This is one of those dense, evocative films that will sweep you up whilst also leaving you not sure of what you’ve just seen.
Continue readingCorsage (2022)
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We Might As Well Be Dead (2022)
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A well-dressed couple and their child trek through a forest and enter a compound where a white tower block rises amidst verdant lawns and a manicured golf course. They are desperate for their residence application to be accepted in this dystopian world where everything outside the fence is, seemingly, dangerous.
Continue readingGirls/Museum (2020)
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Director Shelly Silver takes a simple premise – to interview young women about the art they are seeing in a gallery – and creates an absorbing commentary on female representation and its effects.
Continue readingExile (Exil) (2020)
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Director Visar Morina perfectly captures the uneasy dislocation of being a foreigner in a structured and comfortable society, using every frame to push us into a growing paranoia.
Continue readingNo Hard Feelings (Wir) (2020)
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It’s good to start a film festival on a high and this sweet, sexy, lyrical and hopeful first feature by Faraz Shariat hit just the right note.
Continue readingTransit (2018)
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Image via miff.com.au
I wasn’t expecting to be charmed by Christian Petzold’s inventive rethinking of a well-worn World War II movie trope. To all intents and purposes, it is a period drama akin to Casablanca, complete with third-person narration, a mysterious dame and uniformed guards with dogs. However, the backdrop is inexplicably and unapologetically modern day France. Continue reading
In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts) (2017)
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Image via miff.com.au
This is how revenge movie should be made. Turkish director Fatih Akin takes a story that could have been plucked from today’s news and exposes the personal cost of racism. Continue reading
Tehran Taboo (2017)
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Image via miff.com.au
Tehran Taboo uses rotoscope animation to tell the story of four people unable to have choice in their lives due to the religious and social limitations of modern day Iran. Continue reading
Fukushima, Mon Amour (Grüße aus Fukushima) (2016)
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Image via http://www.filmpressplus.com
Screening as part of the German Film Festival (that finishes this week in Melbourne), Doris Dörrie writes and directs this homage to the Alain Resnais film Hiroshima Mon Amour and a love letter to the people of Fukushima. Shot in black and white, this begins as a slight tale of a German girl, Marie (Rosalie Thomass), trying to escape her memories amongst those cast adrift in the wastelands of Fukushima, two years after the earthquake and nuclear disaster. Continue reading
Toni Erdmann (2016)
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I nearly didn’t see this film. Thank you to MIFF buddy Alex #2 who encouraged me to book this encore screening after I had ditched an earlier screening in exchange for a bit of sleep. I loved it. Laugh out loud loved it. Now I want to see more of Maren Ade’s films. This film revolves around Winfried and his adult daughter Ines. Through steady and wry observation, we see the dynamics between them, the effect of a separation and what their early years together might have been like. They seem very different now; he always finding humour in the everyday, she trying so hard to be a competent adult. Continue reading
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