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The feature-film debut of New Zealand director Daniel Joseph Borgman is a stark, impressionistic affair. Although set in a small, unnamed New Zealand town, The Weight of Elephants (2013) has an oddly Scandinavian air, owing more than a little to Lars von Trier’s minimalist approach to filmmaking. (It’s certainly no coincidence that Borgman himself now lives in Denmark, where he trained in film.) Large swathes of the film pass in silence, there is minimal use of non-diegetic sound, and even major characters are introduced in passing, with little attempt at exposition. We presume that the eleven-year-old protagonist, Adrian (Demos Murphy), is living with his grandmother (Catherine Wilkin) and that the odd man in the next room is his uncle (Matthew Sunderland), but it’s some time before these suspicions are confirmed.…

If you want to get technical about it, there are two kinds of apocalyptic stories: those with zombies and those without. (There are also a few featuring vampires and other such creatures but let’s take those as honorary zombies.) In recent years, in particular, there has been a rash of apocalyptic films around the world: everything from the devastating Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) and the bittersweet Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (Lorene Scafaria, 2012), to the zombie-plagued World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013) and the comedic, monster-filled This Is the End (Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg, 2013). But what’s the difference? What is Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968) saying that On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) is not? What makes I…

Anthony Chen’s debut feature may be steeped in its Singaporean setting and proud of its homegrown production, but it is the pertinent words of Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus that the film’s story and statement are most reminiscent of. In Ilo Ilo (2013)’s retelling of life in the midst of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, we find echoes of the theorist’s most famous observation. For the filmmaker and his characters, ‘Nothing endures but change.’ Crafting an honest, heartfelt effort informed by his childhood experiences (in fictionalised rather than autobiographical form), Chen remains cognisant of the ever-altering nature of existence. Reflecting historical circumstances as much as the contemporary climate, the hesitant economic reality looms large over his thoughtful tale about family. The latter acts as the intimate embodiment of the former; as…

A few minutes into Lasseter’s Bones (Luke Walker, 2012), the camera closes in on an old man climbing a ladder. Against an endless blue sky he moves slowly, methodically folding out an A-frame as he climbs. When he reaches the top, he pauses before folding out a piece of prospecting equipment. As he works he talks softly to himself. His face is wrinkled and framed with an unkempt beard. His hands shake as he fiddles with the device, but he seems quietly confident as he leans over the ladder to peer through the lens of his binoculars. The camera jumps to a long shot, revealing that the ladder is perched on top of a four-wheel drive parked in a clearing in the desert as stark as the blue sky. Teetering…

The feature film John Doe: Vigilante (2014) – about a vigilante serial killer who exacts his form of extreme justice on repeat-offending criminals – is something of an anomaly in the current Australian screen industries landscape. The Melbourne-shot film, which stars British actor Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica, Law & Order: UK) and Lachy Hulme (Howzat!: Kerry Packer’s War, Offspring), sourced its entire budget, incorporating the Producer Offset,1 from a private investor. But such a unique funding model has both pros and cons. According to David Court, Head of Screen Business at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), its benefits include ‘one-stop shopping’ as well as ‘a level of guaranteed return’. The Producer Offset may also be regarded as income – rather than a loan, thereby allaying the need…

When Tim Winton’s The Turning was published in 2004, it fast became Australia’s best-selling collection of short stories. Adapting it into a feature film presented two major challenges: there was a fan-based army of expectation waiting gingerly in the wings, and, despite some recurring characters and thematic consistency, it was still a collection of short stories. Winton himself thought it an ambitious, if somewhat crazy, idea: So when Rob Connolly asked about making a film as a response to this book, pitching it as 17 films, each with its own director, writer and cast, it seemed churlish to stand in his way. Because the idea was so daft it might actually work. Anyone mad enough to try it deserved a crack. 1 Mad or not, Robert Connolly is definitely ambitious.…

‘I like the idea of looking at [Andy] Warhol to search for what cinema really is, or can be,’ Alex Munt tells me. His 2013 film, Poor Little Rich Girls (After Warhol), was first screened to an audience of half a dozen in an underground car park in eastern Sydney. The idea is [that] the film will play in unconventional, micro-cinema spaces. It’s not a film designed for online, but for a collective audience experience in the Warhol tradition of art spaces in the city. The conceptual leap for the film came when Munt discovered that one of Warhol’s script ideas was to make the same movie twice, with different actresses. In December 2012, he was working on a more complex screenplay – an adaption of the novel Life Kills…

The marriage of music and television has been a lengthy and interesting one. From the earliest ‘talkie’ to the heyday of TV variety shows and performance spaces, the importance of showing us what we can hear has long been acknowledged by audiences, producers and musicians alike. However, MTV in the US stopped focusing on music at least a decade ago, and is now overrun with reality programming, pranks and competition shows. For many international scholars this change seemed to signal an end to music television generally,1 while others have simply interpreted it as a shift in style whereby the best Voice, Talent or Idol has won the prize (for the moment).2 In Australia, meanwhile, this music–TV relationship remains happy and relatively stable. Public service broadcasters ABC and SBS provide important…

Every now and again, a documentary carries us into territory we believed impenetrable. Whether it’s a familial landscape, as in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012), or a psycho-political minefield, as in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), we travel, compelled by that combination of anticipation and fear that is the trespasser’s drug. It’s the ‘Is the camera really going there?’ quality that made The Gatekeepers (2012) the smash hit of Australia Israel Cultural Exchange’s tenth Israeli Film Festival. Director Dror Moreh persuaded six former leaders of the Israel Security Agency – the Shin Bet, as it’s locally known – to discuss their work on moral, political and historical grounds. It’s not just their agreement to participate, but also the frankness with which they speak, that astounds. The documentary…

Every year, the National Archives of Australia quietly releases a tranche of Commonwealth records that have reached the end of their thirty-year ‘closed’ period. Among these documents are Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) files, which record, in painstaking detail, the lives and activities of a diverse range of characters who have caught the attention of the organisation. In the Walkley Award–nominated Persons of Interest (2013), director Haydn Keenan has crafted a fascinating and vital series that delves into these files to create a portrait of the political history of Australia. Australia’s spy history is an immediately juicy topic for analysis – particularly for me because my secret dream as a child was to become a spy. I wrote messages to myself with invisible-ink pens and pored over a ‘spy’s handbook’…

The pilot episode of twentysomething opens with its two co-stars crawling across the floor of a crowded bar, giggling and inebriated. Predictably, a towering bouncer soon looms above them – they’re out. But less predictably, while the male of the pair bats apologetic eyelids and demurely moves to exit, the female is having none of it. She hurls herself to the ground and raises her feet in defiance, making it clear that she’s not moving unless dragged. Much to the pair’s amusement, the bouncer agrees – and she is pulled feet-first through a cheering crowd, all of whom she then invites back to their place for more drinking. This scene sets the tone for the show’s ensuing two seasons. These two young revellers are Jess (played by the show’s co-creator,…

Australia has seen an explosion in the number of film festivals organised around particular national cinemas or geographic regions – these include the Japanese Film Festival, Hola Mexico Film Festival, Israeli Film Festival, Spanish Film Festival, Greek Film Festival, British Film Festival and the Reel Anime festival. If you live in one of the major capital cities, you will have no doubt encountered this phenomenon at your local cinemas. But unlike stalwarts such as the Melbourne and Sydney film festivals, these culturally specific festivals restrict their focus to the films of a single region, and often eschew the more arthouse focus of the traditional film festival in favour of presenting their region’s commercial successes. In doing so, they cater not only to local diasporas but also to those curious to…

Alex Gibney is a prolific documentary filmmaker known for his earlier investigative works Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Freakonomics (co-directed with Heidi Ewing et al., 2010) and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012). Without a doubt, Gibney knows how to tell a story – and tell it well. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013), which chronicles the rise of the eponymous organisation, is no exception. Gibney’s rendition of the WikiLeaks story is like a puzzle, with each piece connected to many others, and he masterfully depicts the feeling of pressure and paranoia building up in the characters’ lives. His film is a fast-paced thriller-like documentary with many twists. It is entertaining and leaves…

You have seen things in this place no man should witness. Some of these things you must forget. But history will remember you […] I am honoured to be your brother. — The Colonel (William McInnes) in Kokoda (Alister Grierson, 2006) Cinema is a lens into a country’s unique concerns, obsessions and myth-making, as it ‘remembers’, and turns into narrative, that nation’s historical moments.1 So what have Australia’s films revealed about how we collectively remember and memorialise the pain and rupture of World War II? There have been fewer than fifty Australian features that chronicle the Second World War – and The Railway Man (2013) by Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky (who recently enjoyed critical success with the 2011 film Burning Man) joins the small but significant collection. Compared to the…

Erin Robinson is playing Gravity Ghost on stage in front of a hundred or so people, her on-screen avatar swirling gracefully between planets. As she plays she speaks softly, in a clipped Canadian accent, retelling a personal trauma that shaped her life when she was designing the game. She had suffered an injustice at the hands of another; her life had felt only barely in her own control. Her words – ‘gravity’ and ‘ghost’ – materialise on the screen behind her, swinging between the orbits of a cartoon galaxy. Her in-game actions exert some influence but the movement is mostly subject to momentum and forces greater than any individual. This is day one, session one of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival at Melbourne’s state library, and there are already more…

Conflicted Lives: The AICE Israeli Film Festival 2013 JASMINE CRITTENDEN Ten years ago, when the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange (AICE) Israeli Film Festival began, its goal was to depoliticise Australian perceptions of Israel – to explore the everyday living that goes on beyond media headlines. As the event has expanded, however, it has become more reflective of all aspects of the Israeli film scene. Last year’s program included nine works that directly confront the Arab–Israeli conflict, an increased representation of younger voices and even a selection of genre films. Keith Lawrence, co-curator of the festival and AICE executive director, explains: Early on, the festival was very much about developing a greater cultural understanding of Israel among Australian audiences and vice versa – there’s also an Australian film festival that takes…