Note to self – if they liken a film to the work of Michael Haneke, you are probably not going to love it. Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s first feature borrows heavily from Haneke’s handbook, with extended scenes of our protagonist lying on the ground pretending to be dead or sitting in a chair.
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Damn you, Gaysorn Thavat, you made me cry. I thought this might be a run-of-the-mill feel-good drama about a feisty woman fighting the system but it was so much more.
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Firouzeh Khosrovani constructs a surprisingly tender collage of her parents’ lives that shows the fractures caused by the Iranian Revolution.
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I couldn’t look away for the 150 minutes of Mohammad Rasoulof’s intense meditation on the death penalty, told through four stories of individuals who are part of the system of capital punishment in Iran.
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Blerta Basholli’s quiet and forceful drama about the awfulness of war and its effect on women in patriarchal small-town society is a welcome companion-piece to Strong Female Lead (2021) where we saw how hard it was to maintain respect and autonomy, even when you are the elected leader of a country.
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What are the chances that two of the four films I have watched so far as part of the Sydney Film Festival have been Greek films about people with amnesia? Where Christos Nikou’s Apples (2020) used it as a metaphor, Angeliki Antoniou has a more prosaic approach.
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I was unprepared for the visceral emotion of watching Tosca Looby’s deft collage of media representation of Australia’s first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s time in office.
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So much more than a sport documentary, Justine Moyle has managed to show the exquisite pain and beauty that is the coming of age of Australian park skateboarding star and all-round decent human being, Poppy Starr Olsen.
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Emma Dante has created a beautiful and affecting film version of her play about five Sicilian sisters, forever changed by a tragedy.
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Refreshing in its portrayal of the good and evil of Japan’s part in WWII, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s mystery has some decent twists and turns amidst the melodrama.
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