8 May 2008
The week in film
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Sydney Film Festival announces line-up
The festival season is well and truly on. Cannes next week, followed rapidly by...Sydney, Australia.
Well, not quite the same scale, but there's no doubt the Sydney Film Festival has considerably upped the ante, in both star power and programming, in Clare Stewart's second year as artistic director.
This year sees the first year of the festival's international competition for new directions in feature film, with a $60,000 prize. Twelve films, including three Australian features, will compete. Among them are American director Kimberley Pierce's Stop Loss; UK artist Steve McQueen's Hunger, about the fast-to-the-death of IRA supporter Bobby Sands; Mexican director Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light, a stunning tale of adultery in a Menonite community; the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata; quirky Canadian Guy Maddin's Winnipeg; Matthew Newton's Three Blind Mice, and Nash Edgerton's suburban noir The Square. Each of the twelve films will be given gala red-carpet screenings. Opening the competition, and indeed the festival, will be Mike Leigh's much anticipated Happy Go Lucky, a rare film from that director: a non ironic inquiry into happiness.
Mike Leigh himself will be there on opening night, along with star Sally Hawkins. Other competition directors and producers will be guests, and as a bonus: Jack Black is to drop by for a gala screening of the new animation, Kung Fu Panda. He'll be on the red carpet with Dreamworks's Mighty Mouse, Jeffrey Katzenberg.
The jurors? Well, Clare Stewart is to announce these during the Cannes Film festival.
Outside the competition, there is a range of choice in specialist strands.
One Australian premiere I'm looking forward to is a musical, The Eternity Man, about the legendary Arthur Stace. From a score by Richard Mills and libretto by poet Dorothy Porter, the film is written, directed and shot on the streets of Sydney by renowned British director Julian Temple, who made The Filth and the Fury, and Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.
There is a program of tough documentaries about Iraq, including Brian de Palma's Redacted and the Australian produced, Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.
World Cinema includes such gems as You, The Living, the much admired new film from Roy Andersson, the reclusive Swedish director who made Songs from the Seventh Floor. Andersson directs commercials for a living; makes a film every decade or so, and has an offbeat humour even wilder than that of Aki Kurismaki.
The festival is striking out in other directions; this year it will feature a beefed up Industry section, with its own industry lounge, to encourage more filmmakers to Sydney.
And in a move which will probably provoke reaction from the leather-jacketed old guard, it has invited the head of the Motion Picture Association of America—yes, the big American studios'lobbying arm—to deliver the Hector McPherson Memorial lecture.
His name is Bob Pisano and, well, it wasn't too many decades ago that Australian filmmakers were picketing his predecessor, the extraordinary Jack Valenti. But times change, and so do movies. It will be interesting to hear the Amercian studios' take on what's happening now.
And finally, much to the relief of punters, the festival has found a way to bypass queues. Not only can you book your seats online these days, you can print your own tickets and head straight to the cinema door.
Yeeha! I'll bring you my own festival picks closer to the date.
Further Information
Presenter
Julie Rigg
Producer
Julie Rigg
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