It’s pleasing to report that based on this strong batch of features, Nordic cinema seems to be in very good shape, featuring diverse stories across a whole spectrum of genres told, for the most part, with a great deal of craft, vitality and originality.
Rich, strange, smart and darkly off-centre – like its subject – Acute Misfortune is based on Erik Jensen’s book about the two or so years he spent researching Blue Mountains painter Adam Cullen for a proposed biography (the proposal coming from Cullen himself). Mostly but not entirely confined to Cullen’s spare, modest mountain house, and to the […]
Day 1 – 18 March 2019 – Opening Ceremony The 43rd edition of the Hong Kong International Film Festival kicks off with much fanfare as Hong Kong superstar and film festival ambassador Aaron Kwok and youth ambassadors Jennifer Yu and Neo Yau leads the carpet with the director Renny Harlin and cast […]
Surfing makes for elegant and beautiful spectator sport, as those of us who stick to land know only too well. Ever since I lived on the coast south of Sydney I have thought that surfing was out of this world but that it needed patient dedication and a kind of insanity to pursue. Day […]
A review of the winners and nominees for the FCCA’s 2018 Awards.
The film’s catalyst is the disappearance of a 12 year old boy, a disappearance unnoticed for two days by the boy’s toxically co-habiting, divorcing parents who, burdened by the presence of a child from their union, impatiently want to move in with their respective new lovers.
This, then, is the story of Ray Argall’s Midnight Oil 1984, a thoroughly compelling sort of backstage tour film cum/observational doco where social and political portraiture is of equal importance to capturing a rock show in full flight. Argall was on tour with the band in ’84 and shot 8400 metres of film on 16mm. It sat in a vault for thirty years.
A few days before Geoffrey GurrumulYunupingu passed away last year at the age of 46, he agreed to the release of this tribute to his life and work. It now arrives on screen just the way it was when last seen by the musician in July.
Film festivals really started as sort of trade fairs, and a lot of films are still bought and sold in the early market period of the Berlin Film Festival but it has now become a huge attraction for all those who write or broadcast about film. Journos of all descriptions certainly buzz around the Berlinale, […]