SBS On Demand: True-Life Stories

Get a healthy dose of reality with these 10 true-life tales available at SBS On Demand.

Freeheld (2015) Source: SBS Movies

It’s an oft-repeated phrase, but sometimes truth really is stranger, or at least more powerful, than fiction, so it’s no surprise then that filmmakers regularly trawl true-life stories to adapt into big screen movies.

Sometime these features start out as straight documentary, as was the case with queer rights drama Freeheld. Starring Julianne Moore as Ocean County police detective Laurel Hester, staring down death from late-stage cancer and battling to have her pension rights transferred to long-term partner Stacie Andree (Ellen Page) after 23 years of dedicated service, when their story went national, it was spotted by director Cynthia Wade.

Wade moved in with the couple during Hester’s final months as the pair became reluctant activists in a history-making campaign against a board of local councillors, or freeholders, staunchly defending the "traditional" definition of marriage and seeking to block the pension claim.

The resultant doco, also called Freeheld, went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 2008. Its adaptation into a dramatic feature comes amidst a spate of similar conversions including Black Mass, The Walk and The Program.

Directed by Peter Sollett, from a screenplay by Philadelphia scribe Ron Nyswaner, it’s a strikingly emotive piece that seems particularly prescient given Australian still lags behind the US on marriage equality. Moore and Page put in fine performances alongside Michael Shannon as Hester’s cop partner and Steve Carrell as a prominent gay rights campainger.

We take a look at 10 true-life tales given the dramatic treatment in the SBS On Demand vault:

Beautiful Boxer

Source: SBS Movies

Muay Thai kick boxer Parinya ‘Nong Toom’ Charoenphol champion caused controversy when she took to the ring in this hyper-masculine realm to pay for her gender reassignment surgery. Writer/director saw the potential to tell her story in this, his searing debut, co-penned by Desmond Sim Kim Jin.

 

Non-professional actor Asanee Suwan is magnetic in the lead role, combining graceful beauty with a fierce physicality and it’s a brilliant rags-to-riches sport biopic that plays by the rules of the formula, all the while turning them on their head and forging a powerful coming-out tale too that kicks crap out of the gender binary.

Watch Beautiful Boxer now

Declaration of War

Source: SBS Movies

Fact and fiction blur in actor/writer/director Valérie Donzelli’s beautiful tearjerker Declaration of War. Dealing as it does with the gut-wrenching shadow of infant mortality, young, passionately in love parents Roméo and Juliette discover their young son has brain tumour and drop everything to save his life. It’s a remarkable tale of endurance only heightened when you realise this was their truth.

Donzelli and ex-partner Jérémie Elkaïm star as the central couple, with Donzelli penning the script and directing the piece, drawing from their own fraught experiences with their seriously ill child. It’s hardly surprising, then, that it sings with an emotional honesty.

Watch Declaration of War now

Fanny and Alexander

Source: SBS Movies

Instantly heralded as a masterpiece in an already hugely celebrated career, Fanny and Alexander marked the return of Ingmar Bergman to Sweden and drips with beautiful nostalgia as he invokes childhood memories in this sprawling yet intimate family saga.

Scoring that year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar as well as Best Cinematography, Art Direction and Costume Design, the child actors Pernilla Alwin and Bertil Guve are fantastic. It’s full of the good humour, horror, melancholy beauty and magical mystery of life at its most mundane and incredible all at once.

Watch Fanny and Alexander now

Good Morning, Night

Source: SBS Movies

We may think our politics are like a blood sport down here, with the PM on constant knockout notice, but it gets a good bit rougher elsewhere. Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night relays the dark days of rampant terrorism in Italy during the 70s, focusing on the kidnap of former-PM Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade. It’s a powerful psychological set piece, with Maya Sansa putting in an incredible performance as conflicted jailer Chiara. Who is the real prisoner here?

Watch Good Morning, Night now

R

Source: SBS Movies

Danish directing duo Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer’s R is another fascinatingly semi-autobiographical take. Shot in the notorious, now-closed Horsen prison, a violent and smotheringly claustrophobic place, the majority of actors are non-professionals and, indeed, inmates, offering raw honesty from the performances in this starkly captivating drama inspired by their lives behind bars.

Pilou Asbaek is Rune, trying to keep his head down and blend into the background following his incarceration for knife crime, but when he stumbles upon an unlikely friendship with Dulfi Al-Jabouri’s Rashid, held in a separate part of the complex reserved for Arab inmates, the pair naively set up a drug dealing business that unsurprisingly brings trouble to their door. Nerve-wracking stuff.

Watch R now

A Hijacking

Source: SBS Movies

Lindholm goes from prison drama to a hijacking on the high seas with this fascinatingly intimate and economical take on a real life Somali piracy drama. R’s Asbaek once again shows his chops, this time as the cargo ship MV Rozen’s cook Mikkel, our eyes and ears cooped up below deck as he attempts to ride out the storm and get home to his waiting family in one piece while his fellow crewmen slowly unravel.

Infinitely better than the gun-blazing Hollywood remake starring Tom Hanks, Lindholm is so assured on the personal high stakes at play here he entirely skips what would have been an expensive hijacking staging in favour of the human drama. Abdihikan Asga is a mercurial figure as the Somali negotiator Omar and real-life hostage negotiator Gary Sjoldmose Porter fills that role in the office-bound drama on the other end of the phone with Soren Malling’s steely CEO. The ensuing stand-off is a thrill ride.

Watch A Hijacking now

Playoff

Source: SBS Movies

An interesting conflict is posed by director Eran Riklis’ biopic about lauded Israeli basketball coach Ralph Klein, who fled the holocaust only to take up a spot as coach of the West German team during the 1984 Olympics, much to the disgust of many of his compatriots.

 

Klein here is called Max Stoller and played by Danny Huston to great effect, even if the sporting angle takes a bit of a backseat to the emotional drama. Huston goes on a side quest to re-visit his family home and becomes enmeshed with the story of Turkish immigrants Sema (Selen Savas) and her mother Deniz (Amira Casar).

Watch Playoff now

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky

Source: SBS Movies

As ephemerally beautiful and floaty as an ad for Chanel No5, Jan Kounen’s take on the illicit affair between famous fashion designer Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) and composer Igor Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen) is a glacial but intriguing dalliance. Elena Morozova, as Stravinsky’s long-suffering yet stoically dignified wife, is the real heart of the film, which does nothing to dissuade less than flattering perceptions of the two historical figures.

Watch Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky now

My Way

Source: SBS Movies

While Stravinsky may be one of the world’s most famous classical musicians, outside of France, Claude François’ name isn’t quite so recognisable. A disco king in his home country, he penned and performed 'Comme d’habitude', the song that would go on to be sung by many, but immortalised by Frank Sinatra, as 'My Way'.

It turns out François was something of an egomaniac, with Dardenne Brothers' regular Jérémie Renier fully embracing the 'My Way' or the highway approach in director Florent-Emilio Siri’s warts and all biopic, making for car crash viewing.

Watch My Way now

The Last Station

Source: SBS Movies

Ostensibly writer/director Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station is about the artistic struggle of Russian author Leo Tolstoy, with Christopher Plummer in the lead role, but as is almost always the case with a film also starring Helen Mirren, she completely steals the show as his long-suffering wife Sofya and mother of their 13 children.

Needless to say, she’s not best pleased when Tolstoy decides to bequeath the rights to his life’s work to the Russian people, rather than his family. The ensuing fireworks are quite spectacular.

Watch The Last Station now

Explore the SBS On Demand 'True Stories' collection