sydney film festival – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Sydney FF 2019: VARDA BY AGNÈS – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 27, 2019June 27, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments agnes by varda, agnes varda, sydney film festival

Varda By Agnès is a sprawling, wandering film that reveals how the seemingly different strands of our lives can diverge, intersect, vanish and return. At the heart of this is simply the experience of having lived a full life, where Varda was influenced by the people she met and worked with as much as she influenced them. “Real people are the heart of my work”, she says simply at one point, noting elsewhere “nothing is trite if you film people with empathy and love”.

Reviews

Sydney FF 2019: DANIEL ISN’T REAL – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 25, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments Adam Egypt Mortimer, Daniel isn't real, Mary Stuart Masterson, sydney film festival

Daniel Isn’t Real reveals that at its best, horror can depict with crystal precision experiences, feelings and sensations that are often very difficult to articulate in any other way. Director Adam Egypt Mortimer employs the supernatural cinema toolbox to construct a cartography of pain itself, which he renders with enormous sensitivity.

Reviews

Sydney FF 2019: DARK PLACE – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 19, 2019June 19, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments australia, dark place, horror anthology, Indigenous Australians, Kodie Bedford, Rob Braslin, scout, sydney film festival, Vale Light

Dark Place saves the best of its anthology of five horror shorts till last and excels with Kodie Bedford’s unforgettable, electrifying Scout. If every horror anthology contains one short you wish was a feature, this is it; despite being a newcomer to directing, Bedford directs action like an old-hand, and the way she combines familiar genre thrills with inescapable and at times explicit political agenda about the exploitation and abuse of Indigenous Australian women by white men is nothing less than masterful.

Reviews

Sydney FF 2019 Review: THE WEDDING GUEST – by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 18, 2019June 23, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments dev patel, Michael Winterbottom, sydney film festival, the wedding guest

With a feature filmmaking career that has spanned almost 25 years, although Michael Winterbottom has had some are undeniable misfires, he has simultaneously illustrated time and time again that when he’s good, he’s very good. The Wedding Guest adds to Winterbottom’s oeuvre while donating to his experiments with the crime/thriller genre, joining previous projects such as The Face of an Angel and 2010’s controversial The Killer Inside Me.

Reviews

Sydney FF 2019: OUR TIME – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 18, 2019June 23, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments carlos reygadas, mexican films, our time, sydney film festival

Chances are, if you’ve seen a film by acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas before you’ll have a pretty clear idea what you’ll make of his latest feature Our Time before you even watch it. Tedious navel-gazing or ponderous poetic reflection? As is now seemingly par for the course with Reygadas, opinion is largely split, although Our Time does not seem to have drummed up quite the impassioned positive responses as his last feature six years ago, the more experimental and audacious Post Tenebras Lux from 2012. It may simply be a case of better the (animated) devil you know.

Reviews

SYDNEY FF 2019: ANIMALS – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 12, 2019June 12, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments alia shawkat, animals, Emma Jane Unsworth, Holliday Grainger, Sophie Hyde, sydney film festival

Bursting into the national consciousness with her smash 2013 debut feature 52 Tuesdays, Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde has gone decidedly international in her vision with her much-anticipated sophomore effort, the international co-production Animals. Starring Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat, the two women play best friends and flatmates Laura and Tyler whose down-and-dirty carefree bacchanalia of their twenties suddenly begins to fade when faced with expectations of transitioning to the world of so-called ‘adult’ responsibility.

Reviews

Sydney FF 2019: MY NUDITY MEANS NOTHING – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 11, 2019June 15, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments documentary, Marina de Van, my nudity means nothing, sydney film festival

For those still shaken by Marina de Van’s shocking, brave and wholly unique 2002 debut film In My Skin, that the French filmmaker, actor and writer has finally returned with a feature-length film is cause for unbridled celebration. Like In My Skin, although shifting from fictional filmmaking to a documentary format with My Nudity Means Nothing, in many ways these two works have much in common: both feature de Van as their central subject, and both hold at their core a fundamental, almost clinical, focus on the relationship between gender, identity and corporeality.

Festivals Reviews

Sydney FF 2019: SCHOOL’S OUT – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 6, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments school's out, Sébastien Marnier, sydney film festival

It would at first be far too easy to dismiss School’s Out as representative of generational anxieties about an increasingly vocal, empowered youth, whose voices around the world we see manifest on the daily news in everything from climate change protests to gun restriction rallies in the United States. But the film is far from this simplistic; rather, there is something much opaquer and consequently disturbing about the vision these young people have that the adults and even other students around them are simply not privy to.

Festivals Reviews

Sydney FF 2019: QUEEN OF HEARTS – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

June 6, 2019June 7, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments danish films, May el-Toukhy, sydney film festival, Trine Dyrholm

Women directors exploring romantic relationships between grown women and boys is hardly new. While unarguably a part of this tradition, Danish filmmaker May el-Toukhy’s Queen of Hearts is a gut-wrenching and ethically confronting film that hinges on a woman lawyer called Anne whose job is to fight for the rights for abused children and young people. As we discover, this profession lies in uneasy proximity to her status as a sexual predator who has seduced her teenage stepson

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What’s Up Down Under? “Viva Varda” at Sydney Film Fest – Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Reports

May 16, 2019May 20, 2019 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 0 Comments agnes varda, beaches of agnes, cleo from 9 to 5, sydney film festival, varda by agnes

Marking the legacy of influential French filmmaker Agnès Varda whose recent passing triggered a torrent of both deep grief and loving memorials from cinephiles across the globe, the upcoming Sydney Film Festival celebrates her unparalleled career with a near-exhaustive program of her most significant films.

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