Some movie seasons are better than others, and according to Sydney Film Festival director Clare Stewart, the past year has been a very good one.
“What's notable,” she says, “is a return to real cinematic values… I mean there's never any shortage of good storytelling, but there has been quite a few films I've seen over the last year where you walk out of the theatre and you just breathe a sigh, and say that was 'pure cinema', meaning it engaged you on every level, a film that lives and breathes visual and sound impact and it just feels so right to see it on the big screen.” This impression, she says, is not confined to the kind of picture casually dismissed by mainstream commentary as 'festival fare', such as the challenging, or the strange. “I'm talking about things as different as Symbol, (Dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto) from Japan, which is certainly not to every one's taste, to Italy's I am Love (Dir. Luca Guadagnino), a Douglas Sirk-like melodrama starring Tilda Swinton, to Polanski's brilliant Hitchcockian The Ghost Writer.”
Stewart says she is particularly excited at the breadth, depth and quality of the films in the official competition, which offers a cash prize of $60,000, for 'courageous, audacious, and cutting-edge' filmmaking, judged by a select jury of major film players, and this year chaired by Australian producer Jan Chapman. The two previous prizewinners were Hunger (Dir. Steve McQueen) in 2008 and Bronson (Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn) in 2009. Still, it's not possible to program all the possibilities. “Those movies I missed out on, well, it's a film festival director's best kept secret and it will remain so,” she says with a grin.
Sydney's competition, still only three years old, has already made a strong impact she says. Especially in the way the festival has been viewed internationally by the major stakeholders in both the creative and business sector of the filmmaking community.
“[The Competition] has meant that sales agents have been keener to take the 'plunge' with us, entrusting us with recent high profile films like The Tree (Australia-France, dir. Julie Bertucelli), Heartbeats (Canada, dir. Xavier Dolan) and the top Cannes prize winner Uncle Boomee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (UK, Fr, Ger, Spa, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)." This is a coup, she says, since, as Cannes selections, these movies are in high demand for film festivals though out the world. “The competition means that over all we've been able to attract a higher level of films and more recent films and it's helped us crack the back of our festival being so closely timed with Cannes (which closed only two weeks ago).”
Stewart's competition programming is eclectic; aside from what might be thought of as 'traditional' festival choices like the Cannes entries, and Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime, a sort of sequel to his brilliant Happiness, and If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (Romania, dir. Florian Serban), a stark, dark prison film, there is Four Lions (UK, dir. Christopher Morris), a black farce about a quartet of try-hard jihadists, and How I Ended This Summer (dir.Alexej Popogrebski), a bleak thriller from Russia, Lola (Fr-Philippines, dir. Brilliante Mendoza), an austere, shot-on-digital, drama set amongst the Manila underclass, and Moloch Tropical (Fr-Haiti, dir. Raoul Peck), a strange political allegory about a fictional president having a very bad day. Violence and horror find their way into the competition in two thrillers; from the US comes Michael Winterbottom's bloody, intense and at times mystifying adaptation of Jim Thompson's hard-boiled classic The Killer Inside Me, and from debut Australian director Ben Lucas there is Wasted on the Young.
Wasted is a film tapped into contemporary culture, explains Stewart: “Lucas uses streaming and social networking to propel the film and it's embedded in the narrative.”
Movies about and from the Middle East are featured prominently in the festival. One, Women Without Men (Ger, Austria, Fr), directed by renowned visual artist Shirin Neshat (another competition entry), is, Stewart says, emblematic of the dramatic shift in the kind of film emerging from that part of the world.
“I think at one time we were getting films with a strong journalistic bent,” she says, “where westerners were going into the Middle East and coming back with political films or investigative pieces.”
What is emerging right now, she says, is a vast array of perspectives and experience and approach, with many of the films are being produced by Middle-Easterners, some of them, like Neshat, living in exile. “She was born in Iran and is unable to return,” says Stewart. The film, set in the '50s, tells the story of four women in Tehran, as the Shah is returned to power. “Neshat is very interested in the complexity and politics of Islamic women.” Instead of approaching the subject in terms of realism the film experiments with form: “It's this really poetic avant-garde film which won best director at Venice, that never the less has reverberations to the current politics in Iran.”
Stewart says that even those pictures included in the festival this year that do have a basis in journalism have a significantly different perspective on earlier generations of work set in the Middle East. “Something like the documentary Restrepo (USA, dir. Tim Hetherington/Sebastian Junger) comes out of photojournalism, it's a film made by westerners about soldiers in Afghanistan, but there's a sense of the filmmakers wanting to get to intimate level with the world they are in, rather than to view Middle-Easterners, or non-westerners, as 'the Other.'” Still there are movies that combine documentary with fiction, like No One Knows About Persian Cats (Dir. Bahman Ghobadi). In this Iranian drama, two rock musicians seek out pick up players so they can tour; trouble is rock music in Iran has been banned since 1979. “Here you see a very interesting approach to storytelling,” says Stewart. “It takes a very real situation and its narrative showcases real Iranian underground bands. It takes a political case and it turns it into a very entertaining story.”
Stewart says that there's a sense of long repressed political and social scars finding their way into recent filmmaking that use horror stylings in an unconventional way, like the Australian thriller Red Hill. Director Patrick Hughes combines the Western, and the police film in a parable that speaks to generations of racial hatred between Victoria's Indigenous population and white locals. “The politics are really palpable in this,” says Stewart, “and it's in the casting of Tommy Lewis, who of course played the title character in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978).”
Scattered throughout the festival are retrospective screenings, (including Gillian Armstrong's The Last Days of Chez Nous, 1992, and Love Serenade, 1992 directed by Shirley Barrett, whose South Solitary opens the festival, both of these produced by Jan Chapman) but the major retro focus is on the vampire film. “There is an obvious interest in the theme and it's important when you have a role to enhance and expand people's knowledge of historical cinema,” says Stewart. Asked what it is about the vampire that seems to have such a powerful hold on the popular imagination right now Stewart says it's about individuals trying to gain control of their lives.
“Even with our technology and access to all these incredible tools we have we'd like to have a stronger sense of agency.”
