Eyes Wired Shut (Sleeping Beauty)

2011-06-10T17:15:00.000+10:00

Note: This review is better read after seeing the film.

Julia Leigh's debut Sleeping Beauty is only the second Australian film to be selected in Official Competition at Cannes in over a decade. The other was Bright Star, directed by the only female Palme d'Or winner in history, Jane Campion, whom Leigh cites as a mentor and facilitator here. Interestingly, Sleeping Beauty wasn't welcomed with rapturous applause in Cannes, much like Jane Campion's first film Sweetie, which met with indifference and hostility when it was unveiled in 1989.

While inclusion immediately elevates first-time filmmakers out of obscurity, Cannes' official competition can be unforgiving to first features. The build-up begins when selection is announced. Suddenly a film below everyone's radar, one seen by less than a dozen people worldwide, is presented as being on an even keel with the work of Malick, Von Trier or Almodovar. Once the festival starts, the competition unveils one film at a time, subjecting the work to accelerated appraisal, impossible expectations and immediate comparison with the well-resourced films of firmly established masters. In the mad rush of getting critical responses filed (or tweeted) before the 4th or 5th screening of the day begins, critics and commentators make snap judgments read by millions around the world, long before anyone else has a chance to even see the film, let alone formulate a counter-opinion.

Films screened in official competition often have only one chance to impress, and the rushed critical consensus on the Riviera after that initial screening was that Sleeping Beauty, while by no means a failure, didn't entirely live up to the hype.

Now that the film begins a wider roll-out, starting with an international premiere at Sydney Film Festival, it is possible to allow ourselves a little more time to think about the film, ponder its ambitions and reflect upon its achievements.

Sleeping Beauty's graphic images of female subjugation, emotionally detached tone and refusal to subscribe to traditional narrative conventions will continue to alienate many viewers. Those who seek a heroin they can relate to will be frustrated by a selfish, possibly unfeeling protagonist. Nowhere to be found is a character arc which conveniently maps the learning of valuable life lessons, preferably ones which tie in neatly with the accepted morals of the day, or articulate feminist theories in a way that comforts us or easily validates our opinions.

Many in Australia will be predisposed to hate it, to dismiss it sight unseen as yet another example of self-indulgent homegrown filmmaking, a metaphorical punching bag to vent their frustrations about the local film industry. Some will compare it to films designed to entertain, to make money, to reach for universal resonance, and find it lacking. Conservative commentators will misread the film's comments on sexual exploitation and react hysterically to its matter-of-fact depiction of the sex trade. But some film lovers, as equally unmoved by the glow of international recognition and the Campion stamp of approval as they are by the lukewarm reaction of major Cannes-accredited critics, will hopefully champion this confident, fearless and strikingly accomplished first film.

Sleeping Beauty's opens with a young university student (an excellent Emily Browning) undergoing what we assume are paid medical trials. A lab technician gently but firmly inserts a probe down the woman's throat, challenging both her gag reflex and our comfort zone. In a single tableau, Julia Leigh efficiently sets the tone of the film - detached, clinical, confronting - and provides a great introduction to Lucy: beautiful, fearless, and seemingly comfortable with letting others use her body in exchange for cash.

The clinical gaze ensures that the scenes of nudity and sexual violence are never exploitative nor engineered to arouse. Leigh chronicles a world in which social interactions - whether it is passing notes to your housemates or making plans for sex - are designed and codified to a degree that prevents actual raw, emotional exchange to ever truly occur. The artificial nature of a life lived without emotional engagement is the main subject of this film, it's the true slumber of this sleeping beauty. Leigh's framing of her story is cold and symmetrical, her main character is detached and remote. Numbness, as a subject, is well served by this clinical, minimal style.

It's also a refreshing change from young filmmakers' compulsive need to cram every film school trick into their first feature. A successful novelist, Leigh is clearly already a confident storyteller. For all its formal rigour and technical elegance, Leigh's style hasn't yet found, perhaps, a personality of its own. A monologue on age and experience, delivered straight to camera in one scene, hints at what could have been. Here and there, the influence of Kubrick, Bunuel or Haneke can be felt. There's an intuitive understanding of the power of visual storytelling at work, it just begs to be further developed.

This static medium shot which coldly monitors the action in the lab in that first scene recurs through most of the film, putting us at arms' length from the subject. We are not encouraged to relate as much as to reflect on our position as voyeurs. In other words, we can look but cannot touch.

Later, in a club, a second economical scene conveys a lot of information with scarcely a word being spoken: Lucy needs money, she's comfortable using her sexuality to obtain it, she's in control even when she seems to be the most passive player in the room. Initial forays into prostitution lead her to audition for a position as a lingerie waitress before graduating to the role of "sleeping beauty".

Her icy, aristocratic employer Clara (Rachel Blake) explains: "you will go to sleep: you will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed". For serious money, Lucy - working under the name Sara - accepts to be drugged into dreamless sleep and spend hours alone with wealthy clients. "Your vagina will not be penetrated," Clara assures her, "your vagina is a temple".

While clients are instructed to "not leave a mark" on the young woman's body, it soon becomes clear that Lucy doesn't emerge from artificial sleep unscathed. Aloof as she may be, she begins to wonder about that unknowable part of her life. In one brilliant scene Lucy sees a sleeping woman on the train, wipes the drool from her chin. The vulnerability, loss of control and potential indignity of sleep, merely hinted at here, register on Emily Browning's face as so many tiny ripples of recognition and horror.

Cracks begin to appear in her armor, in her psyche. Even back in the safety of a her own glass apartment, for example, she discovers that she can no longer sleep naked. There are silent cries for help, like a handful of berries released in the car that takes Lucy to her clients (a nod perhaps to European fairy tales), or a desperate marriage proposal to an old flame...

Lucy's behaviour grows wilder, riskier, more dangerous, but her body is preserved, nearly unmarked, a paragon of virginal beauty. Like Dorian Gray, she keeps her alter ego locked up, hidden from view. Here, it takes the form of her only friend (Ewen Leslie), a house-bound addict she visits episodically. He is her one source of true human warmth. This contact that is also codified (they trade unnecessarily polite banter) but it remains untainted by transaction. This man - the one person who knows and loves her - has lost the will to live, is dying. Lucy is unable to save him. His body, like Dorian Gray's portrait, grows older, uglier and weaker by the day. While a hedonistic Lucy sells her immaculate youthful body, it is as if her soul withers away in a cage. Interestingly, her friend is called Birdmann.

Scramble the letters in LUCY and SARA and you can phonetically spell "Australia". Julia Leigh's film is open to interpretations: I read Sleeping Beauty as an indictment of contemporary Australia, with Emily Browning's character acting as a metaphorical key to explore our nation's place in the world.

Australia, the young, white-skinned nation, is healthy, vigorous, beautiful and aware of her gifts. She has poise but sophistication doesn't come naturally. She is the lucky country, untouched by war, strife or natural disasters. Her assets are bountiful, attracting the attention of older nations who lust after her beauty, her youth, her natural resources. Unburdened by shame or conscience, she sells herself to the highest bidder, lets herself be subjugated by powerful nations, whose markets and influence she in turn covets. She sells off her land, her resources, her energy. She closes her eyes to the consequences of her actions, to the plight of others. She turns a blind eye to the price she may one day have to pay for the hedonistic, irresponsible and dangerous excesses of her youth.

That metaphor, of course, will not work for everyone. It's important to remember however, that none of the fairytales which inspired Sleeping Beauty were meant to be taken at face value. Most are cautionary tales which conceal deeper meanings behind scenes both grotesque and preposterous. The best ones are story archetypes which, when revisited (like Catherine Breillat's other Perreault update, Bluebeard) can shed new light on the modern narratives we use to define morality.

Like a psychopath, Lucy seems almost emotionally deaf. Her sleepwalk through life, uncaring and unfeeling, can easily be imagined as the detached, irony-infused apathy of an entire generation. In the fairytale, it takes a prince's kiss to wake her from her slumber. In this contemporary update, it takes a lot more to wake Lucy up from her numb existence. When she finally wakes from this state, she does so with a heart wrenching howl in the final frames. Once again, this time to her irreversible horror, she has allowed someone to die in her arms. It is not the fairytale's Kiss of Life that wakes her, it is the realization that everything Lucy touches withers and dies: hers has become the Kiss of Death.

The last frames, like something from a Michael Haneke film, are a discomforting reminder of our complicity in the actions of those who take advantage of Lucy. The video footage of Lucy sleeping is nothing new to the audience, who have been sitting there throughout, all too aware of what fate awaits her when she sleeps. The final scenes of this deceptively simple narrative aren't just a wake up call to our sleeping beauty, they are a wake up call to those who stand there, bear witness, and do nothing.

Sleeping Beauty had its world premiere at Cannes 2011 and its international premiere at the Sydney Film Festival on June 10th. It releases in Australia on June 23rd.

Days of Earth (The Tree Of Life)

2011-05-27T08:00:00.002+10:00

There’s a breath-holding moment in Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life when Jack, aged 2, meets his newborn brother for the first time. The toddler – almost a boy - approaches the baby, laid out on a blanket on the family’s front lawn. The camera hovers gracefully above his shoulder, occasionally blinded by the warm light of the setting sun. In the space of a single take, Jack’s face betrays a succession of raw emotions: confusion, fear, the discovery that he isn’t the only (the golden) child, a realization that his parents’ love will need to be shared, the first awareness perhaps, of himself as a toddler, grown from an infant such as the newborn now before him, competition, curiosity, a sense of superiority laden with responsibility, protectiveness and, eventually, love.

This incredible scene beautifully encapsulates the rare and magical nature of Malick’s work, simultaneously a construct and the opposite of a construct. While we are never allowed to forget that what we are watching is a film – the camera floats and spins, constantly calling attention to itself – we are also witnessing a moment seemingly so entirely natural as to be borrowed from reality. It’s safe to call a 2 year old actor a non-professional, but this isn’t the European über-realism of Bruno Dumont or event the Dardenne Brothers. This is slick, polished filmmaking with an undeniable Hollywood sheen, and superstar Brad Pitt is just there in the background, slightly out of focus.

More perhaps than the infrequency of his films (5 in 4 decades) or the constant shunning of the spotlight (he hasn’t been interviewed once between 1973 and 2007), Malick’s reputation amongst cinephiles rests on this ability to defend a unique artistic vision which borrows from both a bigger-than-life Hollywood tradition and an intimate, uncompromising European auteur cinema… yet belongs in neither. Only the late Stanley Kubrick, perhaps, compares.

The film begins with a quote from Job 38:4: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?” In other words, how can man - the finite creature - fathom the infinite wisdom of the creator? How can man understand God’s aims, not having been present at the moment of creation? The dizzying ambition of The Tree Of Life is its attempt to tackle this most philosophical of questions.

The simple story is that of an all-American family living in the Suburban hinterland (Texas?) in the late 50’s. Brad Pitt plays the authoritarian father, Jessica Chastain the stay at home mother of three boys. This tableau is conjured through a series of recollections by the older son Jack O’Brien – now a middle-aged man working in the City (Sean Penn). How – he wonders - did he become the man he is today?

A significant part of the film centres around Jack’s daily life with his brothers. It’s told mostly in internal monologues made up of the characters’ whispered (and unanswered) interrogations: there is no distinction made here between talking to oneself and talking to God.

The microcosm of the O’Brien family, of course, stands for humanity as a whole. Jack’s existential investigation is shorthand for our need to come to terms with the origins of the world, so as to understand our place within it.

There are two ways through life, the director posits. The way of Nature (man, the father, John Smith and his kind in The New World) and the way of Grace (woman, the mother, Pocahontas and her pre-lapsarian tribe). Nature only wants to please itself, to have its own way. Grace, meanwhile, is a state of innocence so pure as to be uncorrupted by civilization (“no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end”).

Jack’s parents embody this dichotomy, but it can also be read as a reference to the Fall of Man. Jack is born innocent, his childhood is the universal story of the corruption of this innocence, of man’s fall from grace. It’s a hypothesis that can be explored both through religion and through secularity – the film allows both interpretations.

Moving past metaphor, Malick even reaches back to creation itself, offering us a majestic sequence charting the origins of the universe and the beginning of life, from ocean-born bacteria to dinosaurs to man. In an attempt to pinpoint the exact moment when God is forgotten and the world lapses into corruption, he returns to this symbolic family, inviting us to revisit the wonder of our childhood and to understand when, how and why we (the viewers, mankind) lose our innocence.

The teachings of the father – strict and arbitrary – are the first clues. Childhood is portrayed as the learning of a series of rules and roles which accumulate to form the human condition, tearing us from grace: the introduction of private property (this is our yard, this is the neighbour’s), of competition, of role play (costumes for Halloween), of fear (the cautionary morals of fairytales), of dogma (the rituals of organized religion), the arbitrariness of authority (the one who forbids does what is forbidden)…

The climax is the discovery of that most bewildering of contradiction: innocents are made to suffer. As Jack learns, God punishes innocents and sinners alike, indiscriminately. This contradiction pushes the child into adulthood and in doing so, breaks man’s bond with nature (an idea explored further in The New World) and makes it possible for him to go to war (The Thin Red Line).

In the end, Malick folds time upon itself, allowing the adult Jack to re-unite with his childhood self, his brothers, his father, his mother. This final opportunity afforded by memory (and the medium of film), is a peaceful reconciliation, nature and grace bridged through forgiveness (literally, the last shot is a bridge).

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are superb as the laconic parents, but it’s Hunter McCracken as the 11-year-old Jack who really impresses. His face a subtle mix of steely determination, pained resolve and inquisitive curiosity, he captures in a largely silent performance the complex contradictions of childhood.

Filmed as a philosophical daydream, The Tree of Life casts a spell on those willing to surrender to its counter-intuitive narrative, mystical overtones and languorous rhythms.

As with all of his work, the film is a spellbinding spectacle. No one captures nature’s ability to provoke awe and wonder, to humble and arouse the senses, like Malick does. Emmanuel Lubezki’s luminous photography alone turns an ordinary suburban street into a richly evocative garden of Eden. Alexandre Desplat’s discreet score, meanwhile, threads an ambient, ethereal soundscape through these images, leaving the majestic emotional crescendos to Berlioz or Ligeti.

Don’t allow the lush images, languid cadence and calm whispers to lull you into a dream-like trance, however. There is much reward to be reaped from an active questioning of the film’s silent invitation to philosophical consideration.

The Tree Of Life had its world premiere at Cannes on May 16th (this review was written 3 weeks before that day). It won the Palme d'Or. It is out May 27th (today) in the US. It has its Australian premiere in competition at the Sydney Film Festival on June 14th before its national release on June 30th.

A Life Less Ordinary (Life In a Day)

2011-05-22T14:00:00.004+10:00

What were you doing on Saturday July 24th 2010?

A glance at my online calendar tells me I spent that Saturday in the office, writing copy for our website, two weeks ahead of the launch of a festival that I run, Sydney's Canadian Film Festival. There's no entry for the evening, but I might've gone to see a movie, or maybe had some friends over for dinner. By virtue of being decidedly ordinary, this day was a good a reflection of who I am, or at least who I was 10 months ago.

I remember that I knew about the Life In a Day project. I loved the idea of crowdsourcing a film and in fact, had crowdsourced a short film myself (albeit on a very modest scale) just a few months earlier. And although, like many people today, I had access to a camera and a computer, I didn't think my life was interesting enough to contribute. Perhaps I also felt a little cynical towards a project that I imagined would try too hard to strive, in vain, for the universal.

Edited from 80,000 YouTube submissions sent in from 192 countries, the feature-length documentary Life In A Day chronicles the lives of a handful of our planet's residents on Saturday July 24th 2010. Contrary to my intuition, what makes this document so worthwhile in fact, is precisely that these scenes are culled from the ordinary. One person's daily routine, it turns out, is another's exotic or adventurous daydream.

Free of voice over or context, Life in a Day is 90 minutes of back-to-back amateur clips of people's lives. I recommend sitting as far back in the cinema as you can if you want to avoid a low-res, aspect ratio headache. Arranged chronologically and thematically to chart the unfolding of a day on Earth, from midnight to midnight, the film's main concession to cinema conventions is an original score by Harry Gregson-Williams and Matthew Herbert, which threads the segments together.

While it lacks the thematic integrity of Babies or Oceans, the political agenda and widescreen photography of Koyaanisqatsi or Baraka, Life In A Day presents a surprisingly coherent if incredibly simple aesthetic and philosophical argument, one which belies its eclectic, unpolished origins.

Some clips - twelve different people getting out of bed for example - fly past in blink-and-you-miss-them fragments, others linger or recur. Some do indeed reach for the universal - a father teaches his teenage son how to shave - but most, thankfully, are comfortably anchored in the personal, the specific, the strange, the regional. The latter are the most fascinating for their ability to break with sentimental clichés and stereotypes, and give you a precious glimpse of true stories you've never heard before.

Directed by Kevin McDonald (Touching The Void) and seamlessly edited by Joe Walker (Steve McQueen's Hunger), Life In A Day impresses most by its refusal to skip over the unpleasant, or that to which it is hard to relate: a cow being slaughtered, revellers getting trampled to death during Berlin's Love Parade, a man likening homosexuality to a disease that must be eradicated.

It makes the cute vignettes more palatable, the inspiring moments less sappy, the idealistic banalities less grating. Everyone will be affected by different scenes of course, and I'll admit to shedding a few tears when a young man comes out to his grandmother over the phone. Recurring images of a Korean man in his 10th year of cycling around the world are particularly affecting, as is the last segment which highlights the atomised nature of our hyper-connected reality.

By definition, this is a reductive exercise, the result is bound to frustrate. One the one hand we don't spend long enough with anyone to let their contributions truly sink in, one the other, too many things are missing. The political is telegraphed in excerpts rendered harmless by their brevity and lack of context. The sexual, meanwhile, has been all but erased from the record. I find it hard to believe that no one on the entire planet had sex (even on camera) on the 24th of July 2010.

The filmmakers defended their editorial choices at Sundance, when the film had its world premiere earlier this year, while being live-streamed on YouTube around the world. What they chose to keep, they asserted, closely reflected the diversity of the submissions themselves. All we have is their word.

One interesting revelation, then, is the incredibly optimistic, simple and joyful tone of the film overall. The media feeds us an endless visual torrent of war, crime, abuse, scandal and celebrity hysteria, in its remit to reflect our needs for both information on world events and entertainment. When it's the people's turn to speak however, 80,000 of us reply with positive messages, grounded observations and simple pleasures.

I wish Life In A Day had been conceived as a 24 hour film, with geographical context available at the touch of the button, and perhaps on one of the film's many delivery platforms, this will be possible. Even in its current form, and taken only as seriously as its obvious limitations allow, Life In A Day is an incredible document which will handsomely reward those who check their cynicism at the door.

Update: It looks like UK distributors are crowdsourcing some of the film's marketing as well, using easyfundraising.org.uk as platform for user-promoted online tickets sales, with the incentive that a quarter of the ticket price is given away to charity.

Life in a Day screens at the upcoming Sydney Film Festival, is out in the UK on June 17th and in the US on the one-year anniversary of the shoot, July 24th 2011.
.

What to see at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival?

2011-05-15T15:31:00.007+10:00

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?

What's your most anticipated film of SFF 2011?

New poster: Toomelah

2011-05-10T10:21:00.010+10:00

The 64th Cannes International Film Festival begins tomorrow, and as I write this, thousands of industry executives, film critics and buyers are landing in Nice or unpacking in their hotel rooms. It's a good year for Australian cinema in Cannes: Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty is in competition, Justin Kurzel's Snowtown is in the Critics Week sidebar, while Ivan Sen's Toomelah is in the official selection (Un Certain Regard).

Hundreds of films will be competing for attention: alongside the official and non-official selections, Cannes has one of the largest film markets in the world. Great poster art is one way to break through the clutter and establish a title as a prestigious offering.

In the case of Ivan Sen's Indigenous drama Toomelah, Sydney-based designers Carnival Studio worked closely with the director (for whom they'd already designed the poster for 2001's Beneath Clouds), to design key art for Cannes.

For this poster, a new high quality photograph was shot on location at Toomelah Aboriginal Mission, in the Moree Plains Shire at the border between New South Wales and Queensland. The image wisely focuses on 10-year-old Daniel Connors. His face seems to reflect a childhood innocence, but also traces of inner-conflict, hinting at the film's darker themes.

A minimal, simple approach hints at the film's style. Nothing is spelled out, but visual clues are everywhere: the impulsive typography, the traditional animal totems, the antisocial hoodie, the soothing presence of nature.

Find out more about Carnival Studio and the poster here.

Here are a couple of other just-revealed posters for Cannes 2011 titles.

Sydney Film Festival 2011 in posters (part 1)

2011-05-09T10:01:00.005+10:00

Here's an initial selection of posters from films screening at this year's Sydney Film Festival. In brackets is the poster's country of origin.

All About Love (Hong Kong)

Armadillo (UK)

Attenberg (Festival)

Black Venus (French)

Cool It (US)

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (Brazilian)

Even The Rain (Spanish)

The Guard (Festival)

Happy, Happy (Norwegian)

Life In A Day (US)

Meek's Cutoff (US)

Mutant Girls Squad (Japan)

Norwegian Wood (Russian)

Project Nim (US)

Sacrifice (China)

Senna (British)

Three (German)

Troll Hunter (US)

Tucker & Dale Vs Evil (Russian)

Win Win (British)

Windfall (Festival)

The 58th Sydney Film Festival runs from the 8th to the 19th of June. Full line-up revealed 10am on Wednesday 11th May. Check back here soon for a preview of the films in the 2011 program.

Coming Soon? (Cinephile activism)

2011-04-30T15:40:00.004+10:00

BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS

There's a vacant parking lot on Sydney's William Street which I often walk past on my way back from the office. Several times I've daydreamed about this particular lot, thinking what a great site it would be for an outdoor cinema. Apart from skaters and the occasional street artist, no one seems to be using the lot, prime real estate in the center of the city.

Today I stop dead in my tracks. Stenciled on the sidewalk are the words "tickets", "popcorn" and "snack bar". As I reach the corner, I see glorious vintage film posters - Contempt, Ben Hur, La Dolce Vita, Elephant Man - plastered all along the walls, layered with bright yellow stencils: "Coming Soon".

Next to them, another poster advertising the "Boulevard Drive-In" with a bird's eye view of the site and again, the words "Coming Soon" at the bottom, sending my heart racing. As I look more closely at the film credit-like type at the bottom, however, my heart sinks. It reads:

Not directed by SYDNEY CITY COUNCIL, not produced by RTA, SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL, MOONLIGHT CINEMA, SYDNEY FESTIVAL, VIVID FESTIVAL, without the support of ARTS AUSTRALIA, not an initiative of NSW SATE GOVERNMENT.

That's it.

I'm not sure if it's a brilliant piece of protest art, showing us a frustrating glimpse of what could have been with a bit of imagination, relaxed council attitudes and some public funding, or if an independent group is indeed planning an unauthorized, guerilla drive-in.

I doubt that anyone has indeed approached local and state government, as well as arts festivals, asking for support and funding for this particular idea, or you'd think they'd get the names of these bodies right (there's no such thing, for example, as "Arts Australia"). A series of guerilla screenings is certainly a possibility: there have been more and more of these happening around town lately (one event called Fluoro Brown holds secret outdoor screenings announcing locations online a couple of hours before the screening, for example).

In any case, in a city without a cinematheque nor centre for the moving image, where repertory cinemas have died a brutal death and arthouse theatres all show the same seven films, this is a rather inspiring piece of cinephile activism, don't you think?

If you have any further information on this project, or you'd like to chime in, please leave a comment below!

Waiting for Cannes (Cannes Collection DVD box set)

2011-04-20T19:41:00.003+10:00

The 64th Cannes Film Festival begins on May 11th. The star-studded Official Selection has been announced, and by "star" I mean filmmakers of high-wattage, including Lars Von Trier, Pedro Almodovar, Terrence Malick, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Dardenne Brothers or Nanni Moretti.

The Official Selection includes no less than 2 Australian features. Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty will have its world premiere in competition (only 2 other Australian films have been selected for the official competition in the past decade, Jane Campion's Bright Star in 2009 and Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge in 2001), where it will compete for both the Palme d'Or and the Camera d'Or (best 1st feature). Ivan Sen's Toomelah, meanwhile, will have its world premiere in Un Certain Regard, a sidebar which opens with Gus Van Sant's Restless, starring Australian actress Mia Wasikowska.

The names of the eight members of the jury have been revealed. Robert De Niro presides - worrying if you look at the films he's chosen to act in over the past 15 years or so. Cinephiles such as Olivier Assayas and Norway's Linn Ullmann should provide some much needed critical back-up. From 2011 onwards, an honorary Palme d'Or will be given out each and every year to a filmmaker for their entire body of work. Bernardo Bertolucci will be this year's recipient.

The short film competition is looking good too. Australian filmmakers have often done very well in this category. This year Nash Edgerton's new short Bear has made the cut, quite an achievement if you consider that there are only 9 finalists for the short film Palme d'Or.

Prestigious (but unofficial) sidebar Directors' Fortnight has revealed its program (commented here by artistic director Frederic Boyer). The Critics Week line-up, meanwhile, includes new work by Jeff Nichols and Jonathan Caouette, as well an another Australian film, Justin Kurzel's Snowtown.

For those of us not traveling to Cannes this year, the next month or so is going to be both exhilarating and unbearable. To lessen the pain, I'd like to recommend this brand new CANNES COLLECTION (2008-2010) box-set, for which I have written a special introduction as well as liner notes.

The beautifully packaged collection includes the following ten titles (all released by Transmission in Australia), many of which are Cannes award winners.

The Tree
Fish Tank
Leap Year
Antichrist
Che: Part One
Che: Part Two
Enter The Void
The White Ribbon
Broken Embraces
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

The Cannes Collection 10 DVD box set comes out in Australia on May 5th (pre-order it here!).

A world in which we are all dancers (Pina)

2011-04-18T18:05:00.004+10:00

Why film the performing arts? And how? These questions have been – since the dawn of photography - at the core of our desire to immortalize performance, and allow the ephemeral arts of the stage to be experienced beyond the theatre or concert hall, to live on after the death of its creators.

Ballet, theatre and opera are now routinely broadcast in cinemas, but there are elements of live performing arts which the camera simply cannot capture. With his new film Pina, Win Wenders shows us that there are others which only cinema can show.

It has taken the iconic German filmmaker over 20 years to find the appropriate language to translate the work of the iconic German choreographer Pina Bausch to the screen, but it was worth the wait: Pina is a nothing less than a documentary masterpiece.

Wenders first met dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch in 1985, having just won the Palme d’Or in Cannes for Paris, Texas. In the Q&A for Pina’s Australian Premiere (at the closing night of the recent Festival of German Films), Wenders describes his first viewing of her work in Venice as something akin to being hit by lightning, leaving him a quivering mess. It would be the start of a long friendship, and the beginning of an obsession.

For years Wenders agonizes about how to translate this experience through the medium of film. Bausch herself had featured in Fellini’s And The Ship Sails On. In 1990 she directed her only film, The Complaint of an Empress (Wenders was in Australia shooting Until The End of the World, but Bausch enlisted his frequent collaborator Martin Schäfer as cinematographer). Her work opened Almodóvar’s Talk to Her in 2002. That same year fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh shot a documentary portrait of the choreographer. Throughout her illustrious career Bausch has been the subject of filmmakers’ interest, something which Wenders - an ardent cinephile - was well aware of. Still he wasn’t satisfied that the correct language had been found.

In 2007 Wenders – who had shot several music videos for U2 - sees U23D at the Cannes Film Festival and immediately knows he has the answer. He rings Bausch to tell her the news: it’s taken over 20 years, but he’s found a way.

These are the early days of modern 3D, before the first horror films cheapen the illusion, before the first blockbusters cynically exploit its box-office appeal. Wenders wants to immerse the viewer in the performance, but he also needs the 3D to make itself forgotten after the first 5 minutes. 3D has to remain a means to an end.

In 2009, Pina Bausch dies suddenly, only five days after being diagnosed with cancer, at the age of 68. After much consultation with the dancers of her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, Wenders decides to go ahead with the project. This isn’t a film about Pina Bausch anymore, it’s a film for Pina Bausch.

Wenders reminds himself of Bausch’s two conditions: there could be no biographical material about the choreographer, and she wouldn’t answer questions. Rather than limit the filmmaker, these restrictions liberate Wenders, allowing him to focus on his primary objective: to show us the world the way the choreographer sees it.

Four or five key works are performed for us, the steadycam snaking through the dancers on stage or perched upon a crane, interacting with them in a manner unavailable to a traditional audience. Other excerpts are performed outside the theatre, in and around the town of Wuppertal, in striking settings at the intersection of the natural and industrial landscape.

Suddenly we are amongst the performers in a train tunnel, at a busy intersection, in a suspended railway carriage, on the ridge above a quarry. Blink and the young dancer in front of you is an old man. Blink again and a woman appears before you with the biceps of a circus strongman. Rub your eyes, is what you’re seeing real? It is, but not as you would see it from the stalls.

Wenders seeks not to merely replicate or reproduce, but to borrow Bausch’s gaze and use the medium’s power of visual empathy to let us see the world through her eyes. This is the magic of Wenders’ film. By taking dance theatre out of its traditional context – the stage – and into the physical environment, it embraces Bausch’s vision of a world in which we are all dancers.

Bausch worked with dancers by asking questions, but the answers were never words or sentences: performers had to reply in movement. Through movement, the dancer’s inner-most history and true character is expressed. There is no role-playing in her dance theatre, and that’s why the work is so moving: everything the dancer conveys is an intrinsic part of who they are. As Bausch used to say, "I don't care how my dancers move, I want to know what moves them."

What we learn about Pina Bausch, in other words, we learn from the dancers. It’s a tight-knit family. Some have been in the company 35 years (Bausch is known for giving older actors opportunities to dance past their prime). Others were born into the company, close to the choreographer from the time they were children. All share a deep connection Bausch, express a profound sadness at her disappearance.

Words are kept to a minimum: a short personal testimony about how Bausch brought out the best in each of them. Instead, our questions are answered through movement. It's easy to identify with the dancers, who are not showcased as athletes but as flawed individuals. Every gesture in Bausch’s Tanztheater becomes pregnant with meaning: hilarious or tragic, violent or vulnerable, proud or pained.

The 3D illusion is breathtaking at first, but it never call attention to itself. There is no gimmickry nor visual trickery. The 3^rd dimension is put at the service of realism and truthfulness, giving depth to physical movement without amplifying or distorting it. In a few scenes the camera simply cannot keep up with the dancers’ speed: gestures appear staggered, almost strobe-lit. 2D Archival footage is shown projected for an audience or behind curtains: a jarring artificial construct which thankfully, is used too sparingly to shatter the sense of immersion. For the most part however, Wenders’ brings you so close to the dancers you can almost feel their breath on your skin.

As the artificial barriers between performers and audience fall, so too do our inhibitions, our reserve. We are included in an emotional and intimate conversation with the dancers, carried out in a language as primal as it is universal. We see what the choreographer sees but we feel what the dancers feel. The filmmaker, meanwhile, disappears entirely.

The film succeeds partly thanks to this humility on the part of the director, and the respect and responsibility he brings to the task. Filmmakers think they know a lot about body language. Wenders – a filmmaker who has always questioned the limits of the medium – begins by accepting he still has a lot to learn. Ultimately, the documentary is served by the filmmaker’s obsession with understanding and portraying another artist's way of looking at the world.

In Europe, those lucky enough to be familiar with the performing arts have a special place in their hearts for Pina Bausch. This film spreads the love further and wider than physical performances could ever hope to achieve, to film buffs unfamiliar with contemporary dance, to residents of distant shores, to our children and their children and their children after that… Bausch’s dream that her legacy would live on to touch others is fulfilled.

You leave the cinema shaken, uplifted, inspired. For a while after the credits roll, you do look the world around you a little differently: every movement holds the promise of visual poetry, people around you appear capable of unsuspected grace, even painful moments seem to conceal a hidden beauty. If you doubt the ability of art to change lives, see Pina. If you have no doubt about the ability of art to change lives, then please, see Pina.

Pina had its world premiere at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently out in France. It is released in the UK on April 22nd, in Australia July 14th.

What to see at the French Film Festival...

2011-02-09T17:48:00.006+11:00

.
Merde... what to see? In Australia, to say that the French Film Festival is "enorme" is bit of an understatement. Touring to six cities over two months with 44 feature films, it can be quite overwhelming when the time comes to pick your flicks and buy your tix. In Sydney alone, you'll get to choose from more than 250 screenings at four venues (the Cremorne Orpheum is now part of the family).

At $18 a ticket plus booking fee, you'll need to choose wisely. So far the only confirmed guest is actress Clotilde Hesme (Angèle et Tony), but more should be announced soon. It's been a great year for French cinema, but that doesn't mean everything is worth seeing. The festival has stranded the films to some degree ("All you need is love" is the title of one section, "Vive la difference!" is another), but not all of us pick films according to colour coding or "emotional pathways"... To help you make your selection I thought I'd share my thoughts on the 13 films I've already seen.

TROPHY WIFE (POTICHE)

The acclaimed French auteur Francois Ozon is back in crowd-pleasing mode with this period comedy. Reverting to the camp theatrics of 8 Femmes, he gives Catherine Deneuve a great role which both references her past successes and breaks with her fossilized glamourous image (who else but Ozon would date to dress France's most elegant woman in a tracksuit?).

Set in the late 70's Trophy Wife is a broad but clever satire which, under the cover of charting the emancipation of women 30 years ago, sends up the conservative and intolerant Sarkozy government of today. When a right wing industrialist (Fabrice Luchini) is taken hostage by his striking factory workers, his trophy wife (Catherine Deneuve) reluctantly steps up to do a "man's job" and finds she makes a successful, compassionate CEO. She is inspired in part by an old flame, a Communist deputy-mayor played by Gerard Depardieu.

With nods to the Parapluies de Cherbourg (the factory makes umbrellas) and previous onscreen couples portrayed by Deneuve and Depardieu, the ensemble comedy breaks down character stereotypes with its tongue firmly in cheek, determined to have as much fun as possible in the process. Helped by over the top production design, vintage tunes and a snappy pace, the risky endeavour delivers. The satire hits the mark, the comedy sizzles and the cast's chemistry ensures the fun is infectious. This distinctly French feel-good movie is too smart to be a guilty pleasure.

CARLOS

An epic geopolitical crime thriller from French master Olivier Assayas, Carlos tells the true story of the Marxist revolutionary turned international terrorist who, for two entire decades, was one of the most wanted man on the planet. It's a relentlessly thrilling ride, anchored by a superlative performance by relative newcomer Edgar Ramirez as Carlos.

While Carlos boasts more exotic locations than a Bond movie and a few nail-biting action sequences (the 1975 raid on the meeting of OPEC ministers in Vienna), the film derives its power from its refusal to sensationalize its subject matter. Carlos - the character - is only glamourized at the start to communicate the heady, narcissistic rush of adrenalin-infused arousal he feels after a violent act, but as the political motivations get increasingly less pure and vanity takes over, Carlos quickly becomes a sullied (if tragic) figure. It's a work of staggering ambition.

What fascinates is the degree of detail Assayas brings to the daily life of terrorists. Yet the film functions well at the macro lever too, bringing home the moral complexity (and relativity) of governments' relationship with terrorism, often opposed and sponsored simultaneously. Mixing drama, reportage and biopic, he creates a uniquely compelling document which entertains without really sacrificing its journalistic integrity, offering in the process a surprisingly effective lesson in geopolitical chess playing.

I urge everyone of you to see this, but not at the French Film Festival, unless you're satisfied with the 2 1/2 hour feature film version. The full 5 hour mini-series is available on DVD with English subtitles and it's well worth the purchase.

OUTSIDE THE LAW (HORS LA LOI)

The unrest which began at the Setif massacre and led to Algerian independence is chronicled from the point of view of three Algerian brothers in this Oscar-nominated period piece from Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory). Hugely controversial upon its French release for its biased view of history, the film boldly parallels the FLN's campaign to French resistance during WWII. Ideological finger-pointing aside, Bouchareb should be commended for addressing issues of France and Algeria's shared histories traditionally given way too little screen time.

Sadly its cinematic flaws are as glaring as its editorial liberties: bloated, didactic and overlong, it's an historical epic where everyone speaks like a schoolteacher and production design takes precedence over narrative drive. When you're not cringing at the stilted dialogue, you're sighing under the weight of tedious, classical storytelling.

PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER (LA PRINCESSE DE MONTPENSIER)

Betrand Tavernier's La Princesse de Montpensier is adapted from the 1662 classic novella by Madame de La Fayette (a companion work to her masterpiece of unrequited love amongst French aristocrats, La Princesse de Cleves). Set during the Wars of Religion, civil infighting which opposed French Catholics and Protestants, it charts the coming-of-age of a young aristocrat torn between the four men who aspire to her love.

The current trend in sexing up European costume dramas for impatient modern audiences runs unabated. Luckily, Tavernier is an old hand and a masterful storyteller. He doesn't try to turn this classic of unrequited love into a teen movie, nor does he shoot sword fights as if choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping. He does however give the story a very contemporary sheen, dispensing with pomp and ceremony to bring us closer to these characters, stripping the mythologizing from their daily interactions. In other words, everything feels real.

Melanie Laurent is suitably gorgeous and sensual as the titular character, but her one note performance doesn't quite convey why so many men would make such a fuss, let alone risk their lives for her affections. Gaspard Ulliel, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet and Raphaël Personnaz are great as the three young aristocrats wrestling with duty, religious ideology and raging hormones, but Lambert Wilson's wooden performance as the older mentor and secret suitor is creepy at best.

La Princesse de Montpensier divided the critics in Cannes and, though it lacks the passion and style of Patrice Chereau's magnificent Queen Margot (which charts similar events), I recommend seeing for yourself.

LOVE LIKE POISON (UN POISON VIOLENT)

Following a handful of noteworthy shorts, thirty-year-old Katell Quillévéré established herself as a filmmaker to watch at Cannes this year, winning Best Screenplay in the Director's Fortnight sidebar with her accomplished and confident first feature, Un Poison Violent.

Anna, on the brink of adolescence, comes home from her Catholic boarding school for the holidays and discovers her father has left. Her mother - seemingly devastated - spends all her time in the company of the local priest, who happens to be a childhood friend. Anna clings to her beloved grandfather, who is confined to his bed due to ill-health. She also grows close to Pierre, a free-spirited teen who cares little about God. As Anna prepares for her confirmation, her budding desire for Pierre and the contradictions she discovers all around her invite her to question her faith.

This delicate but confident coming-of-age drama is not just an inspired portrait of nascent desire but also a thoughtful meditation on the mystical promises of surrender and the ambiguous proximity of faith and flesh. Refusing the temptation to explain her characters through psychology, Quillévéré prefers instead to focus on sound, touch and feeling. Anna perceives her world through the heightened, sensual, confusing lens of adolescence and the director wisely chooses to lift all filters: this is not a morality tale.

While the story feels timeless, the film has a great sense of place, capturing the feel and isolation of a small Breton village with authenticity. Like Pialat before her, Quillévéré describes French provincial life without flourishes or romantic notions. Clara Augarde is fantastic as the brittle, feverish 14 year-old. The great Michel Galabru has a lot of fun with the bon-vivant grandfather and pop-singer-turned-actress Lio convinces as the dysfunctional mum.

MY FATHER'S GUESTS (LES INVITES DE MON PERE)

I loved Anne Le Ny's first feature, Ceux Qui Restent (Those Who Remain) and was curious about this star-studded follow-up.

In My Father's Guests, Michel Aumont plays a retired human rights activist who does his duty as a rich leftist and decides to shelter illegal immigrants in his gorgeous Parisian appartement. His children, who've spent their lives trying to please him, are supportive. But when they discover that the guests are a 28 year-old Moldavian sex-bomb and her daughter, they begin to suspect papa's motives are not as pure as they imagined.

Le Ny tackles the serious theme of illegal migrants and refugees and French society's attitudes towards their plight - last seen in Lioret's Welcome - with a light touch. Thankfully, the comedy - while very funny - is satirical, witty and born of fine writing rather than heavy-handed brush strokes. In fact, the immigration theme is more of a pretext to dissect the mores of the Parisian bourgeoisie, especially the privileged, liberal kind (sometimes referred to as gauche caviar).

Mid-course, just when the comedy begins to wear a bit thin and the satire loses its bite (its target, wealthy left-leaning intellectuals, are only deserving of so much scorn after all), the film achieves a subtle shift in tone. We begin to feel for the characters as their story evolves into a morally complex drama of hidden complexities. It helps that the grown-up children at the centre of the story are played by such gifted actors as Fabrice Luchini and Karin Viard, both very touching.

My Father's Guests succeeds because it's less interested in passing judgement or moralizing about topical issues than in exploring wider themes of class, responsibility and family with the help of finely written characters. There are shades of Arnaud Desplechin or Anne Fontaine in the raw, honest interactions between family members. Audience sympathies shift, and no one will respond to the moral questions raised in quite the same way.

SPECIAL TREATMENT (SANS QUEUE NI TETE)

Jeanne Labrune's drama stars the inimitable Isabelle Huppert as Alice, a middle-aged call girl who caters, with intelligence and imagination, to the diverse role playing fantasies of her wealthy clients. She's empowered and free - but unhappy. The same applies to Xavier (Bouli Lanners), a wealthy psychoanalyst who does his job without compassion or joy. His wife is leaving him and for the first time in his life, he decides to call on the services of a prostitute. Their paths meet.

The clever idea of this Belgian film is to draw parallels between psychoanalysis and prostitution. Both provide intimate services for a fee, both involve the illusion of care and personal attention, both, Labrune seems to say, offer diminishing returns for the client and existential angst for the provider. Alice and Xavier, for example, both refer to a client not by name but by the object their custom will allow them to purchase.

While their encounter seems to bring about progress in their respective quests for meaning, there are no easy epiphanies. The fascinating hypothesis that both professions offer similar opportunities and contradictions isn't fully developed, not even when Alice goes in search of an analyst for herself. This detached examination of unhappiness fails to add up to more than a series of very good scenes (Huppert, nearly 60, dressed up as a naughty schoolgirl), and the grim Belgian locations and sad faces add to the gloomy vibe.

LOVE CRIME (CRIME D'AMOUR)

The less is written about the abysmal French corporate psychothriller Love Crime (by the recently deceased Alain Corneau), the better. Even Kristin Scott Thomas couldn't save this dated potboiler from descending into cringe-inducing ridicule (this has to be Ludivine Sagnier's worst performance of her career). Not only do you predict the twists and turns before they happen, they are then explained to you once again in lengthy flashbacks. It's as generic as the title implies and to say it could have been written by a class of 6th graders is an insult to 6th graders. Stay well away.

TURK'S HEAD (TETE DE TURC)

A young Turkish teenager throws a molotov cocktail onto an Armenian doctor's car during a day of anti-police riots in an unstable banlieue. Seized with remorse, he rushes to the burning vehicle and pulls the comatose driver to safety. A hero who is also a villain, a Turk who saves an Armenian, crime and punishment in the French cité: a smashing premise for a socially-conscious thriller served by an excellent cast, which includes Roschdy Zem (also in Outside The Law and Happy Few) and the great Israeli actress Ronit Elkabetz.

So why doesn't it work? Once the set-up is established, the contrivances come thick and fast. The doctor's brother is one of the detectives who sparked the riots. The teenager's neighbour is the one who takes the rap for his crime. The screenplay doesn't stop there, adding character upon character affected in tragic ways by the central incident, struggling in vain to fold them back into the main story in the hope of achieving a miraculous ensemble catharsis.

Everyone has an allegorical or archetypal role to play, in a bid to turn a dramatic thriller into an essay on immigration, integration and repression. At some point, we cease to believe in these characters, seeing right through to their narrative function: the drama fails. Soon afterwards, we refuse the political and philosophical points the film is trying to score, nothing in real life is that neatly tied together: the essay fails.

Tête De Turc (a French expression meaning scapegoat, or a bully's victim - lost in translation here) is nothing more than France's answer to the infuriating, Oscar-winning Crash.

THE CLINK OF ICE (LE BRUIT DES GLACONS)

Bertrand Blier is back with a black comedy about cancer. Not everyone will find this amusing, but those who like their comedy to be as black and bitter as a strong espresso will have a ball. Jean Dujardin plays an alcoholic writer who lives as a recluse in remote mansion. His wife has walked out, leaving him alone with a brain tumour and an ice bucket. One day, an insistent and obnoxious visitor (Albert Dupontel) rings his door bell, introducing himself as the man's cancer.

Blier runs with this sharp premise, turning a hallucination triggered by writer's block and excessive consumption of chardonnay into a ruthless existential metaphor. It mostly works. While Blier's misanthropy and curmudgeon arrogance annoys at times, there's no denying the skill with which he gets these two brilliant comedic actors to deliver their malignant lines.

HAPPY FEW

The characters of Happy Few ask themselves (and the viewers) a fascinating - and lethal - double-barreled question: Is it possible to love two people simultaneously, and if it is... is it desirable to do so?

Two liberal, middle-class, happily married couples become friends. After a night of drinking and flirting, it becomes clear that each is attracted to the other's partner, and that everyone feels sophisticated and open-minded enough to proceed to the next step. Partners are soon swapped for bouts of not-like-at-home sex.

Happy Few succeeds by eschewing the hysterical or moralistic approach which would no doubt have characterized an Anglo take on the same material. Yes the film is eventually about jealousy and monogamy, but because it takes the time to paint convincing, true-to-the-zeitgeist portraits of bourgeois bohemians, it's so much more than the issue film the aforementioned Cosmopolitan cover question promises.

Echangisme is quite common amongst a certain French social set, and Antony Cordier's film offers a convincing exploration not of a community or sub-culture, but of the emotional and physical terrain favourable to polygamy. By grounding the screenplay in generous characterization and intelligent, measured dialogue, Happy Few asks all the right questions, brushing aside sensationalism or lurid voyeurism.

What this means however is that the film won't work for those who aren't willing to provide the answers themselves, or who are happy to indulge in a little sexual sophistication à la française as long as the moral implications are clearly spelled out. The couples' acts are often selfish, and it's clear the children could pay a heavy price for parental hedonism, but Cordier refuses to judge, handing the moral responsibility - generously, I thought - to the viewer.

ON TOUR (TOURNEE)

I fell head over heels for this film when I saw it in France last summer. Cannes-winner Mathieu Amalric directs and stars as a former TV producer Joachim Zand, now broke, who returns home to France after a long stint in the US with a new-burlesque troupe he hopes to tour around the country.

The film follows this failed impresario and his American performers - busty, glamourous women who have traded their youth for attitude - as they travel from one miserable club to another in the decidedly un-glamourous ports of provincial France.

The thin story is but a pretext to paint an affectionate portrait of these riotous and curvaceous women and the de facto family they form while on this largely unsuccessful tour. Busting up preconceived notions, it is the Americans who bring their joie-de-vivre to the Old Continent, enlivening grim locales with infectious irreverence and cheap champagne.

Amalric is incredibly touching as the often mean-spirited, chain-smoking loser who's squandered riches, friendship and love in a narcissistic bid for transatlantic fame, finding difficult solace in the company of strippers and burlesque dancers.

Atmosphere takes precedence over narrative and Amalric imbues each scene with such humanity, invests each character with such generosity, that it's impossible not to succumb to the gritty charms of this ode to show business and performers.

L'AMOUR FOU

Finally Pierre Thorreton's L'Amour Fou is a conventionally directed but fascinating documentary about French couturier Yves Saint Laurent, who died 2 years ago. Framed by the auction by his partner Pierre Berger of their incredible art collection at the Grand Palais, often referred to as the" sale of the century", the film ventures beyond fashion to speak with great insight about creativity, art and the high price of passion.

It helps that Pierre Berge is incredibly articulate and eloquent in describing both the impact YSL has had on the culture and his own role in making that happen. I came out of this spirits soaring, inspired and energized by what has been accomplished throughout recent History on the strength of talent and dedication alone. So will you.

.

Sydney Film Critics: Best of 2010

2010-12-18T16:58:00.011+11:00

.
Once again, I've asked Sydney-based film critics to send me their top 10 films of the year. You can check out last year's poll right here. Below is an overall Top 20 collating results from all participants. It comprises two lists: one for titles released theatrically in Australia in 2010 and one for unreleased titles (either coming in 2011 or currently without theatrical distribution).

The methodology was simple: 10 points for 1st position, 9 points for 2nd etc. Bullet point lists are those submitted by critics who refuse to rank their films (each title gets 5.5 points). Of course no sample is representative, no comparison objective, no ranking scientific - it's just an informal poll. Because of how it's set up, films that have been seen by more journalists have an advantage over films seen by fewer, films seen later in the year tend to be fresher in everyone's minds.

SYDNEY FILM CRITICS' TOP 20 FILMS RELEASED IN 2010

The Social Network
Animal Kingdom
Toy Story 3
Inception
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Winter’s Bone
The King’s Speech
The White Ribbon
Fish Tank
Exit Through the Gift Shop / Kick-Ass (tie)
A Prophet
Fantastic Mr Fox
In The Loop / I Am Love (tie)
Greenberg
Enter The Void
The Ghost Writer
The Kids Are All Right / Welcome (tie)

SYDNEY FILM CRITICS' TOP 20 UNRELEASED FILMS OF 2010:

Black Swan
127 Hours
Carlos
Last Train Home
Bill Cunningham: New York
Hesher
Leap Year (Año Bisiesto)
Restrepo
The Illusionist
Castaway on the Moon / HOWL (tie)
Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires)
I Killed My Mother
Meek's Cutoff
I Love You Phillip Morris / Never Let Me Go (tie)
Alamar / House of the Devil / Waste Land / Women Without Men /Incendies (tie)

Here are a few observations:

Sydney vs Melbourne - I think the results would be different in a poll of Melbourne journos (hint hint, Melbourne journos!). More and more films get a Melbourne release without ever coming to Sydney, which is sometimes akin to a provincial backwater when it comes to arthouse exhibition. Ozon's Ricky and The Refuge, Enter The Void, Desert Flower, Doors documentary When You're Strange, David Byrne concert film Ride, Rise, Roar, Claire Denis's White Material, Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty are just some of the titles we are still waiting for...
A ok year for Australian cinema, critically, with a strong showing by Animal Kingdom. Though I feel it's important to point out that a more diverse and commercially minded local film industry doesn't automatically translate in better films. The Loved Ones came in at 21. Amongst the unreleased films, Camera d'Or winner Leap Year from Mexico-based Australian filmmaker Michael Rowe, seemed to impress the few who caught it.
The dominance of mainstream and Hollywood blockbusters persists, not just at the box office but also with critics. Many had no qualms submitting top tens devoid of a single documentary, Australian feature or subtitled film.
Acclaimed films released in the beginning of the year were all but forgotten: The Hurt Locker, A Single Man or Up In The Air failed to score, despite a healthy showing in last year's Best Unreleased poll. Conversely other films are just now been shown to the press and might've made the top 20 had more people seen them at the time of writing (Blue Valentine, for example).
The role of film festivals to boost the diversity of what's on Sydney screens cannot be underestimated. The list of unreleased films is filled with treasures, and not all are coming soon to a theatre near you. Last Train Home, which rates very high with many, has only been shown at the Sydney Film Festival and Possible Worlds, Sydney's Canadian Film Festival. Also without distribution is Castaway To The Moon, which screened just once (as the closing night film of Sydney's Korean Film Festival, KOFFIA) but made the top 10.

Following are the individual Top 10 lists from all participating journalists.

_____________________________________________________

SIMON FOSTER

BEST RELEASED:

The White Ribbon
Animal Kingdom
Inception
The Social Network
The Milk of Sorrow
Boy
Fish Tank
Kick-Ass
Greenberg
Mother Fish

BEST UNRELEASED:

I Love You Phillip Morris
Black Swan
An Unfinished Film
Restrepo
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno
World's Greatest Dad
Marwencol
Sword of Desperation
Lunopolis
Solitary Man

Animation took itself very seriously this year - I don't take my kids to see Toy Story 3 or Shrek 4 so they can suffer through existential angst. That's why Despicable Me (and, for most of its running time, How to Train Your Dragon) repped the years best cartoon, despite not making the Best 10. A few films I loved at the time - Four Lions, Lebanon, Crazy Heart, In The Loop, Buried, A Single Man - have faded from memory, despite being terrific films. For fear of retribution, I excluded two films whose content evoked passionately negative feedback from some but which I loved - the sickeningly violent The Killer Inside Me and the plain sickening brilliance of Jackass 3D. Was a tough year for kids in the movies: three films in my Top 10 speak of the plight of kids on the outer with their world - Boy, Fish Tank, Mother Fish (four, if you include Ben Stiller's man-child in Greenberg). The years worst theatrical release? Brendan Fraser's Furry Vengeance was low-brow awful; Eat Pray Love was as fake as a $3 bill. And the Aussie film Wasted on the Young (screened at Sydney Film Festival and due in 2011 from Paramount) was repugnant and pretentious.

Simon Foster writes for SBS Film.

MIGUEL GONZALEZ

BEST RELEASED:

Toy Story 3
Animal Kingdom
The King’s Speech
Winter’s Bone
The Loved Ones
The Social Network
Boy
Inception
Let Me In
Micmacs

BEST UNRELEASED:

Leap Year (Año Bisiesto)
Black Swan
The Illusionist
Never Let Me Go
Tangled
Rabbit Hole
Cane Toads 3D
Griff the Invisible
Conviction
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Encore was asked by Matt Riviera to provide its list of the Top 10 films released theatrically in Australia in 2010 and, even though our specialty as a publication is local productions, it was a pleasant surprise to look at our final list and see two Australian films (and one with a considerable amount of Aussie talent) that deserved a spot in it. It wasn’t a pat on the back for the local industry, but a genuine recognition of the power of their stories and the skill of its execution.

The public is slowly starting to recognise it too; the top 10 highest grossing Australian films of 2010 made $45m at the box office, a figure that has brought optimism to an industry in desperate need of reassurance from the audience it serves. Read more...

Miguel Gonzalez is the the editor of Encore Magazine

DANIEL CRICHTON-ROUSE

BEST RELEASED:

The Social Network
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part. 1
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Fish Tank
In The Loop
Toy Story 3
Four Lions
Enter The Void
Animal Kingdom

BEST UNRELEASED:

House of the Devil
Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires)
Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance
Hesher
Runaway (Kanye West)
Birdemic: Shock and Terror
OSS 117: Lost in Rio (Rio Ne Repond Plus)
Everything Will Be Fine (Alting Bliver Godt Igen)
Marwencol
Summer Wars

POP CULTURE ALERT. This year's poll is incredibly different to those in the past. For one, in 2010 I watched far less French cinema than I'd done in past years, which means my list lacks any presence of Isabelle Huppert, since I can think of two films right now that could've been included here had I actually made a little more effort. (I have Copacabana sitting here on my desk, for Christ's sake.) This year for me was highlighted by personal heroes making their first forays into feature filmmaking (Banksy, Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci), mood-pieces (Heartbeats, Enter The Void, Runaway, The House Of The Devil), and the films that you need to see with a ticket-paying crowd (Toy Story 3, Harry Potter, Birdemic). But, ultimately, and in all honesty, nothing this year affected me in the same way that The Wrestler did last year, which, since I saw it at a media screening in December 2008, means that it's been two years since I've been profoundly moved by a film.

Daniel is the national arts editor of Street Press Australia, which publishes The Drum Media (Sydney and Perth), Inpress (Melbourne), Time Off (Brisbane), and 3D World (East Coast). His words exist on paper, and paper alone. For now.

NICK DENT

Animal Kingdom
Inception
The Social Network
The Hurt Locker
Winter's Bone
The Ghost Writer
Toy Story 3
The King's Speech
Up in the Air
Love and Other Drugs

Animal Kingdom – you only have to watch it a second time to realise what a clever piece of work it is. The way it withholds information about its characters is masterful. There's a world of detail bubbling under the surface of which we only get a tantalising taste. It's the work of a man who loves and understands the art of cinema. My top ten are all movies that I can't wait to see again because they are so full of detail and insight. For what it's worth, my guilty pleasures this year were Splice, Hot Tub Time Machine and Paranormal Activity 2.

Nick Dent is the editor and film editor of Time Out Sydney and writes the film reviews for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

IAN BARR

BEST RELEASED:

Fantastic Mr Fox
A Prophet (Un Prophete)
Inception
The Social Network
Father Of My Children
The White Ribbon
Buried
The Other Guys
Winter's Bone
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet

UNRELEASED:

Alamar
Meek's Cutoff
Compline (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA)
Leap Year
Another Year
Wild Grass
Carlos
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Let Each One Go Where He May

There was a distinct lack of Australian theatrical releases this year that truly reminded me of why I fell in love with film in the first place. With so little artistry, ambition, and pleasure on offer in mainstream and arthouse releases alike, watching the human subjects of Frederick Wiseman's La Danse almost made me wanna tear up my imaginary Movie Lover card and regularly invest my funds in the ballet instead. Then again, a list of the year’s best Australian theatrical releases is hardly any kind of definitive representation of what’s truly exciting in cinema today. As with every other year in film, the real heroes of 2010 are the valiant folk – programmers, journalists, bloggers, etc – who ventured outside their comfort zone to deliver a semblance of that representation to filmgoers; not the armchair critics whinging that it was a lousy year for movies based on their multiplex viewings.

Ian Barr is a film critic for Drum Media, and more of his writing on film can be found at http://sydneyfilmhappenings.blogspot.com

BETH WILSON

BEST RELEASED

Winter’s Bone
Welcome
The White Ribbon
Fish Tank
The Social Network
Animal Kingdom
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Love, Lust and Lies
Monsters
Somewhere

BEST UNRELEASED

Waste Land
Crab Trap
Black Swan
Last Train Home
If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle
The Wind Journeys
The Red Riding Trilogy: 1974
Hesher
Good Hair
Bathing Franky

While assembling these lists bordered at times on painful as I chopped and changed between picks for the number 2-10 places with the misapprehension that somehow there was a correct solution, the top spots were never in question. I caught both films - Debra Granik’s amazing adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s country noir novel, Winter’s Bone and Lucy Walker’s documentary study into the transformative power of art, Waste Land – at the Sydney Film Festival this year, pretty much by chance. It is rare that I watch a film with no prior knowledge or anticipation, and perhaps it was partly the joy of discovering something incredible on my own that has made these films so important to me this year.

Beth Wilson is the film editor of Trespass Magazine.

RICHARD GRAY

BEST RELEASED:

American: The Bill Hicks Story
Blue Valentine
Bunny and the Bull
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Hedgehog
Machete
The Princess and the Frog
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
Toy Story 3
Winter’s Bone

BEST UNRELEASED

Summer Wars
Bill Cunningham: New York
FLOWERS
Confessions
The Illusionist
HOWL
Castaway on the Moon
Redline
I Killed My Mother
127 Hours

This year was particularly difficult to draw a Top 10 from, simply due to the sheer diversity and high quality of films from around the world released in Australia. Rather than pick an objective 10, I’ve gone for some personal favourites. So we get the devastating highs of Blue Valentine and Winter’s Bone mixing freely with the genre-perfect gems like Machete and The Princess and the Frog. Indeed, so strong was the list that I couldn’t include other favourites Easy A, Food Inc, Lebanon, The Town, Monsters, and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work in my Top 10. Yet the lists also highlighted just how much we don’t get released in Australia, and I hope all the readers of this site – along with my two humble portals – vote with their wallets in 2011.

Richard is the Editor in Chief of both DVD Bits and the The Reel Bits

MARC FENNELL

BEST RELEASED:

Toy Story 3
The Social Network
Inception
The Kings Speech
Animal Kingdom
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Fantastic Mr Fox
In The Loop
Up In The Air
Kick Ass

2010: The year of the 3.5 star rating. I found myself doling out this rating over and over again: so many *okay* movies, so few stunning. Luckily, the ones that were amazing were brilliant. It was a year of surprisingly strong Hollywood contenders too. Toy Story 3 was perhaps the greatest surprise for me. This movie made my entire row of twenty-something guys weep for our passing childhood. A pretty amazing acheivement at the best of times. But then consider this: THEY START WITH NOTHING. At least with a live action film you can point a camera at an actor and the audience recognise that there's a human soul on display. With an animated film, they literally start with a blank page. To go from empty pixels to characters capable of making me weep like the blubbering girly mess that I am... that's freakin impessive.Honourable mention to The Kids Are All Right, A Single Man and Blue Valentine. Sadly I missed a lot of festival and non-release films cos I was on my honeymoon during the Sydney Film Festival and was working through a lot of the smaller festivals.

Marc Fennell is the film critic for triple j, ABC radio and Network Ten's The Circle. His work can be found at marcfennell.blogspot.com.

5SPROCKET

BEST RELEASED:

I'm Still Here
Kick Ass
Life During Wartime
Jackass 3D
The Human Centipede
The Loved Ones
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
Piranha 3D
Inception

Emma Stone wasn’t in I’m Still Here, but it was ok without her. Everything is great about Kick Ass. Shirley Henderson and Paul Ruebens. Jackass. Dinner Party conversation of the year - "feed her". Shame about The Loved Ones and what not. Mark Zuckerberg what a fuck. Same with that pink bear. Seismologist on jetski with shotgun fighting prehistoric killer fish. The van is still, still falling.

5sprocket writes about TV and Film for 3D World magazine. He's on twitter.

DAVID MARIN-GUZMAN

BEST RELEASED:

I Am Love
The Ghost Writer
Inception
Enter The Void
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
Greenberg
The Social Network
Monsters
Piranha 3D
Splice

BEST UNRELEASED:

Carlos
Last Train Home
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Cell 211
Film Socialisme
Black Swan
Wasted On The Young
127 Hours
La Vie Au Ranch
Humpday

2010 was an inspiring year for cinema. Almost every film on my (much-truncated) list showed me something I had never seen before. Vincenzo Natali's Splice was one of the most subtly disturbing films of the year, twisting your reactions and projections so much it became impossible to distinguish between the two - creating something indefinable in the mix. When it came to pure cinema, Piranha 3D proved exploitation films are still chasing the light (as if Terrence Malick made a tits-and-ass film). Those libidinal, sublime underwater shots *are* 3D, no matter what Cameron says. Scott Pilgrim vs The World heralded cinema's most Awesome fusion of video games and cinema to date (and a promising sign things to come). Inception was pure awe at witnessing something coming straight from the source; while Polanski's The Ghost Writer was a bona-fide Masterpiece hiding inside a cliched genre pic; All these would have made 2010 one of my favourite years in a long time. And then came I Am Love... Exquisite.

Dave writes reviews for Cream magazine and keep up the blog Roger Really (daveguzman.blogspot.com)

GILES HARDIE

BEST RELEASED:

Kick-Ass / Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (tie)
The King's Speech
Toy Story 3
The Social Network
Made in Dagenham
In The Loop
MicMacs
Inception
Winter's Bone

BEST UNRELEASED:

Black Swan
Tangled
Tamara Drewe

I've chosen to make a different top ten to my published one, on the basis that this is personal. These are the ten I just plain loved. Yes, I'm (still) cheating with my number one pick. They both deserve to make the top 10 and what's more they were both better for the other film's existence. If there is one genre, or really sub-genre, that 2010 will be remembered for it is the Teenage Superhero category. Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim seemed to take exactly the same idea and delivered two incredibly different and equally extraordinary film events. Love the language of Hit-Girl, love the Nintendo stylings of Scott Pilgrim... you must love these films. Visually they were fantastic. Plot-wise they were brave and wonderful. Special mention to Emma Stone in Easy A who proved the girls can dress up and beat the odds too with a big Scarlet A and a raft of John Hughes references, leaving the score at year's end Teenagers 3: World 0.

Giles Hardie writes for Fairfax (Pick of the Flicks, Get Flick'd) and is on Twitter.

JIAO CHEN

BEST RELEASED

Mother
Animal Kingdom
The Social Network
In The Loop
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Fish Tank
Exit Through The Gift Shop
A Prophet
The Kids Are All Right
Winter's Bone

BEST UNRELEASED

Women Without Men
Castaway On The Moon
Dear Doctor
I Killed My Mother
Poetry
Last Train Home
Confessions
How I Ended This Summer
Au Revoir Taipei
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

South Korean cinema is proving to be one of the most dynamic in the world. Mother, my favourite theatrical release for 2010, tells an utterly compelling story and successfully blends different genres to create something that's wholly unique. Other highlights from South Korea include the offbeat comedy Castaway On The Moon and the moving drama Poetry. From another part of the world comes the achingly beautiful Women Without Men by exiled Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat. The profoundly haunting film offers an unparalleled cinematic experience and I'm so grateful I got to see it on the big screen. Back at home we have David Michod's tense and sophisticated thriller Animal Kingdom, which joins the growing list of Australian films that have found commercial and critical success both locally and abroad.

Jiao Chen is an emerging producer and blogs about films at http://jiaochen.tumblr.com

ALICE TYNAN

BEST RELEASED

Toy Story 3
The Social Network
Animal Kingdom
The King’s Speech
The Kids Are All Right
Blue Valentine
The White Ribbon
Fish Tank
Exit Through The Gift Shop
Cairo Time

BEST UNRELEASED

Black Swan
Bill Cunningham New York
Babies
Hesher
Howl
Last Train Home
How I Ended This Summer
Cyrus
Restrepo
If I Want to Whistle I Whistle

As a critic who detests giving star ratings, ranking these lists is tantamount to torture. This year felt particularly anxiety inducing as a hefty number of films worked their magic on me. Considering Up trumped my list last year, it’s probably no surprise to see Pixar take line honours once again. I am however, quietly pleased to see a trio of female filmmakers make my list; with various iterations also including Debra Granik’s masterful Winter’s Bone and Sophia Coppola’s enchanting (and divisive!) Somewhere. So too Australian films, with the epic Animal Kingdom and exquisite The King’s Speech representing on a list that could also have included The Waiting City and special mention for Animal Logic’s mind-blowing efforts with Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. While across the Tasman, Taika Waititi’s charming Boy absolutely deserves consideration, but in the end, my pure love for Patricia Clarkson won out. Meet you in Cairo.

Alice Tynan writes for a variety of publications in print and online. Her writing is collated at The Plot Thickens.

SCOTT HENDERSON

BEST RELEASED:

The Social Network
The White Ribbon
Animal Kingdom
Winter’s Bone
Inception
The King’s Speech
Exit Through The Gift Shop
A Prophet
Welcome
Monsters

BEST UNRELEASED:

Black Swan
Carlos
127 Hours
Restrepo
Bill Cunningham New York
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives
Hesher
Heartbeats
The Illusionist
The Wild Hunt

Once again it feels like my own end of year top 10 list is distinguished by the films that didn’t make the final cut. The desire to curate a list internationally relevant means that 2010 Australian releases discounted include Fish Tank and The Hurt Locker simply because they took too long to make their Australian debuts. Some though were simply too good to ignore (The White Ribbon, A Prophet). That vague qualification given, was it not a great year at the cinema? Having juggled my 10 over and over one film remained consistently at the top, and what else could it be than The Social Network. The Fincher-Sorkin one-two punch delivered a generation-defining film characterised by classical themes, not to mention a star turn from Jesse Eisenberg and a thunderous score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. A few honourable mentions: Buried, The Kids Are All Right, Shutter Island, Father Of My Children. Here’s to 2011, a sneak peak of which is in my unreleased list, and already things look pretty damn good.

Scott Henderson writes for The Vine, Drum Media, 3D World, Cinemascape and M2 Magazine, as well as his own blog http://darkhabits.blogspot.com.

MATT RAVIER

BEST RELEASED:

Greenberg
I Am Love
A Prophet
Enter The Void
A Single Man
The Social Network
The Kids Are All Right
Fish Tank
White Material
Welcome

BEST UNRELEASED:

Incendies
Beeswax
Black Swan
Beginners
On Tour (Tournee)
Carlos
127 Hours
Meek's Cutoff
Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires)
The Housemaid

I was lucky enough to see over 200 films and spend a lot of time at film festivals this year, here and overseas, and my list of unreleased films is packed with gems that couldn't quite make the top 10. Ozon's Potiche is a hoot, pan-sexual drama Three is Tykwer's return to form, Phillip Seymour Hoffman confirms his talent as a director of actors with Jack Goes Boating, Norwegian Wood does Murakami justice, French auteurs strike again with The Sound of Ice (Blier), Love Like Poison (Quillévéré) and Plein Sud (Lifshitz) among others, and I only saw 2 of Bruce McDonald's 4 films of 2010 (!) but Trigger and This Movie Is Broken are not to be underestimated. I worry about local film commentators' reluctance to champion under-represented films and our insistence on cheering (without providing much in the way of new insights) the ones which don't need our help. Having said that I'm optimistic about our prospects in the year(s) to come and confident in our ability to rehabilitate cinephilia, embrace diversity, raise the level of discourse and act in defense of a threatened film culture. Here's to 2011!

Matt is a film festival programmer and organizer. He writes this very blog, tweets here and occasionally mouths off about film on samesame.com.au, FBi Radio and various other media outlets.

DAVID MICHAEL BROWN

BEST RELEASED:

Toy Story 3
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
The Social Network
Inception
Let Me In
Up In The Air
Kick-Ass
Monsters
A Single Man
Animal Kingdom

BEST UNRELEASED:

Black Swan
127 Hours
Dream Home
Machete Maidens Unleased
Love in a Puff
Wasted on The Young
Never Let Me Go
Howl
Conviction
I Love You Philip Morris

2010 was a great year for movies but my favourite was Toy Story 3. More than a decade has passed since Buzz Woody and their toy pals last came out to play. Young fans of the first film may have reached their teens but Toy Story 3 has grown up with them. Hot on the heels of Wall-E and Up, the third Toy Story is a masterclass in animated joy to be loved by all ages. Eye-poppingly awesome animated imagery, fabulous vocal performances – but what do you expect from Pixar. What surprises here is the level of emotional involvement that sneaks up on you. The finale will bring a tear to the most hardened of sceptics. In an incendiary moment, when the toys may meet their makers, a fleeting moment of friendship is devastatingly poignant. Toy Story 3 is perfectly judged end to one of the greatest trilogies of our time — animated or not. To Infinity…

David Michael Brown is senior editor at Empire Magazine. You can read his work at www.empireonline.com.au.

_____________________________________________________

This is an informal poll and doesn't represent an official organization or critics group. Apologies to any Sydney-based film journalists who haven't been included, I tried to reach out to everyone but not everyone was in town etc. Please get in touch so I can include you in future polls.

I'm inviting all film lovers out there to post their own analysis and top 10 lists in the comments below. Happy new year everyone!

.

Films released theatrically in Australia in 2010

2010-11-26T16:35:00.012+11:00

Here's a handy resource for local critics compiling their top 10 for 2010, or who'd like to check on what films we got, what came out - just nowhere near where you actually live - and what we missed out on entirely. Australian titles are in bold. If you know of any I've forgotten, please let me know in the comments!

FILMS RELEASED THEATRICALLY IN AUSTRALIA IN 2010

14 Blades
4,3,2,1
44 Inch Chest
A Prophet (Un Prophete)
A Single Man
A Woman, A Gun & A Noodle Shop
Accidents Happen
Agora
Alice In Wonderland
American, The
American: The Bill Hicks Story
Amos Oz: the Nature of Dreams
Animal Kingdom
Anything For Her
At World's End
A-Team, The
Back-Up Plan, The
Being In Heaven
Belladonna
Beneath Hill 60
Blind Company
Blind Side, The
Blue Valentine
Book Of Eli
Boot Cake, The
Bounty Hunter, The
Boy
Bran Nue Dae
Break Ke Baad
Brothers
Bruce Lee: My Brother
Bunny And The Bull
Buried
Cairo Time
Cats And Dogs 2: Revenge Of Kitty Galore
Celine - Through The Eyes Of The World
Chance Pe Dance
Charlie St Cloud
Child's Eye
Chloe
Chronicles Of Narnia: Voyage Of The Dawn Trader
City Island
City Of Your Final Destination
Clash Of The Titans
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
Concert, The
Cop Out
Copacabana
Crazy Heart
Date Night
Daybreakers
Dear John
Desert Flower
Despicable Me
Detective Dee and The Mystery of the Phantom Flame
Devil
Devil's 6 Commandments, The
Diary Of A Wimpy Kid
Dinner For Schmucks
Dinner Party, The
Disappearance Of Alice Creed
Due Date
Easy A
Eat, Pray, Love
Edge Of Darkness
End Of The Line
Enter The Void
Everlasting Moments
Exit Through The Gift Shop
Expendables, The
Extra Man, The
Extraordinary Measures
Fair Game
Fantastic Mr Fox
Father Of My Children
First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life
Fish Tank
Five Minutes Of Heaven
Food Inc
Four Lions
From Paris With Love
Furry Vengeance
Gainsbourg
Gasland
Genius Within: The Inner Life Of Glenn Gould
Get Him To The Greek
Ghost Writer, The
Girl Who Played With Fire, The
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Going The Distance
Greenberg
Green Zone, The
Grown Ups
Gulliver’s Travels
Guzaarish
Harry Brown
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows (Part 1)
Hedgehog, The
Hobby Farm
Hot Tub Time Machine
How To Train Your Dragon
Hubble 3D
Human Centipede
Hurt Locker, The
I Am Love
I Love You Too
I, Don Giovanni
I'm Still Here
In The Loop
Inception
Invictus
Iron Man 2
It’s A Wonderful After Life
It's Complicated
Jackass 3D
Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work
Kick Ass
Kids Are All Right, The
Killer Inside Me, The
King's Speech, The
Knight and Day
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
Last Airbender, The
Last Exorcism, The
Last Song, The
Last Station, The
Law Abiding Citizen
Leaving
Lebanon
Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’hool
Legion
Let Me In
Letters To Juliet
Life As We Know It
Life During Wartime
Little Deaths
Losers, The
Lou
Love And Other Drugs
Love Happens
Love, Lust & Lies
Loved Ones, The
Machete
Made In Dagenham
Mademoiselle Chambon
Marmaduke
Matching Jack
Meet The Parents: Little Fockers
Megamind
Men Who Stare At Goats
Mesrine: Public Enemy No 1
Messenger, The
Mic Macs
Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
Mid August Lunch
Milk of Sorrow, The
Monsters
Most Dangerous Man In America
Mother
Mother And Child
Mother Fish
My Name Is Khan
My One And Only
Nanny Mcphee And The Big Bang
New York I Love You
Nightmare On Elm Street
Nine
North Face
Nothing Men, The
Other Guys, The
Other Man, The
Paranormal Activity 2
Peepli
Percy Jackson And The Lightening Thief
Piranha 3D
Playing For Charlie
Please Give
Precious
Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time
Princess And The Frog, The
Raavan
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
Rebound, The
Red
Red Hill
Reluctant Infidel, The
Remember Me
Repo Men
Resident Evil: After Life
Ricky
Road Train
Road, The
Robin Hood
Rocket Science
Runaways, The
Sagan
Salt
Sarah's Key
Saw 3D
Scott Pilgrim Vs The World
Secret In Their Eyes
Separation City
Sex And The City 2
She’s Out Of My League
Shrek Forever After
Shutter Island
Skyline
Social Network, The
Somewhere
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Soul Kitchen
Special Relationship
Splice
Spy Next Door, The
Step Up 3D
Stoning Of Soraya M, The
Streetdance 3D
Subdivision
Summer Coda
Switch, The
Tea With Madame Clos
The Refuge
This Way Of Life
Tinkerbell & The Great Fairy Rescue
Tomorrow When The War Began
Tooth Fairy
Tourist, The
Town, The
Toy Story 3
Treasure Hunter, The
Tree, The
Triangle
Tron Legacy
Tumbler, The
Twilight: Eclipse
Up In The Air
Valentine’s Day
Vampire’s Assistant
Vampires Suck
Vintner's Luck, The
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
We are Family
Welcome
When In Rome
When You're Strange
White Ribbon, The
Wild Target
Winter's Bone
Wog Boy 2: The Kings Of Mykonos
Wolfman, The

.

3 new short films

2010-10-25T14:11:00.001+11:00

.

Both my job as a film festival programmer and the hobby that is film criticism benefit from experience and insights into how films are actually made. This is why I try to make short films once in a while. It helps me stay on my toes and encourages to think twice about what I write or what I a program.

Of course while I strongly believe that everyone can make a film, I don't believe everyone is a filmmaker. I'm far too busy (and realistic about my talents) to pursue filmmaking seriously. Instead I make films as part of Kino Sydney, the local chapter of the international no-budget DIY filmmaking movement.

Kino's perfect for what I'm able to commit to filmmaking: it's inclusive, it's cheap, it's non-competitive and it's an incredibly supportive environment in which to have a go. I also happen to run said chapter with my colleagues at The Festivalists, so another reason I make films is to show potential participants how easy it is to make something.

The following three films were all made in less than 32 hours over the past 6 days. I shot them on a borrowed consumer camera (the user friendly Sony NEX-VG10) and edited them on Final Cut Pro (which I'd never used before).

If you want to make films with us at Kino Sydney, check out our (soon to be upgraded) website, or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo or YouTube. If you don't live in Sydney, check out the global Kino website (headquartered in Montreal) for a chapter near you!

The first two work best played LOUD and in full screen mode...

Kino Ident 2010 from Matt Riviera on Vimeo.

Forever from Matt Riviera on Vimeo.

Kino Addicts from Matt Riviera on Vimeo.

Shoot first, ask questions later (Kino Kabaret 2010)

2010-10-08T17:54:00.002+11:00

Most people have never heard of Kino Sydney, yet the monthly short film night (which I run as part of our non-profit company The Festivalists) has been going since 2006. It now operates at capacity, welcoming 150 filmmakers and enthusiasts to each of its unpredictable evenings (currently at Fraser Studios, behind the Clare Hotel on Broadway).

Kino is something you want to climb on a rooftop and shout about, but you don’t. Maybe Kino is a secret best shared with a few of your closest mates: creative, adventurous people who will “get” Kino: those likely to fall for its lo-fi, DIY approach to filmmaking, more about making art for art’s sake, less about winning an award, getting famous or declaring oneself (from a rooftop): “a Filmmaker”.

The concept behind Kino is simple. Participants make short films specifically for the night. There are no themes or restrictions, as long as the work is under 5 minutes and screened in public for the very first time.

Kino is not just for filmmakers. Digital video and cheap mobile devices have opened up filmmaking to all. Whether you’re a fashion designer or a punk rocker, an architect or a skater, an opera singer or an animal wrangler, chances are you’ve got a good story to tell. Kino’s a friendly, supportive place to do that.

The aim is to free ourselves from the pressures of funding, time and professional contacts, and get in the habit of an “act now” mindset. Making a film, after all, is the best way to learn about filmmaking. Kino’s motto is simple: “Do something with nothing, do more with little, and do it now!”

Some films go on to international success on the Festival circuit, others become hits online. Some are never seen again. Because films are never pre-screened or judged, quality fluctuates. Yet – perhaps because the filmmakers have nothing to lose and no one to impress - the work is usually personal, inventive, playful. With Kino there’s always a chance to chat with the filmmakers and offer constructive feedback… or make something better yourself.

The work is also surprisingly diverse. Look at most “prestigious” film competitions and the finalists seem to all follow the same formula. At Kino, styles, formats and influences mix and clash. Many different languages are spoken. Obscure subcultures are unearthed. Some go it alone, others team up. Some come with their own ideas, others opt into one of our collective filmmaking challenges. Animation, documentary, experimental: it’s all there on the screen.

Solitary Electricity Substations from Nils Crompton on Vimeo.

Kino Sydney is part of a vibrant international movement, which started in Montreal a decade ago. There are now Kino cells around the world, from London to Hamburg, from Paris to Zagreb. It’s an opportunity to collaborate internationally and bring in foreign artists to make work locally – another chance to stir things up.

Kino blurs the boundary between the artist and the audience, encouraging amateurs to rub shoulders with professionals. It harnesses the energy, simplicity and creativity of YouTube, but brings it out of the bedroom and back into a social context. Most of all, it’s a celebration (of talent, of resourcefulness, of personal expression) to which everyone is invited. You might come to watch, initially, but it won’t be long before you put your hand up to make a film.

Kino also likes a party. A typical Kino night will include a screening of some 12-18 films made for the night, an open bar serving beer and wine, a snack bar with homemade crepes or gourmet pizza, live music performances, hula dancers and sometimes, even trapeze artists and magicians.

Once a year we go all out and put on Kino Kabaret, a series of three 32 hour filmmaking marathons, each culminating in a screening party. The next Kino Kabaret is presented by Sony and starts October 19th in Sydney, and it's open to established filmmakers and first-timers alike. Some participants are flying in from Kino chapters as far away as Paris for this collaborative experiment.

To make things easy we're providing participants with a fully-fitted HQ in which to work, as well as free access to editing stations, equipment and cameras, including Sony's brand new NEX VG10 cameras, which boast an interchangeable lens. Many local musicians - some of whom will be performing a the parties - have put their tracks forward to be used in the films. Acclaimed videographer Piet de Vries will even be on hand to demonstrate the cameras and give a few tips on shooting like a pro.

If you've always wanted to make a film, dropkick your procrastination into the void and join us for what promises to be an exhausting, sleep-deprived, pulse-quickening time.

428 (Via Newtown) by Steven Kastrissios

Kino Kabaret runs October 19-24 in Sydney and registrations are open until Friday October 15th.

Days 9, 10 & 11 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-20T23:51:00.001+10:00

Day 9

The industry and foreign press have left town but the Toronto Film Festival is far from over. Die hards like myself will not be deterred by the dismantling of the delegate centre, and even if we do bid goodbye to the free drinks at the filmmakers' lounge with heavy hearts, it's with renewed enthusiasm that we join thousands of Torontonians as they enjoy TIFF's glorious last weekend.

I like this period of the festival because when you run into friends you actually have time to chat, and you can look back on the films you've seen and discuss patterns, themes and recurring motifs. In my case i'm afraid to say it's serial killers and non-consensual sex. Interestingly though, I've seen eight films which feature a swimming pool scene.

Black Ocean (Noir Ocean) is a languorous film set almost entirely on a French navy vessel in the early 70's. Its protagonists are a group of 18 and 19-year-old sailors doing their military service, and a significant part of the film is dedicated to their routine: training exercises, staying awake for watch, playing cards and shooting the breeze. In Mururoa to carry out one of the 170 nuclear tests undertaken by France in the second half of the last century, the boys struggle to grapple with the significance of what they've been sent out to do.

Marion Hansel, like Claire Denis in Beau Travail, is less interested in narrative than in the spectacle of men at work and at play when women are taken out of the equation: the rituals, the natural pecking order which emerges, the difficulty in communicating, the seductive aura of those who fight, whatever their motives. By stripping the environment of the civilizing rules and structures of society, something for which military order is a poor substitute, the film exposes the true instinctual behaviors and thoughts of men.

Two metaphors exist at the core of this beautiful film. The first concerns the crossing of an icy river by a young boy, as a test of his courage, which is told first in flashback then as a story. It's echoed of course in the crossing of an ocean by the boy, now on the cusp on manhood, though what he discovers on the other side isn't courage, but the cowardice of men willing to unleash nuclear destruction onto others.

The second metaphor relates to these men as representatives not just of their generation but of their species, of the young civilization they belong to. The oceanic voyage is like mankind's rite of passage, the test of its mettle, but also of its wisdom. Issues of pollution, colonization and finally war and genocide are brought up in this microcosm where young men are invited, perhaps for the first time, to take responsibility for the or actions. The film takes us back to a turning point In our history and asks what we might have done differently.

And that's my last industry screening for the Festival. For my next film, I catch a public screening of Ryan Redford's first feature, Oliver Sherman. The intimate Canadian drama is a three hander involving a broken and aimless war vet who visits the home of the man who saved his life, now happily married. It's a beautifully restrained psychological drama (especially for a first feature) and a fascinating character study. The three leads are great but Molly Parker impresses especially with her turn as a, willful but accepting wife who is ever so slowly pushed over the limit.

We finish the day with the Film Circuit drinks upstairs at Lightbox, a chance to meet a few more Canadian filmmakers who've somehow escaped our radar this week, and to thank the TIFF staff for all they've done for us over the past 9 days.

Day 10

After a hearty brunch with Australian critic Ian Barr, I head to a public screening of Make Believe. This documentary is as formulaic as they come, following a group of international teen-aged contestants as they prepare for and compete in the World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas. You know the drill, a portrait of 5 selected entrants, their backgrounds and motivation, 10 minutes on why the contest means so much, highlights of the competition itself, a suspenseful reveal of the winners with close ups on the tears of joy (and disappointment), a short 6 months later segment.

The whole thing, of course, is edited in light of who the winners actually were, and is only slightly more honest and less manipulative than reality television. From Mad Hot Ballroom to Wordplay, from Spellbound to Every Little Step, the formula has proven itself. Make Believe is a worthy addition to the genre, and a good introduction to the world of magic and its mildly autistic cast of misfits and weirdos. It's a decent critique of America's despicable celebrity-grooming industry and ultra-competitive culture, and a simple but moving account of growing up different. For a film about magic, however, it doesn't work too hard at hiding its tricks and formulas, and could have done with a little more mystery.

At least 127 articles have been published this week about TIFF's crop of Oscar hopefuls, who's in contention, who's out, who cares. It seems the early consensus is that Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is the one to beat. Turns out there's a private screening organized at Lightbox that afternoon that I can sneak into, so I decide to see for myself.

It's a beautifully written story of the friendship between an Australian speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) and the Duke of York (Colin Firth), whose stammer is a major obstacle at a time - as Europe lurches towards war in the 30's - when royals still mattered. No doubt the film will be an awards magnet: it's expertly crafted, equal parts moving and rousing, light hearted but set against a serious historical backdrop and sufficiently middle-of-the-road to appeal across the board. While it's a little heavy handed at times, its two leading men lead a charm offensive that's hard to resist. As easy to admire as it is to like.

On the way out, we score tickets to the Closing Night film and party, so without a minute to spare, Karina and I rush to the Elgin to join the long line of locals on Yonge Street. TIFF co-director Piers Handling introduces the screening by thanking the Toronto audience for its enthusiasm, claiming three filmmakers have told him the same thing over the past few days: "I make my films with Toronto in mind" (they are John Nossiter, Jason Reitman and Benoit Jacquot, if you want to know).

Massy Tadjedin's debut feature Last Night is an odd choice for closing night, though it boasts significant star power in a cast that includes Sam Worthington, Keira Knightley, Eva Mendes and Guillaume Canet. A couple's marriage is put to the test as husband and wife each find their commitment to fidelity challenged on the same night.

Unfolding over 36 hours in long, talky scenes, it's a tedious and unoriginal relationship drama that relies too much on its Wallpaper-like locations and the good looks of its unsympathetic characters, who spend their time pouting as if in a Vogue or GQ spread. This film has already been made countless times and there is nothing new or interesting enough in this particular story to justify its telling. Toronto might be the most enthusiastic and supportive audience on the festival circuit, but the applause at the end of Last Night is sparse and polite at best.

The closing night party at Roy Thompson Hall is a massive but somewhat uninspired affair, more of a sponsor thanking exercise than a proper send off (we pass 8 other red carpet parties on King St along during the streetcar ride over - the fun, it seems, is being had elsewhere). Thankfully, Karina and i have a bring-your-own-fun policy and, with the help of a few vodka-martinis, we give the Festival the regal farewell it deserves.

DAY 11

I see my 31st and last film of the Festival today, Richard Aoyade's coming of age film Submarine. There's been a lot of online hype about this film during the week, with many heralding it as the "discovery" of the festival and the Weinstein Company swooping in to pick up North American rights. The indie comedy charts one not-very-popular high school student's first love and his attempt to save his parents' disintegrating marriage.

It's set in the early 80's and a lot of humor is based on the semi-ironic nostalgia for the era's lapses in good taste. I should add that it's set in Wales. It's mildly funny, the quirks are sweet and smart and it's fun spotting the art film references, but Submarine does nothing Rushmore didn't already do a decade earlier.

Meanwhile the TIFF awards have been announced. The King's Speech takes the Audience Award for Best Film, Force of Nature, the David Suzuki documentary takes the one for Best Documentary. Denis Villeneuve's excellent Incendies takes Best Canadian Feature which Deborah Chow's The High Cost of Living takes Best Canadian First Feature.

The rest of the day is spent finally checking out the amazing Essential Cinema exhibition at Lightbox. The main gallery is filled with props, posters, clips, costumes and artifacts from the list of 100 films deemed essential by the curators. It's a bit of a geek-out for film buffs. There are original animation cels from Saul Bass's Vertigo title sequence, for example, or the Videodrome helmet.

Some of the video art is really great, such as Slidelength, Michael Snow's companion piece the seminal Wavelength. Barr Gimmore's typographical video montage of 100 titles and directors' credits is strangely abstract and moving. Douglas Gordon has his infamous Psycho piece on display, in which the Hitchcock film is slowed down so as to last 24 hours (if I'd had the time I would have sat there with quilt and a thermos of coffee for exactly that long). I also really like Guy Maddin's Hauntings II, a series of videos projected onto the building's 4th floor windows at night, in which mysterious figures walk through billowing curtains.

But my favorite piece commissioned especially for the exhibition is Atom Egoyan's 8 1/2 Screens, for which the Canadian auteur has taken over all of cinema 4 at Lightbox. In a reversal of the traditional cinema gaze, he's placed the projector beneath the screen, facing the auditorium. His piece is projected onto 8 1/2 white sheets draped over the cinema seats, and consists in fragments of the scene at the end of Fellini's 8 1/2 in which the producer and his entourage watch rushes sat in a cinema.
It's a playful meditation on the sheer joy of cinema and a clever twist on the accepted notions of who is watching, who is being watched. In short, it brilliantly captures the democratic appeal of this accessible, and therefore inclusive inaugural exhibition.

I've read through the program for the first few months at Lightbox and it's quite simply awe inspiring. Forget Tim Burton, there's a 70mm film season, a Bertolucci retrospective ("Fashion, Fascism and Fucking"), silent films with musical accompaniment (including the new score by Portishead's Adrian Utley and Goldfrapp's Will Gregory for The Passion of Joan of Arc!), talks by David Cronenbeg, Walter Murch and John Waters, and a 12 hour all-night grindhouse marathon programmed by Midnight Madness's Colin Geddes.

You can perhaps sense my breathlessness as I write this last paragraph. It gives you an idea of how intense, exhilarating and fulfilling these past 11 days in Toronto have been. It's been a pleasure sharing them with you in these hasty nocturnal posts. I'm leaving tomorrow, I accept that, but just as I'm taking a little of that Toronto cinephilia with me on the plane, I'm sure I've left a little of my soul under a cinema seat somewhere. Never mind, I'll be back.

Day 8 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-19T02:10:00.003+10:00

I feel a little sad today. I had my first good night's sleep since the festival started and though I feel human again (it came not a moment too soon), I've also lost some of the nervous energy and adrenalin-induced giddiness which has characterized my Toronto visit thus far. That and our friend and flatmate Kate leaves Toronto today. The end is near, I can feel it!

For one thing most of the buyers and a large portion of the press have left town. The long queues outside the press and industry screenings have vanished. The trades have stopped publishing their daily editions. The big buzz-worthy titles of the front-loaded festival have all played. The party invitations have stopped coming.

In a way it's an easier, more pleasant phase of the festival. A lot of my friends are still in town, especially the Canadian contingent. Everyone has more time to chat. And because there's less to see I don't have to rush to an early screening: it's almost noon by the time I take my seat at Special Treatment (Sans Queue Ni Tete).

Jeanne Labrune's drama stars Isabelle Huppert as Alice, a middle-aged call girl who caters, with intelligence and imagination, to the diverse role playing fantasies of her wealthy clients. She's empowered and free but unhappy. The same applies to Xavier (Bouli Lanners), a wealthy psycho-analyst who does his job without compassion or joy. His wife is leaving him and for the first time in his life, he decides to call on the services of a prostitute. their paths meet.

The clever idea of this Belgian film is to draw parallels between psychoanalysis and prostitution. Both provide intimate services for a fee, both involve the illusion of care and personal attention, both, Labrune seems to say, offer diminishing returns for the client and existential angst for the provider. Alice and Xavier, for example, both refer to a client not by name but by the object their custom will allow them to purchase.

While their encounter seems to bring about progress in their respective quests for meaning, there are no easy epiphanies. The fascinating hypothesis that both professions offer similar opportunities and contradictions isn't fully developed, not even when Alice goes in search of an analyst for herself. This detached examination of unhappiness fails to add up to more than a series of very good scenes, and the grim Belgian locations and sad faces do nothing to lift my mood.

It takes a coffee with an old friend, now a senior programmer at Lightbox, to cheer me up. I hear the fascinating (and tumultuous) behind-the-scenes story of how this rather amazing centre for the moving image came into being, and the ambitious plans for year-round programming which will make this facility a world-class centre for film, on par with the National Fim Theatre in London and ACMI in Melbourne.

There's only one other film planned for the day, Larysa Kondracki's Bosnia-set Canadian-German coproduction. This grim thriller about human trafficking stars Rachel Weiz and for some reason, seems to be missing from TIFF's 448-page program guide. I go in knowing very little and come out knowing more than I want to know about the subject. It's not the most pleasant of film-going experiences, the second film in as many days to feature a woman being forcefully raped with a foreign object.

But that's film festivals for you, you gotta go in ready for everything... It's been a high batting average so far, for which I'm thankful. Let's hope the nastier scenes of the films I've seen today stay out of my dreams tonight...

Day 7 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-18T04:01:00.000+10:00

The 14 hour days and the sleep deprivation is beginning to takes its toll. I've been waking up every night around 4am from crazy dreams, collages of memories, fears and scenes from the two dozen films I've seen at the Festival so far. Because often I string films along like laps at the pool, there's not much time to process each experience, images and sounds get filed away only to resurface at random moments of the day... Or night.

This morning I wake up and it feels I'm still dreaming. I don't even remember how I get there but at 9am I find myself seated in Lightbox for a screening of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan. Natalie Portman stars as a Nina, a ballerina given the break of a lifetime: the chance to play the swan queen in the NY company's Lincoln Centre production of Swan Lake. Problem is the artistic director, played with gusto by Vincent Cassel, thinks she's got the technical chops to dance half the role, the white swan part, but none of the sensuality and life experience needed to play the other half, the black swan.

Under pressure from her tyrannical, repressive mother (Barbara Hershey) and the bitchy dancers who covet her role, Nina whips herself into a frenzy. As stress, fatigue and other stimulants come into play, she begins to buckle under strain.

Black Swan is the most fun I've had at the cinema in a vey long time. Aronofsky blends high- and low-brow, originality and homage, camp and horror to great effect, making a film which works on a variety of layers, using ballet as a microcosm to represent society as a whole.

It's a commentary on the high demands we make on contemporary women and the high price some pay to meet those demands. Aronofsky uses fantasy to illustrate ballet's destructive, transformative effect on the body which, through the story of Swan Lake, can be used as a powerful metaphor to describe the passage into adulthood, the objectification of women and the cost of sexual repression. In other words, it's more than a guilty a pleasure.

It's the perfect role for Natalie Portman, who invests the part with all she's got, including some serious dancing skills. Portman has always been a white swan in Hollywood. Her she proves she has a wider range, propelling her career forward to more adult roles.

The film unfolds at a frenzied pace, features feverish set pieces of stunning, disturbing beauty, and never lose an once of narrative coherence, event when things take a turn for the fantastic. It could have ended 5 minute sooner, the finale adding a tragic element both expected and unnecessary. And the commentary on the sexual objectification of women by men is diluted by the director's own insistence on doing just that in a scene or two. But then the camp factor is such that taking the film too seriously defies the purpose. Black Swan is one hell of a psychological thriller.

After a couple of meetings with sales agents in the suites high up in the Hyatt Regency, which serves as the industry hub for the festival, I head to the filmmakers' lounge to hear Quebec filmmaker Xavier Dolan (I Killed My Mother) speak about his new film Heartbeats, which I'd previously seen at the Sydney Film Festival. He's just finished writing his next film, he says, called Lawrence Anyways. It's about a man who on his 30th birthday tells his wife that he will have a sex change by the end of the year, that he loves her and hopes she will stay with him. The film charts the next 10 years in their marriage as their relationship evolves and deteriorates. Dolan will not act in this one. I don't know about you but I can't wait.

Next is the much anticipated Rabbit Hole. I'm a big fan of John Cameron Mitchell's flawed but colourful, boundary-pushing queer indies Hedwig And The Angry Inch and Shortbus, but this is another animal altogether.

Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart are Becca and Howie, a married couple whose relationship is buckling under the strain of grief, having recently lost their 4-year-old boy in an accident. The drama catalogues the hundred and one ways the tragedy and it's aftermath poisons their existence, changes their relationship, informs their world view, corrodes family bonds.

The well acted, mature drama seems designed to win Oscars. Sadly it's conservative and uninspired. At one point Becca forms a friendship of sorts with the teenager who was driving the car the fateful day their son was run over, and you hope the story will venture down more unpredictable paths, but the opportunity is not seized.

You care about the parents' loss because it's a tragedy, but how much you are willing to indulge their crisis will depend on how sympathetic you find this rich, self-absorbed, conservative couple in their manor on the hill. Their lack of imagination is frightening. In one scene Becca imagines a happier version of herself in a parallel universe... making pancakes.

It's hard not to imagine what filmmakers like Benoit Jacquot, Michael Haneke or Pia Marais might have done with a similar premise, and we know where Lars Von Trier took this particular story in Anti Christ... Rabbit Hole is a step forward for John Cameron Mitchell's career (we learned today that Lionsgate have just snapped up the film for a major awards push), but a wasted opportunity nonetheless.

I walk out of my next film, the Rainn Wilson comedy Super, after 45 minutes. This ordinary-guy-turned-superhero film does nothing for me except hasten a rising headache. On the way out I bump into a film critic who tells me Ellen Page kicks the film into gear - and turns the film around - in the second half so I'll never know if I missed an indie gem, but it would take some freaky superpowers to make this film fly, methinks.

My final film of the day is Tran Anh-Hung's gorgeous adaptation of the Haruki Murakami novel Norwegian Wood. I read the book while living in Japan when I was 19, and the melancholic story of doomed love and suicide had a profound impact on me (not to mention 14 million Japanese high school girls and emo kids the world over).

The film adaptation is suitably lush and laconic, beautifully photographed and inhabited by complex, innocent characters who seem to float through its landscapes like ghosts. The paper thin story is told correctly: with languor and long stretches of silence, feelings communicated by mood rather than words. It's a haunted and haunting film which will be too delicate for some, the object of fanatical obsession for others.

Day 6 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-17T03:36:00.001+10:00

Having slept fewer hours than I've had empty-stomach vodka martinis, it's with considerable difficulty that I extract myself from bed this morning. But if anyone can peel me off my pillow today, it's Kelly
Reichardt, whose Old Joy and Wendy And Lucy are true treasures or recent American filmmaking.

Set in Oregon in 1845, Meek's Cutoff follows three families and their three covered wagons, as they attempt to find their way through harsh, barren landscape. Their guide Meek seems to have led them astray, more interested in tall stories than in coming clean about his inability to lead them. Soon they run out of water and, their lives are at risk, must choose whether or not to trust a Native American they capture en route. One of the men's wife, played by Michelle Williams, seems to have more sense in her than all the men in her party combined, though she's never asked to contribute an opinion.

In Reichardt's minimal, laconic cinema, stories are moved forward by tiny moments and unsaid truths. It's a cinema of asking the right questions rather than providing easy answers. This is just as well. The Western is a genre which has helped shape American mythology, define an entire nation's cultural and political identity, but it's a genre which, like Meek himself, has been more interested in tall tales
than in questioning one's choices.

While it seems nothing much happens in Meek's Cutoff - realism trumps entertainment, fair enough - there's plenty of gold nuggets to be found if you sift through the silence. One question Reichardt asks for example, is how different the settlers' story might have been if women had had a say in their destiny. What would have been the fate of the Native American tribes whose land is encroached upon had curiosity and dialogue won over fear and destruction? How was the West won, and need their have been a fight?

Of course this also leads us to another interesting question: what would American myths look like if the stories they'd been built upon had been written by women? Reichardt doesn't have the arrogance to answer that question. Her wise, poetic contribution to an entirely male-dominated genre however, is very, very welcome.

Oh, and it's in 4:3...!

Before lunch at the Lightbox Canteen with a good friend, I catch Jacob Tierney's follow up to his excellent teen movie The Trotsky, a serial killer thriller set almost entirely in one Montreal building. Called Good Neighbours, it stars Scott Speedman, Jay Baruchel and Emily Hampshire. What is it with serial killers in Canadian cinema this year?

Very hungover still, I head into Beginners, graphic designer and filmmaker Mike Mills superior follow-up to Thumbsucker. Beginners chronicles the budding love story between graphic designer and artist Oliver (Ewan McGreggor, very convincing for once) and a French actress (Melanie Laurent). Both are damaged, sad individuals whose past relationships have been plagued by a constant need to flee and be
alone. Oliver's father Hal (Christopher Plummer) has just died, adding another weight on his shoulders while jolting him into accepting a need to confront or at least come to terms with his demons.

It's in Hal's story that Oliver finds inspiration. We learn that Hal has come out as a gay man aged 75, at the time of death of Oliver's mother, choosing to embrace the truth and live it up in his final years. Mike Mills' clever, bittersweet film charts the parallel stories of these two men, beginners in the game of love.

Mills uses a variety of quirky tricks to tell his story (think Michel Gondry meets Jean-Pierre Jeunet), but they quickly lose their gimmicky quality, adding layer upon layer of meaning to story in a way which, in it's blending of pop culture, hipsterisms and honesty, feels very now. It all adds up to something quite moving and entertaining. What comes across, at first, as a set of formal affectations, emerges as a
true style, an extension of Mills' experience as an artist: personal and authentic.

Christopher Plummer is excellent, a revelation as a dying man who shirks sentimentality and convention in a last-ditch attempt to be true to himself, and Ewan McGreggor gives simply the finest performance of his spotty career. Beginners is one of the best surprises of this year's healthy line-up.

Tired and content, I head to the filmmakers' lounge to meet with Karina and my cool British festival buddies for a lengthy debrief over complimentary wine. Later we will have a few more at the friendly South by South West party, though I'm happy to report i get home before 11 for a much anticipated early night. More tomorrow!

Day 5 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-16T03:20:00.003+10:00

The first screening today - Francois Ozon's Potiche - is not until 9:15, which means that I can sleep in (8am!). The French director is back in crowd-pleasing mode with this period comedy. Reverting to the camp theatrics of 8 Femmes, he gives Catherine Deneuve a great role which both references her past successes and breaks with her fossilized glamourous image (who else but Ozon would date to dress France's most elegant woman in a tracksuit?).

Set in the late 70's Potiche is a broad but clever satire which, under the cover of charting the emancipation of women 30 years ago, sends up the conservative and intolerant Sarkozy government of today. When a right wing industrialist (Fabrice Luchini) is taken hostage by his striking factory workers, his trophy wife (Catherine Deneuve) reluctantly steps up to do a "man's job" and finds she makes a successful, compassionate CEO. She is inspired in part by an old flame, a Communist deputy-mayor played by Gerard Depardieu.

With nods to the Parapluies de Cherbourg (the factory makes umbrellas) and previous onscreen couples portrayed by Deneuve and Depardieu, Potiche breaks down character stereotypes with its tongue firmly in cheek, determined to have as much fun as possible in the process. Helped by over the top production design, vintage tunes and a snappy pace, the risky endeavour delivers. The satire hits the mark, the comedy sizzles and the cast's chemistry ensures the fun is infectious. This distinctly French feel-good movie is too smart to be a guilty pleasure.

The next film is a star-studded adaptation of Mordecai Richler's Canadian classic Barney's Version, which charts the convoluted saga of the three marriages of Montreal Jewish TV producer Barney Panofsky. Richard J Lewis manages to condense 40 years into one impressive feature which deftly blends drama, satire and comedy, at least until a somewhat sentimental third act. It's all held together by Paul Giamatti's excellent performance as the pessimistic curmudgeon capable of the worst but able to sustain our sympathy regardless.

It's an entertaining portrait of a man undergoing a chain of (mostly self-triggered) midlife crises, one which isn't afraid of intellectual musings or political incorrectness. The cast is mostly excellent, especially Dustin Hoffman as Barney's father, a retired cop who isn't afraid of making a fool of himself, especially in the name of doing the right thing by his son. The film could of done with bolder stylistic choices, preferring instead a semi-sophisticated sheen which gives it a middle-of-the-road appeal it didn't really need. It is conservative in form and in tone (in that unique North American manner which consists in dissimulating conservative world views beneath a thin layer of irreverence), but succeeds in eliciting sympathy for it's privileged jerk of a protagonist. Old fashioned but well crafted, it's the sort of adult comedic drama Hollywood hasn't done well in a while.

Next up for me is a book launch at Lightbox, for Phaidon's Take 100, in which 10 film festival programmers globally each pick 10 filmmakers who will shape the future of world cinema. I score a complimentary copy, which is a good chance to meet TIFF boss Piers Handling, and chat briefly with programmer Cameron Bailey (both contributed a chapter to the glossy volume).

The third film of the day is in Scotiabank Theatre's cinema 3 and it's, appropriately enough, Tom Tykwer's 3 (Drei). Returning to Germany proves to be the right move for Tykwer, more inspired than ever with this intellectually playful relationship drama. The premise is simple. Simon and Hanna have been together for 20 years, best friends rather than passionate lovers. Hanna has an affair with Adam. Simon also has an affair with Adam, not knowing about his relationship with Hanna.

This bizarre love triangle is more than a gimmick or a high-concept premise however. Tykwer has a real interest in exploring our understanding of deterministic biology and how it can determine our sexuality. Hanna and Simon are both open-minded liberal intellectuals unbound by dogma or hangups. Through them the German director explores the possibilities afforded to us by true sexual liberation while painting a convincing portrait of middle class ennui. Well cast and smartly written, Drei makes up in with what it lacks in warmth. It's optimistic coda provides a satisfying conclusion to a rather elegant grown-up drama.

The rest of the evening is spent hopping from party to party, picking up friends and newly-met acquaintances at each stopover. We start with the launch of 10/10, a new book on Belgian cinema by talented critic Boyd Von Hoeij featuring gorgeous photographs by Fabrizio Maltese. I've been an online friend of Boyd's for a while so it's great to finally meet him.

We then join a throbbing, heaving crowd at the Entertainment One party, a busy Grey Goose-soaked affair unfolding over three floors at the Royal Conservatory for Music. It's a great chance to elbow celebrities out of the way (Victor Rasuk, Kevin Spacey...) to speak to some cool Canadian filmmakers and producers. Finally we crash the Incendies party at the members-only Spoke Club, where it turns out we know quite a few people. All in all a fun night capping off a great day, a chance to verify that it is indeed possible to survive on vodka, caffeine, canapes and good movies. Sleep be damned!

Day 4 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-15T07:07:00.001+10:00

I wake up to the sad news that founder of the French nouvelle vague Claude Chabrol has just died, aged 80. As the news ripples through the festival today it'll be interesting to reflect on the breadth and scope of Chabrol's contribution to cinema, from a time when cinephilia and criticism mattered immensely (and widely) right up to the present (his latest film Bellamy has yet to be released in some parts of the world).
Speaking of French cinema, Romain Gavras' Our Day Will Come is a hilarious way to start the day. Set in the north of France, it's a road movie about two unhinged men who unleash mayhem in their wake as they attempt to make their way to Ireland, which they see as a haven for "their people", in this case, redheads.

The decrepit and derelict French landscape is depicted as a post-apocalyptic wasteland without the help of special effects. The abandoned factories and distilleries, the windswept parking lots of vacant shopping centres, the empty business hotels of Northern France all serve as the backdrop for this deranged origin story of a would be prophet and his mentor. The film is like a loud warning bell for contemporary France, where racial and social tension is rife, fueled by the right wing rhetoric of President Sarkozy. High unemployment, marginalized youths, rampant ignorance: this is fertile ground for the rise of extremism.

Laced with political incorrectness, black humor and brutal violence, the film follows a young redhead with paranoid delusions (Olivier Barthelemy) and his improvised mentor, an increasingly unhinged psychiatrist played by Vincent Cassell. From La Haine to Dobermann, from Irresistible to this piece of jubilant, controlled anarchy: every few years a renegade film emerges as a "fuck you" to the French filmmaking establishment... And it almost always stars Vincent Cassel. Its ambitions are limited and the absurd premise isn't developed as much as it should be, but Our Day Will Come is a coherent piece of agit-prop designed to rub people the wrong way. It's also a lot of fun.

After a brief breakfast at Canteen, I head to Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. At the screening I finally get a chance to meet up-and-coming filmmaker Xavier Dolan, whose I Killed My Mother recently closed our Possible Worlds Film Festival. He is here for his second feature, Heartbeats, which took best film at the Sydney Film Festival. He's shocked to hear about Chabrol. I wonder what he made of Villeneuve's ambitious drama...

Adapted from a powerful play into a full blown saga spanning two continents and several decades, Incendies tells the parallel story of a woman negotiating disgrace, war, persecution, prison and torture in the Middle East of the 70's, and that of her two children investigating their mother's unknown past in an effort to uncover hidden truths which surface at the time of her death.

It's a film which gets under your skin, reaches for your throat, squeezes tight and never let's go. It works as a multi-layered microcosm which unpacks the forces that fuel the conflict in the middle east and their antidote, the incredibly difficult process of tolerance, acceptance and forgiveness. It's never sensational, never voyeuristic, and even its narrative tricks (which like, say, the overrated Babel, rely on coincidence) feel organic precisely because the director refuses to underestimate the complexity of his subject matter. In other words, I would have no beef with people calling Incendies a masterpiece.

Catherine Breillat's A Sleeping Beauty is next for me. The revisited fairytale furthers her exploration - two years after Bluebeard - of the founding myths which underpin contemporary gender roles and female sexuality. Sadly (and perhaps it was the Incendies aftermath, such is the cruel tyranny of festival schedules), Breillat returns to fairy tale with diminishing returns. It becomes harder and harder to reveal meaning behind the paper thin storyline, unpolished acting and slight production values. I have tremendous respect for the French auteur, but I miss the ambition of hear earlier work.

Finally Pierre Thorreton's L'Amour Fou is a conventionally directed but fascinating documentary about French couturier Yves Saint Laurent, who died 2 years ago. Framed by the auction by his partner Pierre Berger of their incredible art collection at the Grand Palais, often referred to as the sale of the century, the film ventures beyond fashion to speak with great insight about creativity, art and the high price of passion. It helps that Pierre Berge is incredibly articulate and eloquent in describing both the impact YSL has had on the culture and his own role in making that happen. I come out of this spirits soaring, inspired and energized by what has been accomplished throughout recent History on the strength of talent and dedication alone.

Day 3 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-14T04:52:00.004+10:00

.
Day 3 is only a two-film day for me, but i make up for it with lots of partying and networking. Getting up early i've decided is nothing more than a jetlag channeling exercise. Armed with an espresso, I am even early for Daydream Nation, a Canadian big-city-girl-starts-at-new-small-town-school teen movie with a twist (there's a serial killer on the loose). Kat Dennings is good as the sassy teen who can't choose between her hot English teacher (great chemistry with Josh Lucas) and the stoner-with-a-big-heart classmate. The serial killer subplot is a clever narrative device to keep us guessing throughout what is otherwise a good if rather formulaic entry in the high school canon.

After a brief meeting with a sales agent to source some DVD screeners, Karina and I meet up with Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann at his infamous annual TIFF dim sum lunch in Chinatown, where I score a rather awesome Uncle Boonmee tee (Mann's filmswelike is distributing in Canada, alongside other bold acquisitions The Light Thief and the new Jia Zhang Ke). We're sat next to producer Robin Crumley, whose Suck we just premiered in Australia at the Possible Worlds Film Festival. We also meet the friendly folk at the Planet in Focus Film Festival, the director of the amazing Los Angeles Plays Itself and eat some cheap but delish steamed delights so it's a big win all round.

Expecting a huge crowd, we get there super early for the new Danny Boyle, 127 HOURS, the true story of adrenalin junky Aron Ralston, who spent 5 days stuck in a crevasse in Canyonlands National Park after a falling boulder pins his arm to the rock. 127 minutes later, we are still waiting in line. Technical problems means the screening needs to be relocated and there are delays. The TIFF front of house crew are really, really good at what they do and so we're happy to leave it in their capable hands and take the time to share notes with strangers in the queue. Eventually, we get two very gracious apologies, in person, from TIFF programmer Cameon Bailey and Danny Boyle himself (a rare thing at industry screenings), which wipe out any residual resentment.

The film is an intense piece of visceral filmmaking which had people in the audience gasping aloud, moaning and shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Rumour has it paramedics had to be called in at a recent Telluride screening. I myself nearly fainted during one particularly difficult scene. My palms started sweating uncontrollably and I found myself holding my breath, then covering my ears in horror, my nerve endings pulsing like deranged cicada.

And yet 127 HOURS isn't a horror film but a surprisingly engaging, tightly directed drama about one man stuck between a rock and a hard place. For once Boyle's hyper-kinetic style is a perfect fit for the difficult subject. Investing every frame with charisma and energy is James Franco, who gives the best performance of his career. The result is a remarkable film and memorable film-going experience. While not for the faint-hearted, expect this high-octane drama to replicate the success of the overrated Slumdog Millionaire.

To calm our nerves (and stop the shakes) Karina and I decide to skip on the screenings for the rest of the day and concentrate on drinking. This is done first at the Filmmakers' Lounge, which we discover has an open bar every night between 5:30pm and 7:30pm. The Telefilm party we have invites to has a huge line outside so we head instead to the Screen Australia drinks.

Ryan Kwanten, shamelessly trying to pose for a picture with Karina

The relaxed rooftop affair is filled with Aussie actors and filmmakers whose films are playing TIFF this year, including Ryan Kwanten, Geoffrey Rush, Ben C. Lucas and Louise Alston (turn to the back age of Screen Daily tomorrow: that's me in the background behind Ryan Kwanten and the girls from Jucy). I chat with some lovely distributors and film programmers. I'm usually a bit nervous a parties, but this is my 9th year at TIFF and I feel at home here, which lessens the pressure somewhat.

By the time we get to the Canadian Initiatives party, i'm in a bit of a groove. The rest of the night is filled with good conversation with filmmaker friends old and new. Tiredness is much less of a factor when you're having a good time and getting things done.

Day 2 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-12T14:25:00.003+10:00

When the alarm clock rings this morning I'm like, you've got to be kidding. It's 8am, I've slept 4 hours and my head is throbbing with pain (despite keeping to my nothing-but-martinis rule). But Canadian cinema waits for no man, so I jump in the shower, grab a banana and head out the door. In the back of my vodka infused brain is one thought: what if the one Canadian film I miss - because I can't bother to get up early in the morning - is the hidden gem that the Canadian film festival I program cannot do without?

First film of the day, Amazon Falls may or may not be that gem. As a rule I try not to blog about the Canadian films I see in too much depth because they might end up being considered for a slot in the line-up. This LA-set indie about an aging actress trying to get a Hollywood gig plays to a near empty auditorium, so I know I'm not the only one with a headache this morning. Word on the street is the FUBAR II party was the one to be at last night. The well reviewed Midnight Madness opener is the sequel to a local cult classic and I hear the party involved 150 men wearing mullet wigs on a float, or something to that effect.

I drop by the filmmakers' lounge for an industry panel on building "buzz" ahead of a film's release. I'm amazed both by the size of the audience (everyone wants buzz) and what I'm hearing (it seems buzz recipes haven't improved since we discovered social media). Yawn. On a side note, there are Australians everywhere. I run into, meet and network with more Aussie film execs here in a week than I do back home in a year...

Philip Seymour Hoffman's directing effort Jack Goes Boating is next. It's a simple story of two couples - one falling awkwardly in love, the other heart-wrenchingly out of it - connected by friendship. Adapted from a play as an actors' showcase, it's entirely successful in its limited ambitions, convincingly describing four broken New Yorkers trying to stay positive in hard times.

PSH's style sits comfortably between those, perhaps, of Amos Kollek and Ramin Bahrani. He excels at capturing everyday gestures, tonal variations in speech which sounds authentic and believable. While the camera is restrained and naturalistic, the filmmaker can't resist that most American of temptations which consists in injecting a micro-dose of magic realism to sweeten the reality pill, and resorting to musical montage (Grizzly Bear instrumentals and Fleet Foxes, mostly) to bring the emotional broth to the boil.

Despite these minor affectations, Jack Goes Boating is a moving film, lit up from within by a great performance by Hoffman and filled with small recognizable moments where insight is shared almost accidentally, rather than dispensed didactically.

CURLING recently wowed the jury in Locarno. It's Quebec auteur Denis Cote's most accessible film to date, a minimalist rural drama - or is it a thriller? - starring Emmanuel Bilodeau. The understated plot centers around a father and his 12 year old girl, whom he keeps at home, away from school and her peers.

The confident direction hints at an overall grand design as we are presented with pieces of a narrative puzzle, but the bigger picture, if it ever appears, fails to make conventional sense. But then Cote is clearly interested in subverting and deconstructing genres, letting us know a film can have dead bodies without necessarily being interested in murder, for example. CURLING must be read between the lines. Even then I suspect the director is less interested in subtext than mood.

After the draining experience that is watching CURLING while suffering from that 4pm slow-mo slap across the face that is jet lag, I decide I need something slick and over-produced. Mark Romanek's NEVER LET ME GO fits the bill. Adapted from a much-loved Ishiguro novel and starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley, it can be described as a period sic-fi romance. Set across three decades in rural England, it charts the lives of three cloned individuals raised with the sole purpose of one day providing healthy organs in life-saving transplants, and losing their own life in the process.

It's a fascinating premise which is used here as the backdrop for a tragic love triangle. I'm sure the novel is amazing, and if anything, this frustrating film convinces me I should read it. I suspect its contents are far richer than what transpires in the film, which feels calibrated for 14 year old girls who write poetry and keep vintage trinkets in secret boxes. The characters' passivity is maddening, not least because you're never given a good reason as to why they shouldn't rebel against their dismal fates. The performances are mostly excellent, though they are sometimes smothered by Rachel Portman's gorgeous but invasive score.

In the context of a festival which offers such complex, layered offerings, often under the guise of deceptively simple, modest stories, this lavish drama comes embarrassingly short. The ethical issues and intellectual questions is supposedly raises would fit in the first 55-minute period of a high school philosophy class.

My fifth film of the day is Pia Marais' AT ELLEN'S AGE, a German drama which deconstructs a 40 year old flight attendant's nervous breakdown when she learns that her partner is having a child with another woman. It's a terrific showcase for the inscrutable charms of French actress Jeanne Balibar, who brings to the role a magnetic, animal quality and an unpredictability which I associate with Isabelle Huppert's braver efforts.

Marais lets circumstance and coincidence guide the story as Ellen loses herself and migrates to the margins of a society in which - now that she's ceased to play her role - Ellen can no longer function. Existing first in a no man's land of airports and borrowed hotel rooms, she depends on the kindness of strangers, especially those who like her have ceased to bow to arbitrary behavioural expectations.

Finally, she's taken in by a group of animal activists. She moves into their squat, flirting with the idea of radical activism and commitment to a cause she's not sure she believes in. More importantly, she rediscovers the freedom she needs to find herself. A freedom she first glimpsed through the window of a jet liner, in the form of a leopard racing alongside the aircraft on an African runway. Balibar wonders through the film in her increasingly battered flight attendant's uniform, drifting from man to man, from idealistic cause to disillusioned reality, finally understanding that you need to lose yourself completely in order to find your way.

AT ELLEN'S AGE offers potent social commentary on everything from politics to gender, but never preaches. The lines which are drawn in the film are never where you most expect them, so that it becomes a (potential) journey of self-discovery for the viewers as well. The European filmmakers' refusal to psychologize, her insistence that there are no clear messages, that emotion should be earned, not served on a platter, make for a welcome reminder that there still exists a kind of cinema we cannot take for granted, one able still to surprise us and make us ponder things well into the night.

Day 1 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-11T01:05:00.004+10:00

Kate, Karina and I are sharing an apartment on College St, in Little Italy, a Toronto neighborhood I really like, not least for its cool restaurants and gelato parlours. We wake up early on our first full day at TIFF, merci jet lag, so decide to tram it downtown for breakfast at Canteen, the first element of Lightbox - the festival's new home - to open to the public.

The building opens on Saturday with a free block party and the "Essential Cinema" exhibition, and in November will welcome the Tim Burton exhibition after MoMA and Melbourne's ACMI. Right now, the expensive new building offers a simple but convenient cafeteria not unlike the National Film Theatre's at London's South Bank.

The reccie continues at the Hyatt, where we scope out the video room, very handy if you've missed a film on the big screen. Next is the Filmmakers' Lounge, a new space within the new "Festival Village" which has the potential to be the delegate hub I've always hoped for: food, booze, free wi-fi and comfy sofas, open late and a stone's throw from the industry venues.

There we have our first meeting, with the lovely Karen from TIFF's Canadian Initiatives department. She hooks us up with Opening Night tickets and gives us a few tips as to who's in town and which (Canadian) films we should see at all cost. Karen is a huge supporter of Possible Worlds, the Canadian Film Festival I program in Sydney, and she's always a wealth of insider information at TIFF, not to mention great fun.

On to lunch at my favorite TIFF restaurant, Peter Pan. A gorgeous art deco diner with scrumptious Italian food, its patio is the perfect hideaway when you want to escape the frenzied festival mayhem.

Finally, it's time for our first movie, at the hideous and gigantic Scotiabank Multiplex, a convenient but somewhat ironic hub for industry screenings this year. It was a little surreal watching Lee Changdong's subtle, intimate Korean drama POETRY in such an ugly, state of the art theatre.

POETRY is the story of a 66-year-old woman suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's, her struggle to write poetry and the painful discovery that her grandson, whom she cares for, has been involved in the gang rape of a 16 year old girl at his school. Deliberately paced and lovingly detailed, the film is a contemplative examination of honesty and responsibility in a society where both have been abdicated in the name of harmony and progress. The old woman's search for truth and beauty is not very different from the wrestling she has to do with her conscience in relation to her grandson's heinous act, which (male) figures of authority around her are all to eager to forgive and forget.

Through this deceptively simple story, Lee Changdong paints a searing picture of Korean society, one where violence lurks just beneath the slick surface of all things. Like Haneke, he is a master at hinting at the rotten malaise which underpins the social contract, and the moral sacrifices we all make to keep it buried there. In the film, the main character listens to a radio announcer speak of the "discomfort index" which measures pollution, heat and humidity but takes on a much deeper meaning if you let it.

At the film's core however is a generous portrait of a woman whose wisdom slowly catches up with her years. And if Jeong-Hee Yoon's overacts slightly, it's easily forgiven considering how much humanity she brings to the complex role. While the storyline might be reminiscent of Brilliante Mendoza's recent LOLA, POETRY also calls to mind Luca Guadagnino's I AM LOVE, in which a woman's sensual awakening opens her eyes to the patriarchy's traditional, corrupt moral codes she exists under.

Kim Hyunseok's crisp, luminous photography acts as a thin veil hiding the ugly truth behind a layer of beauty. A film critic I met recently in Berlin who is a regular visitor to Korea described his vision of a society bordering on psychosis. This impressive new film, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes this year (but was recently passed over as South Korea's representative at the Academy Awards) is possibly a case in point.

At the screening I run into Mike, who worked with me at Inside Out, Toronto's Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, whom I haven't seen in 11 years. We reminisce about the good times shared at a great festival which, in 1999, inaugurated - alongside The Phantom Menace - the very multiplex we are now sitting in (then called the Paramount).

After a quick meeting with sales agent E1 Entertainment, it's time for Opening Night at the glorious Elgin Theatre. TIFF has gone for a crowd pleaser, in the form of SCORE, A HOCKEY MUSICAL, a throwback to the pre-irony family fare prevalent in the 80's. It's in many ways as fun and slick as an overlong episode of Glee, albeit one filled to the brim with uniquely Canadian references.

The cringe-worthy dialogue is worth a laugh or two, but the film coasts on its charms and catchy tunes to deliver a camp, frothy, genre-abiding teen flick complete with a supporting turn by Olivia Newton-John as a Canadian hockey mom. The fact it could have been written in 1957 makes Michael McGowan's feel-good comedy feel both dated and timeless. It certainly proved a big hit with local audiences and a good, consensual launch for the festival.

Rumour is the real opener is Richard J. Lewis's BARNEY'S VERSION (screening Saturday) but the Mordecai Richler adaptation, which stars Dustin Hoffman, couldn't be programmed on what is effectively a Jewish Holiday. Having said that, SCORE is opening 6 Canadian festivals this autumn, and is likely to be embraced across the land.

Time for a quick change of outfit at the flat before we trek out to Exhibition Place, a massive entertainment complex which serves as the home of TIFF's massive Opening Night party. We join thousands of other guests at the Hockey-themed event, complete with ice rink dance floor and TIFF branded hockey pucks. The opening night party is traditionally a relaxed, B-list affair (though some ladies definitely take the red carpet a little too seriously), known for its generous buffets (poutine! Puck-shaped ice cream!) and open martini bars. The best way to handle the cheesy dance music is to drink up and that's exactly what we do, starting with welcome vodka shots taken at a Hockey rink-shaped table made entirely of ice. It's a while before we make it home.

Day 0 - Toronto International Film Festival

2010-09-10T15:51:00.004+10:00

It's my ninth year attending the Toronto International Film Festival, but the exhilaration as I land at YYZ after a 24 hour flight from Sydney is as strong as it was the first time. I have tremendous affection for this city and its friendly, film-savvy citizens. I did my MBA here years ago, but more importantly, Toronto is where I got my first ever film festival job back in 1998. In other words, it's where I fell in love and joined the circus.

The circus is most definitely in town this week. Before you even pick up your luggage from the carousel you come face to face with huge TIFF banners and an info desk manned by one of TIFF's trademark super-perky volunteers (this year wearing bright orange "What will YOU see?" tees). I skip the expensive shuttle/taxi racket and zoom into town using Toronto fast public transport, getting in just before the registration centre closes at the Hyatt Regency. This year the whole festival's moved downtown to be closer to TIFF's new home, Bell Lightbox, and we're all fearing the worst, hoping for the best.

Screen Australia are in force this year, on the back of 6 features in the Official Selection. They bought the cover of the Hollywood Reporter's first Festival Daily which comes out in the morning, and in every delegate bag is a glossy brochure promoting Australia's generous producer offset.

In the bag of course is also the 400 page program guide, a heavy bible i'll refer to at least once a week over the coming year. I'm here wearing various caps, but first and foremost I'm here as the programmer of Possible Worlds, Sydney's annual Canadian Film Festival. Over the next 10 days my colleague Karina Libbey and I will attempt to see every Canadian feature film in the line-up, in between meetings with various sales agents, producers and filmmakers. Hopefully that will still leave time for international films, debauched partying and a little bit of writing.

Right now though I'm off to Kalendar on College for my first Canuck martini, meeting up with Karina and Kate Taylor, an old friend from Manchester, to discuss our Festival strategies (and which are the parties to crash). Press & industry screenings begin in the morning and from then on I'll be averaging 3 or 4 films a day.

I warmed up in the plane, thanks to Air Canada's rather decent line-up of arthouse titles. Prankumentary Exit Through The Gift Shop was the highlight, a brilliantly written tribute to street art embedded within a scathing satire of the art world and its insatiable appetite for hype and commodification. French nature doc Oceans provided the eye-candy, its lush orchestration canceling out the cabin's white noise. Gorgeously shot and lovingly told, Women Without Men struck all the right notes as a surprisingly stylized period drama about the emancipation of Tehran women in the late 50's. Only Rodrigo Garcia's Mother And Child failed to leave a lasting impression. Fine performances by Annette Bening and Naomi Watts and some well written dialogue are undone by mawkish sentimentality and an arbitrary, issue-serving screenplay.

I'll try to post every day so watch this space!

Dispatch from Germany's Fantasy Filmfest

2010-09-02T18:57:00.003+10:00

I traveled to Berlin recently to attend the 23rd Fantasy Filmfest, which is now touring across Germany. Festival programmer, film critic and Berlin resident Shane Danielsen - whom I had coffee with - calls it "the best-programmed festival in Berlin – and yes, that includes the Berlinale". I can't comment on the comparison - my last visit to the Berlinale was in 2002 - but I can vouch for the breadth and diversity of a dynamic line-up, filled with brand new genre-busting titles.

Fantasy Filmfest is less about fantasy - or even horror - than it is about genre cinema as a whole. The common thread between the titles showcased here is not the depiction of the unreal, but a tribute to the powers of imagination, especially extravagant and unrestrained. From corporate thrillers to queer comedies, survival horror to prison drama, these films share one distinctive feature - they're trying to get a reaction from the audience (preferably a shocked gasp or a horrified squint), and will happily resort to the sensational to get it.

The festival's tagline - in English - is "Fear Good Movies". I get the dubious pun but thankfully good movies were not in short supply. Nor were high profile guests, which this year include Eli Roth (The Last Exorcism), Gaspar Noé (Enter The Void), Adam Green (Frozen), Frank Richard (opening night film The Pack) and Gareth Edwards (Monsters).

I've already written about The Loved Ones, which led - in competition - a significant antipodean assault on the program, a reflection of Australia's current genre renaissance. Also screening were neo-western Red Hill, shark thriller The Reef, factory floor drama The Nothing Men.

The clear highlight for me was Gaspar Noé's hallucinatory death trip Enter The Void, screened here in its glorious 161 minute version (without cuts made for distribution). Even poisoned by despair and self-indulgence, the film's command of innovative cinema techniques, coherent vision and immersive aesthetic inspire awe. Resisting exploitative tricks, the French director chooses instead to unpack the full potential of medium at the service of a haunting (literally) Tokyo-set ghost story, told exclusively from the visual point of view of a man caught in a prolonged posthumous drug trip.

Experimental in form rather than in content, the film's narrative is surprisingly straightforward and engaging. A neon-enhanced Tokyo serves up the eye candy, but despite what some have written, the film is not a triumph of style over substance. While the nihilistic, elegiac meditation of Enter The Void isn't to everyone's taste, it's as emotionally moving as it is dazzling. Recognition from drug users will be high, not to mention acid flashbacks, and if the film sometimes feels like a bad trip you'd like to get off, it pays to stick with it as Noé proves an expert guide.

Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani's Amer on the other hand, amounts to nothing more than the sum of its (admittedly enticing) parts. A love letter and tribute to the Italian Giallo genre, which came to prominence in the 60's and 70's with filmmakers such as Dario Argento or Mario Bava, it's purely exercice de style. The recreation of Giallo's tone and style borders on the scientific, but it never transcends its origins. A good example of the limits of its ambitions is the use of vintage Giallo score from the 70's instead of commissioning an updated, if referential soundtrack.

All the hallmarks of the slasher-opera genre are present: fetishistic eroticism, deconstructed murder sequences, exaggerated sound design and visuals stylized to the extreme. Sadly the narrative is paper thin: three vignettes of a woman's mysterious, nightmarish experiences in a French Mediterranean manor at three different stages of her life. There is enough skill at work here to lament the deferential cop out. Having mastered the style, the filmmakers have the potential to upgrade the genre: vintage gialli are visually striking but very few have left their mark as masterpieces. One can only imagine what a true update of the genre can accomplish now that these gifted Belgian filmmakers have paved the way.

Kim Chapiron's teen prison flick Dog Pound's place in the Fantasy Filmfest is secured by the director's willingness to linger on a close up of a face being pummeled for an extra second or two, until it caves in upon itself like a rotten watermelon. A serious drama for the most part, it can't disguise its desire (its need?) to get a reaction from the audience, even at the expense of being taken altogether seriously.

A chronicle of life in a maximum security facility for underaged criminals, Dog Pound has none of the formal or artistic ambition of A Prophet, or even television series Oz for that matter. Going for gritty realism with a knack for creating believable tension, French filmmaker Kim Chapiron (Sheitan) crafts a claustrophobic and relentless thriller.

The realism however is only screen deep. The violent trajectories of the three new inmates which serve as protagonists has been mapped out by hundreds of prison films previously, right up to the codified and seemingly inevitable homosexual rape. In this respect, Dog Pound is a first and foremost a genre film, more preoccupied with codes and protocol than originality or depth. Depending on expectations therefore, the film will excite some and bore others. One thing it does leave you with, in any case, is the sense of having stumbled upon a real talent in the form of up-and-coming actor Adam Butcher, whose visceral performance as the mutinous Butch hits its mark.

Other films I saw at the festival, previewed here ahead of a European release, included Michael Winterbottom's violent pulp throwback The Killer Inside Me, Gregg Araki's queer comedy Kaboom (which I review here) and the abysmal French corporate psychothriller Love Crime, by the recently deceased Alain Corneau. Even Kristin Scott Thomas couldn't save the latter from descending into cringe-inducing ridicule (this has to be Ludivine Sagnier's worst performance of her career). Not only do you predict the twists and turns before they happen, they are then explained to you once more in lengthy flashbacks. It's as generic as its title implies and to say it could have been written by a class of 6th graders is an insult to 6th graders.

Two Canadian films I recently programmed at Sydney's Canadian Film Festival also made the cut, vampire rock and roll musical Suck and The Wild Hunt, set in the strange world of live action role playing. The latter's confident ability to shift tones seamlessly from drama to comedy to horror was a good representation of this multi-faceted genre-bending festival.

Germany's Fantasy Filmfest runs until September 9th with Munich, Stuttgart and Nuremberg still to go.