With new venues gradually being added – this year welcomes the Dendy cinema in the student-land of Newtown – the Sydney Film Festival program seems to get bigger every year. Faced with a sprawling program, I planned my viewing schedule this year by homing in on some of the more out-of-the-way features and documentaries that are less likely to be reviewed, films from (or featuring) places like Sudan, Georgia, Turkey and Lithuania, et al, rather than some of the bigger commercial releases like Mr Holmes (starring Ian McKellen as yet another incarnation of Sherlock Holmes).
This was not out of perversity but because the smaller and less widely publicised films are the raison d’être for having film festivals in the first place. The big ticket items may be necessary to attract media attention, sell more tickets and help make the event sustainable – nearly all well-established festivals around the world program them for this reason - but should be seen as the cherries on top, not the cake.
I chose, for instance, Marc Eberle’s Cambodian Space Project – Not Easy Rock’n’Roll, an energetic Australian documentary on a lively Cambodian retro-pop band of the same name, over the critically–praised Brian Wilson biopic Love and Mercy (despite my having been a Beach Boys fan since age six and three quarters), because I’m guaranteed to get the chance to see the latter in commercial release soon, whereas a doco on SE Asian music I may never see outside the festival on the big screen. (In theory – in practice the film will be getting a TV outing, as it’s backed by the ABC.)
There’s also more pragmatic questions to consider: a frustrating number of sessions overlap, restricting the choices offered to any single patron (unlike Melbourne’s filmfest, which for several years seems to have had no trouble in co-ordinating film starting times into bands, e.g. 6pm. As a result, not all my first choices could be accommodated into my schedule.
Cambodian Space Project pivoted around the complicated professional and personal relationship of its Australian exile founder Julien Poulson, and its livewire Cambodian female singer, Srey Thy, and like all good documentaries, was about more than just its ostensible subject. It also told the story of the 1960s Cambodian pop from which the band draws its inspiration, placing the music into the context of peace, warfare and genocide, and examined the tensions involved in relationships between westerners and inhabitants of poor SE Asian countries. On the downside, the film failed to answer some pretty obvious questions, such as what do Cambodians think of the band?
Director Hajooj Kuka’s documentary Beats of the Antonov was even more obviously about the relationship between war and music, examining the identity-and-spirit sustaining role played by music in the vicious civil conflicts between the Arabic north of Sudan and the black African tribes of the Blue Nile and Nuba regions – conflicts in which the civilian population is routinely bombed by the Russian-built Antonov planes referenced in the title.
Documentaries that sound on the face of it to be unappealingly esoteric, often turn out to be gems – they’re not on the program because they’re an easy sell, after all (today’s debating topic: the harder a film is to market, the better the film – discuss). In this category fell Cosimo Spender’s Palio, about one of the world’s oldest horse races, held annual in the ancient Italian city of Siena. It was a riveting story of pageantry and passion that by implication acted as a lens for Italy’s traditions of corruption, not to mention its sense of history and machismo, but again, major questions were frustratingly left unanswered. With horses often slamming into walls on the tight corners, and both animals and riders being whipped by rivals during the race, and demounted jockeys habitually trampled under hoof, what of the death and serious injury rates? Perhaps Spender was too scared of alienating her sources to raise an issue that should have been inescapable, leaving a gaping hole in what was otherwise a hugely entertaining and superbly made piece.
Of the features, Georgian director George Ovashvili’s Corn Island was a poetic beauty, with dialogue kept to the minimum. It starts out as a magnificently photographed piece of fictionalised ethnography, capturing the process by which a grandfather and his teenage daughter plant and harvest a corn crop on a small, temporary island – one of many annually created by silt carried downstream from the Caucasus floodwater to somewhere near the border of Georgia and the breakaway republic of Abkhazia. Gradually the military conflicts start to impede on this would-be Arcadian bliss, as does the girl’s budding sexual awareness. This was a deeply poetic example of pure cinema.
Another tale of burgeoning sexuality from an ex-Soviet republic, this time Lithuania, came in the form of Alante Kavaite’s The Summer of Sangaile – the understated story of a lesbian summer romance whose poetic direction overcame the triteness and obviousness of metaphor waiting to trip up a less sensitive filmmaker. It had something of the delicacy of Bergman’s Summer with Monica (not screening in David Stratton’s Bergman mini-retrospective elsewhere in the festival).
I enjoyed Christopher Honore’s Metamorphoses, a modern-dress (or rather, given the amount of nudity, undress) French retelling of Ovid that had something of the flavour of Pasolini’s takes on Greek mythology. Honore very effectively set the action in classical settings – woods, pools, meadows, streams - that were placed in a contemporary context, ie. adjacent to busy highways or in a quarry.
Like Sangaile, Tola Karacelik’s Turkish nautical drama Ivy had a huge weight of metaphor to carry. Tensions build among the yet-to-be-paid skeleton crew on a rusty cargo ship as the news breaks that the ship’s owner has gone bankrupt. The captain is an authoritarian (presumably representing Turkish leader Recep Erdogan) while the sole Kurdish crew member – strong, taciturn and scary looking - lacks a name and eventually turns into a ghost. The Kurdish question haunts the nation – get it? Well photographed (by its producer Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s regular cinematographer) and equally well acted, it was a slow-burner that for this viewer threatened to fizzle out a few too many times. Or maybe I was just tired.
My wake up film was 99 Homes, Ramin Bahrani’s riveting Faustian story of rapacious US capitalism during the 2008 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac foreclosure crisis, in which a struggling unemployed builder and father (Andrew Garfield) loses the family home and sees a chance at getting it back by selling his soul to the Mephistophelean real estate agent who helped to take it off him. The latter, played with typical brilliance by Michael Shannon, is alone good reason to see the film, but let’s not forget the equal brilliance with which Bahrani directs the performances, cameras and tense electronic musical soundtrack, creating a sense of urgency that transform this from a drama into almost a seat-of-the-edge thriller.
