Innehållsförteckning för No. 182 från Metro

Craig Monahan’s new film Healing (2014), which he co-wrote with Alison Nisselle, is an emotionally harrowing, aesthetically beautiful and ultimately uplifting film about the possibilities of surviving trauma and damage to both the body and the spirit. The road to such healing is difficult and by no means certain, yet the film’s narrative points to its persistent possibility, even to a sort of reparation that leads to soaring and thriving. Healing draws a parallel between the circumstances of injured birds of prey and those of the prisoners who work with them in the remarkable Raptor Rehabilitation Program coordinated by Healesville Sanctuary and Corrections Victoria, which exists not just in the film but also in the real world. Monahan and Nisselle had long been inspired by this program, and spent years…

Hirokazu Koreeda’s most recent film, Like Father, Like Son (2013), won the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where Steven Spielberg picked up the rights for an American remake. This is unsurprising. A melancholy film about love and fatherhood, Like Father, Like Son strikes a similar emotional chord to some of Spielberg’s family-focused work. With a title that more closely translates from the Japanese to ‘Then to become a father’, the film follows the internal journey of Ryota Nonomiya (Masaharu Fukuyama), a conservative and hardworking young father who discovers that his son is not his biological offspring. Koreeda’s visual and rhythmic style allows him to explore the conflicting emotions that arise from such a charged situation without becoming overly sentimental. The film draws on a timeless set-up. Two…

Few films made in 2013 double as historical firsts, but Beatriz’s War marks the first ever feature film from East Timor. Co-scripted by its star, Irim Tolentino (who plays the titular heroine), and co-directed by Timorese filmmaker Bety Reis and Australian documentarian Luigi Acquisto, the film is a decade-spanning saga that begins during East Timor’s fleeting independence in 1975 and continues through to the unstable armistice arrived at in 1999. Of winning the International Film Festival of India’s top prize, the Golden Peacock, in 2013, Acquisto tells me: ‘It was amazing to win an award in a country with the world’s biggest film industry, for a film from a country with exactly one film to its name.’ I speak to him at his home base in Melbourne about the creation…

At the end of April, the ABC’s youth network, triple j, made good on its advance notice of a takeover of Dig Music, a sleepy but well-loved digital radio station also administered by the national broadcaster. Dig had a reputation for being eclectic, to put it mildly – a station where the listener might expect to hear Miles Davis bookended by Brian Eno and the Warumpi Band. The only contextual information provided was the occasional promo for the station – human voices drifted through like tumbleweed – and listeners had few clues as to the station’s ethos or the direction of its endless bracket of music. Unfortunately, diehard listeners were themselves few and far between. Dig’s nonchalance kept its ratings low, which in turn preserved its cachet – after all,…

For every Academy Award winner that addresses the difficult history of race relations in a country’s population and earns recognition for its efforts in the process, a wealth of less lauded projects toil in its shadow. In the United States, filmmakers have built a sizeable body of work concerned with the clash of cultures that troubles the nation as part of the lingering consequences of European colonisation. Several centuries after non-indigenous settlers inhabited the country, making the continent their own and bringing the African slave trade with them, the aftermath is interrogated in films that educate and investigate the current scenario. In particular, 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) became a worthy emblem for decades of cinematic exploration on the subject, as the most applauded and high-profile example in…

Early in Snowpiercer (2013), two men attempt to convince a boy to part with an item they believe has value but think he should not. The negotiations, like all endeavours in which opposing parties haggle and reach a compromise, are about perception: one judges their needs as more important, the other adjusts their position respective to their needs. What they are actually arguing about is almost inconsequential; such is the way this seemingly simple scene epitomises the film as a whole. In Bong Joon-ho’s long-awaited first English-language effort, seeing isn’t always believing – but it is believing that matters, as the film’s characters come to know. The aforementioned men are Curtis (Chris Evans) and Edgar (Jamie Bell), unwilling leader and eager disciple in a war among the last remnants of…

When two friends decide to traverse Victoria Island in Canada’s extreme north and capture their adventure on film, the result is an alluring account of man overcoming nature. But according to ANTHONY CAREW , the documentary is also about the changing face of geographic exploration in this pictures-or-it-didn’t-happen digitised world. The Crossing (Julian Harvey, 2013) chronicles the journey of Clark Carter and Chris Bray, young Australian adventurers taking leave of university life to travel, by foot and by kayak, across uninhabited and uninhabitable Victoria Island, in the Arctic wilds of Northern Canada. It shows them on screen together, striding across a harsh landscape of sharp rocks, sticky mud and melting ice. It captures their few moments of triumph and more frequent moments of fatigue, frustration and failure. Given that they…

If you are going to use public subsidy to support Australian storytelling for wide audiences, why insist on the hardest possible medium to distribute it? — Ian Robertson entertainment lawyer and deputy chair of Screen Australia (2008–2013)1 Does the film-distribution sector play an enabling or limiting role in terms of allowing Australian cinema to reach larger audiences and financial viability? Film distribution in Australia is undergoing a rethink. Prompted by ruptures in the global film industry and the movement from analog to digital systems, film culture is migrating out of the cinema and into a dizzying range of devices, channels and viewing sites. Parallel to this, discourse in Australia is also moving outwards: away from production-centred discussions regarding perceived deficiencies in subject matter, budgets and script development,2 and towards how…

BROUGHT TO LIFE: THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ANIMATION FESTIVAL • ELIZABETH FLUX It feels as though there is a lot of animation around. Whether it’s in the form of special effects, in television advertisements, or in one of the many blockbuster films churned out each year, usually aimed at children, you don’t need to look far to find an example of the form. However, what we’re being shown is only a very narrow slice of the bigger picture. For the past fourteen years, the Melbourne International Animation Festival (MIAF) has been aiming to widen that perception, bringing a lot of work that would otherwise remain unseen to a larger audience. Malcolm Turner, executive director of the festival, has been with MIAF since its beginnings in 2001. He tells me how, starting from…

Despite their high-concept premises, time-travel comedies are rarely all that cerebral. As far back as Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989), the cinematic exploits of time-traveller everymen (quite reasonably) have tended to be played for daft laughs rather than exploring any metaphysical implications. Alternatively, as in recent rom-com About Time (Richard Curtis, 2013), the time travel itself is an almost incidental device, stripped of any science and used as seasoning to reinvigorate an otherwise-tired genre. New Australian film The Infinite Man (Hugh Sullivan, 2014) treads a line between these two camps. It is, at its heart, a romantic comedy, packed with a potent mix of dark and silly jokes, but it thankfully refuses to shy away from the mind-bending possibilities of tangled timelines and paradoxes. Big ideas, small…

A tantalising saying kept popping into my head while I watched Serangoon Road: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ A co-production between the ABC and HBO Asia, the series feels like the map of a marvellous territory, teeming with opportunities for drama that can’t be mined anywhere else. For starters, the series is located at a very particular crossroads of time and place, the Singapore of 1964–1965. Newly independent from the British Empire and about to split from Malaysia, this Singapore is a place where Eastern and Western traditions of dominance are being played out in the streets, to say nothing of the wider geopolitical manoeuvrings of the Cold Warriors. In short, it’s the birth of a nation – one of the most significant in…

According to Oliver Dew, an Asia Extreme film is ‘marginal by dint of its location in a critically disreputable genre, and by its excess, in terms of (sexual or violent) spectacle, or its transgression of social or aesthetic norms’.1 The term itself was coined by the founder of Tartan Films, Hamish McAlpine, as part of a marketing campaign to sell Asian films, notably from South Korea and Japan, during the late 1990s and early 2000s: ‘When I realised that these films were not one-offs and there was a constant flow of brilliant films coming out of Asia, I decided to brand it and make Asia Extreme.’2 These films are markedly difficult to watch, not only because of their violence and sexual content, but also because of their intense realism and…

The world is richer than ever before. There are more consumers, spending more time and money and engaging with more content, than ever before. But the survival of the independent content producer remains the perennial struggle for project funding. Notwithstanding individual successes, a sustainable – unsubsidised – Australian screen-production industry seems unlikely to emerge any time soon. But why is this? My article sets out to explain the current screen-industry value chain and demonstrate the economic benefits of disintermediation, which we seem to be missing. It argues that only a (radical) disruption of this value chain will change the status quo and that a unique opportunity to do this exists today. Finally, it explores whether investing a modest amount of extant public funding and political capital in building market-access infrastructure…