I love you MIFF. You have just given me a most memorable two weeks. With you I travelled the world, learned about love and sorrow, grieved for lost futures and saw the shifting diaspora of people torn away from their homes.
We became great friends, you and I. We hung out every day and I saw you at your best and at your worst. Please understand that what I am about to say in no way undermines this new and sparkling friendship, it will just make our love all the stronger. Continue reading
I like films and I like blogging. MIFF is over for a year so I need to find something to feed these two addictions until August 2016. How do you feel about me continuing to blog about films and reviewing the films I see? You love that idea? I thought so.
I hereby commit to at least one film review a week – it might be anything, a worthy and sad Iranian film where nothing much happens when Alex comes to visit or a classic action movie when Ron gets to choose at the DVD shop. Or a romcom or TV series when I’m just hanging out with my girls. Continue reading
Have you heard about the Bechdel Test? It came from a comic strip in the 80s by Alison Bechdel called Dykes to Watch Out For and tests a work of fiction as to whether it has two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man. Perhaps unsurprisingly to all women who are used to seeing films predominantly about men, not many more than half of all mainstream films pass this test. Continue reading
So, you want to know what my top films were? Of course you could just look at my 5 and 4.5 starred reviews but I’ll save you the bother and list them here: Continue reading
Sigh.
It’s over.
What a brilliant two weeks. The last two days were good ones, tinged a little with sadness that it was all coming to an end but I made the most of them. Continue reading
I think this is my favourite Iranian film of the Festival. I have seen three – Tales, Tehran Taxi and this. Tales had some good moments but Melbourne is a nicely constructed debut feature film that keeps you considerably uncomfortable throughout. Continue reading
Oh Peter, Peter, Peter. Have you changed or have I? I think it’s fitting that I ended the festival with a Peter Greenaway film. I discovered Greenaway films when I was falling in love with cinema back 25 years or so ago.It was fitting also that I walked out on it as I did the first film of the festival. Continue reading
I’ve seen a few films in the past two weeks that have changed my view on something or at least given me a profound insight. This Australian documentary joins those ranks. I mentioned that Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad made me think of the displacement of Australian Aboriginal people and this commonality has been reinforced by today’s film, Putuparri and the Rainmakers. Continue reading
This US documentary by the Maysles was made in 1975 and it shows that, if you have remarkable people, you only need to point a camera at them for long enough to get a story. We are flies on the wall of the crumbling East Hampton mansion, Grey Gardens, owned by Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, ‘Little Edie’. Edith is Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and we can see that she has come from old money and the American aristocracy. That is all in the past though, as the mansion is a squalid place, full of cats and raccoons and rubbish and Edith and Little Edie live an insular and co-dependent life within its walls. Continue reading
A somewhat trivial title for a film grounded in long-held sorrow. The original title, Une Histoire de Fou gives perhaps a more meaningful name – A History of Madness. This is a French film but it is about Armenia and the repercussions of the massacre of more than one million Armenians by the Ottoman government during and after the first World War. You may be like me and several French characters in the movie to say, “Where’s Armenia?”. How could I not know about this part of history? Continue reading
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