On Sunday, the final day of the 2015 Sydney Film Festival, I watched a survivor of the Indonesian genocide interviewing his brother’s killers (The Look of Silence), baby seals being clubbed to death and the sea turning red around harpooned young whales (How to Change the World), and a new student at a deaf school being dragooned into criminal enterprises involving prostitution and the bashing of innocent passers-by (Ukrainian The Tribe).
I wouldn’t tolerate a film festival that shirked its responsibility to show the more challenging and confronting in content as well as in style, but it’s worth meditating for a moment upon the potential effect such a viewing diet of brutal indignities and cruelties can have. Does it make the viewer become more engaged with the world, spiked with anger and a new determination to do something? (Surely a filmmaker doesn’t use a title like How to Change the World without banking on this.) Or does projecting a pile-up of horror leave the viewer feeling numb, hopeless and withdrawn? For this viewer the former is the case, although I can imagine a wide range of responses to that question.
Large urban festivals like Sydney or Melbourne are structured to place much of the responsibility for the viewing experience in the hands of individual patrons – though the structure of the schedule also funnels them in certain directions, locking off options via simple timing logistics. Nonetheless it is possible to book a schedule that avoids all difficult material and concentrates on the excitement and humour of entertainment. Many will be happy to take in the handsome adaptations of 19th century literary classics Madame Bovary and Far From the Madding Crowd screening, and while that’s not a first choice for this viewer, it’s not because these are unsuccessful adaptations (I have seen both outside of the festival context and they’re both worth seeing), but because for the festival 12 days and nights I want to be pushed outside of my usual viewing routines and given the chance to sample more widely.
I’ve observed in previous years that documentary is where much of the most rewarding viewing is to be had in festival line-ups. This year I saw some terrific work, but less that was interesting in terms of experimentation with documentary form (though this may have been screening in other corners of the schedule).
Some of the most powerful films prosecuted their cases like an expert lawyer going into bat for its wronged client. Alex Gibney’s Going Clear - Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief is a conventional enough expose of the cult that builds its power through the sheer accumulation of detail provided by former (often high-ranking) cult members.
Kirby Dick’s The Hunting Ground, the US doco on date rape, worked in a similar way, prosecuting a convincing case against US university and college authorities for downplaying the incidence of this serious crime on their campuses, to protect the institutions’ names. It presented a powerful case that will excite much discussion. Note though, Gibney had to get his facts right in Going Clear because he was up against a notoriously litigious organisation. That may not have been the case for director Dick, given that a journalist for online magazine Slate has recently raised questions around one of the key cases used in the film. This alone would not in my eyes destroy the film’s case, though it would leave unanswered questions. Obviously there is much more debate and information required about both the subject and the film’s alleged inaccuracies.
The Indonesian genocide, which I mentioned at the top, was the subject of The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s companion piece to The Act of Killing, which fell like a boulder into the festival pond two years ago. Where last time Oppenheimer focused on the perpetrators of the mid-60s mass slaughter of communists and other opponents to the military dictatorship, here he takes a more subdued approach, following around optician, Adi, who quietly but very firmly interviews those who slaughtered his elder brother in a rural area known as Snake River. While Oppenheimer previously gave the killers open slather to boast and recreate their crimes in miniature film sequences, here he simply allows Adi to gently probe with “deep questions”, as one of them puts it, that sometimes visibly upset the killers. This film should have been entered into the SFF’s Official Competition, where its predecessor showed.
One of the best films of the entire festival for me was Australian doco-maker Jennifer Peedom’s magnificent Sherpa, which did screen in competition and deserved the berth. In the telling of the increasing disgruntlement and militancy of the sherpas, who take most of the risks in helping westerners climb Everest, she managed – both fortunately (for the film) and tragically - the right timing. Sixteen sherpas were killed in an avalanche while her team was shooting in 2014. The film effectively unfolds the arrogant neo-colonial attitudes of some of the western guides.
Also deserving a mention is Gillian Armstrong’s Women He’s Undressed, a fascinating and lively portrait of an Australian film industry figure who despite winning two Oscars is oddly under-celebrated in his home country. Orry-Kelly was costume designer to Marilyn Monroe and countless other stars. Through his colourful life story, emerged a second story, of a secret, gay Hollywood.
Regarding the features, there was little to float my boat beyond titles reviewed in full elsewhere on this site. Roy Andersson’s ultra-deadpan A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (inspired, albeit not quite as great as its predecessor You, The Living), The Tribe (admired with reservations) and German one-take wonder Victoria.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s family tale Our Little Sister is Japanese classicism at its most delicate and charming. The film is so feminine in its touch it’s hard to believe it was not directed by a woman, but it could have used more narrative. Another Japanese film, Kabukicho Love Hotel, literally put me to sleep.
US indie The Diary of a Teenage Girl didn’t work as a sedative, but its blandly literal title (I mean, really?!) did serve as a warning. The plot: a teenage girl has an affair with her stepfather in the 1970s. I get that filmmaker Marielle Heller wanted to get away from depicting these kinds of relationships as exploitative and to give her young heroine a sense of agency without moralising. Very edgy and all that, but missing was any sense of vulnerability or at least sufficient emotional complexity on the part of the girl to lift this out of the shallows. Some nice animated sequences though.
I couldn’t see any reason for monotonous Italian gangster drama Black Souls taking up a competition spot apart from featuring some admirably burnished chiaroscuro camerawork. All it did was remind me of the greatness of Abel Ferrara’s similarly gloomy (and way too little seen) The Funeral back in 1996. Ferrara, come to mention him, was represented in the program by his feature about the late Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (called with stunning imagination Pasolini) but I didn’t manage to get to it. Now the festival is over and I’ve heard about all the supposedly great films I somehow missed (viz. Russian Woodpecker, about conspiracy theories surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown), perhaps they could run the program all over again.
