“We essentially start programming in September. Some films you might be able to see and confirm immediately, and others you might be negotiating for, for months and months and months. We go to places like Sundance or Berlin or Cannes which is always amazing to see films played with an audience, to see what the response is at a critical level, at a level of sales, and purely just being in a room and hearing what people say. Seeing the energy a film brings out of an audience as well is really incredible…we build things from the ground up.”
From all-ages films in Next Gen to all-out gore and madness in Night Shift, to behind-the-scenes discussion with filmmakers in Talking Pictures, you really have to browse the MIFF program to appreciate the enormity of what’s on offer. MIFF isn’t even limited to traditional cinema – the showcases at the Melbourne Planetarium (with its 16-metre domed ceiling, reclining seats and multiple projection system) provide for an alternative film viewing experience for quirky, visually-stunning films such as Kilpisjärvellä – a presentation of the Northern Lights.
“I really love Ain’t Them Bodies Saints which world premiered at Sundance this year, and it’s from a writer-director called David Lowery…the film is sort of a grand, eloquent, doomed, outlaw love-story with Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, and he’s obviously been brushing up on his early Terrence Malick to very good effect. It’s a very grand, beautiful film.
“There’s Blue Ruin which was part of Directors Fortnight at Cannes, and I hope it’s something that people don’t go by. It’s part of our Night Shift program and it’s incredibly intense but also a blackly kind of comic, revenge film that’s really sort of adept at withholding the right amount of information from you. It starts out with this homeless man who is intent on finding this guy to kill him, and it slowly unveils why, and it has the tone of an early Coen brothers film. It would be an amazing film to see in a room full of people, so I’d definitely recommend that.
“The Act of Killing is one that’s already got a lot of popular attention, and that is just a devastating film to see. It’s by Joshua Oppenheimer, and his films are made across like seven years. It’s [set] in Indonesia in 1965-1966 where over a million people alleged to be communists were exterminated by the Indonesian government, carried out by a variety of gangsters and thugs.
“All Is Lost, our closing night film, is an absolutely amazing film. Again it was a Cannes world premiere. JC Chandor did Margin Call a couple of years back and it’s literally a one-person film. The only actor in it is Robert Redford, who delivers an absolutely charismatic, incredible performance. It’s a survival at sea story, and there’s about five lines of dialogue in the whole thing. You don’t find out anything about his character, there’s no backstory, there’s no contextualising to it. You’re witness to a desperate act of survival at sea and that’s the entirety to it, and that’s an incredible narrative tight rope to walk across a 100-minute film or so. It’s a really bold, memorising film.
“There’s a whole lot of smaller films that I hope people take the opportunity to see as well. I really like These Birds Walk, which is a documentary about a runaway boy in Karachi, Pakistan and it’s kind of centred around this runaway home and there’s an ambulance service where the drivers moonlight as picking these kids up and dropping them at the centre…it’s an amazing, really intimate, beautifully rendered story about youth older than their time in this very chaotic city.
“Starlet, in the US Indie strand, is something that’s really intimate but also takes a confronting turn. Harmony Lessons, which is the Kazakh film, played in Berlin competition this year, it’s this story around an organised bully ring that’s an extortion racquet in this Kazakh high school…it’s very focused and dense, but it also manages to be an art film that packs a very thoughtful genre piece in it as well.
“Blanket Evens is a Spanish silent film that’s a re-telling of Snow White with a female matador is great big-screen film. The Selfish Giant is a loose adaptation of an Oscar Wilde story and it’s updated and contemporary and he’s working with non-professional child actors who are all amazing. It was probably the best received British film at Cannes I think.”
While there are perennial strands at MIFF each year, a one-off category this year – Inside the DPRK – provides an exceptional opportunity to experience the culture of a reclusive, secretive society through film.
“One of the broad kind of things that people respond to is to get an insight and experience another culture and that’s a particularly interesting proposition when you apply it to a region like North Korea…it’s a rare opportunity I think in terms of being able to view these films. For Western audiences, there’s heavy ideology through them and there is a lot that will be very different. There’s also things that would be relatable or similar or interesting in that you’ve got melodrama, Kung Fu, a classically structured sports film. As a festival we try to present things that aren’t just sit-on-your-couch and watch a DVD films. We want films that are going to be rare and interesting experiences for an audience to watch as a community in a cinema.”
BY NICK TARAS
