"One of the greatest things about the sport of surfing is that you need only three things:your body, a surfboard, and a wave.” - Naima Green, author.

For film buffs, the familiar cadence of the quote recalls the now iconic musing of French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard, who said, “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl." Both speak of the profound simplicity at the core of either activity; of the immense pleasure that can be derived from just paddling into the open sea or picking up a camera.  It suggests that artists, whether those that challenge the ocean or capture an image, share a unique bond. It is also why the five films competing for the Best Surf Film at the 2015 Byron Bay International Film Festival offer some of the event’s most beautiful images…

Learning to Float (Dir: Brendan Calder; USA, 20 mins)
At 280 pounds and living a life mired in the drug and gang culture of South Central LA, a carefree life riding the Californian beach breaks did not leap out as an option for 12 year-old Giovanni Douresseau (pictured, above). But a youth centre beach excursion introduced him to the life-giving properties of the sea, the generosity of a man that would guide his growth into adulthood and the spirituality of a life spent surfing. Brendan Calder’s thesis film has warmed festival hearts as far afield Hawaii, Costa Rica and Portugal, with Byron Bay crowds certain to succumb to its charms.

1970 Something (Dir: Rafael Mellin; Brazil, 70 mins)
With the might of a military dictatorship oppressing a once vibrant Brazilian society, a counter-culture subset opted out of life under the regime and established a movement that celebrated music, dance and, above all else, the metaphor for surfing as an expression of freedom. Rafael Mellin, who explored the bond between cinema and surfing in his Everaldo Pato biography, Nalu (2008), will be attending the Australian premiere of his vivid, retro-flavoured ode to the spiritual birthplace of Brazilian beach culture.

Tierra de Patagones (Land of Patagones; Dirs: Joaquin Azulay and Julian Azulay; Argentina, 75 mins; Official site)
Capturing the essence of ‘extreme sports’ fanaticism, brothers Julian and Joaquin Azulay trek to the freezing, hostile southern extremes on the Argentinian side of Patagonia to surf the monster swells at Isla de los Estados (Staten Island), in the Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) region. The journey becomes a constant struggle against one of nature’s most harsh landscapes while in the company of some of the planet’s most warm and welcoming people.

What the Sea Gives Me (Dir: Pierce Michael Cavanagh; USA, 63 mins; Official site)
Pierce Michael Cavanagh’s unashamedly celebratory film asks those whose lives are spent on or in the water to define their bond with the sea, its inhabitants and the increasingly lopsided role it plays in sharing the planet with mankind. Amputee surfer Andre Barbieri, activist Crystal Thornburg-Homcy, oceanographer Dr Walter Munk and ‘shark wrangler’ Brett McBride (pictured, right) are among those that share candid insight with Cavanagh’s incisive camera. One of the most enriching visions of man’s interaction with the ocean ever captured.

Oney Anwar – Chasing the Dream (Dir: Karen Donald; UK, 41 mins; Official site)
From a remote rainforest enclave deep within Indonesia, a singularly-focussed young man named Oney Anwar emerges to challenge for the surfing world championship in Karen Donald’s rousing, heartfelt human story. In addition to the majestic surf footage, Donald captures a fish-out-of-water tale that effortlessly changes gears from lump-in-the-throat tearjerker to heartwarming crowdpleaser. A star is born in the form of Oney, a driven, humble and wonderfully engaging screen presence.

Afforded unprecedented access to the Blackfeet reservation in Browning, Montana, director Nicholas Hudak (pictured, below) and his wife, producer Anna Hudak, set about capturing the modern experience of three young Native American people. As filming began, each was on the verge of their adult lives - Andi Running Wolf, an intelligent, independent woman about to leave the reservation for college life; Edward Tailfeathers, a philosophical backyard muso caught between a teenage mindset and his grown self; and, Douglas Fitzgerald, a softly spoken, family-oriented cowboy, working the earth of his ancestors.

The Hudak's moving account of these lives, Where God Likes to Be, examines a world of rarely-glimpsed bonds within the Native American community - between the Montana land and its people; the old traditions and new society; and, most tellingly, between youth and adulthood. Ahead of its Australian premiere at the 2015 Byron Bay Film Festival, Nicholas Hudak spoke to SCREEN-SPACE about his unique production experience...

What was so unique yet so universal about the experiences of the three young people that led to them becoming the focus of your documentary?

When we set out to make the film on the Blackfeet reservation we did not have a specific topic or narrative in mind. The Native American stereotype across the US is one of downtrodden impoverishment and hopelessness. We wanted to show another side of the Native American experience, one that explored the feeling of somehow being between two worlds, coming of age in modern America and clinging to a sense of unique indigenous culture. Spiritual leaders, teachers and people we met on the street encouraged us to make a film that is uplifting and inspires cultural pride in their youth. The three young people that allowed us to have their voices in the film struggle with many of the issues that are universal on the Blackfeet reservation - and at the same time really try to make the best of it and create opportunities for themselves.

Was the broader reservation population open to the intrusive-by-nature arrival of a documentary crew? How did you and the production team go about ingratiating yourself with the community?

Actually no, they were initially not open to having a documentary crew there. People there have been burned so often by white people coming on to the Rez, looking for the sad Indian story, focusing on alcoholism, substance abuse and general "poverty porn". I think a lot of Blackfeet people are just sick of it. In fact, shortly before we showed up a National Geo crew was thrown off the reservation. We learned that it was important to them that their voices were heard, rather than having another film that points fingers and has outsiders talk about them. We spent almost six months talking to people without touching our cameras. Once we started filming we tried to tread lightly and stay small, which wasn’t too hard since most of the time we were just a team of two. We lived on a trailer on the reservation for six months while filming which I think helped us blend into the scene and really get a feeling for the place. (Pictured, above right; Andi Running Wolf)

How did the experience of living and studying in New Zealand shape this film and the filmmaker you've become?

New Zealand showed me how a country with a colonial history can have a different relationship with its native people, identify on a national level with the indigenous population and even have that be part of its popular image. New Zealand also awakened in me a deeper sensitivity to landscape. Obviously, it is a very picturesque land but there is a melancholy there that I had not ever before experienced in a landscape. I began to read and interpret landscape differently there and I think I took a bit of that back to Montana with me when we started working on the film. (Pictured, above left; producer Anna Hudak)

Does the film tell the story or send the message that you set out to convey? How did the film take shape as the production progressed?

We initially thought we'd make more of an activist film but that is just not what we found there. Finding a strong storyline was definitely our main challenge in post-production. In the end, the film shaped us more than we shaped it. I am happy with the message it conveys and it has been very interesting to see people's reactions to it. Often after screening Where God Likes to Be, white people will come up to me and comment on how depressing they find the film (yet) right afterwards a Native American audience member will thank me for finally making an uplifting positive film about an American Indian reservation.

Although your film is not the advocacy/call-to-action type of documentary, what do you hope the narrative inspires in audiences?

I would like for Where God Likes to Be to evoke an understanding of how deep cultural roots are for a lot of Native people and how progress is not just about providing more of the kind of opportunities we think people on reservations need. I hope it leads to small actions on a grassroots level; to more respect and understanding for American Indian people, their reservations and their situation. (Pictured, right; Nicholas Hudak and Anna Hudak, on location)

Finally, how did the Blackfeet people and the residents of Browning react to the film?

The Blackfeet Nation and the residents of the reservation have been incredibly kind to us and the feedback we have been getting has been overwhelmingly positive. We are lucky.

The brutal nature of coal seam gas extrusion, in which the vast expanses of subterranean earth is fractured to allow access to the profitable resource, is the key issue facing a great many rural communities across the world. The heartless practices of the mining industry and the social cost to already struggling landowners are further examined in Richard Todd’s Frackman, the tough talking, tender hearted account of Queenslander Dayne Pratzky and his alter-ego, the titular militant agitator determined to right some basic wrongs. Ahead of the highly-anticipated 2015 Byron Bay Film Festival screenings, ‘Toddy’ (pictured below, left, with Pratzky) spoke to SCREEN-SPACE about his film, the issues it addresses and the fearless unpredictability of his protagonist…

When did you first become aware of the impact that coal seam gas and ‘fracking’ technology was having on our land?

I read about it in my local paper in Margaret River. There was a company wanting to drill through our local aquifer, 15kms from the centre of town, which sounded nuts. (It is) one of the tourism gems of Australia. I started to research the topic and that’s when I heard about CSG. That led me straight to where it was already in action, in Tara/Chinchilla. 

When the production rolled into small towns and you began to get your camera in front of the people being impacted by CSG mining, how did they react?

It doesn’t take long for people to forget I’m there because the first two years it was just Dayne and I chatting to them, rather than us sitting down for interviews. Interviews hardly happened, ever. We did less than six in four years, so it was very observational. They haven’t seen the film yet but they’ve been very responsive to rough cuts we have shown some of them. We have invited several of the main characters to BIFF, (so it) will be pretty exciting to have them there.

How would you describe the dynamic between you and your ‘leading man', Dayne Pratzky? He is presented as a fearless force-of-nature, singularly committed to the cause. How much about Dayne the man is up there on the screen?

Most of it is up there. I hope it is a fairly accurate representation of Dayne and covers most of his emotions. He is an ordinary bloke that has fought an extraordinary battle. He is a good man but it was tough for both of us. It’s bloody like Dad and Dave on the road! You laugh, you get frustrated, you get angry, you fight but when there is only two of you in one old Hilux, there ain’t nowhere to go. The stakes were high from day one and we did a lot of stressful stuff. The nice thing is we both pushed through it and we are still mates now.

When was the decision made that the narrative had found its ending?

Oh my God, we wrote three different scripts re what could happen. Of course we didn’t know. We were way into the edit when the ending occurred in real time so we went back out for one last shoot in Tara and that’s in the film. It just ended up (being) ‘the time’ re Dayne’s journey, so it actually happened quite naturally but in the middle of editing, instead of the normal ‘ end of shoot’ time.

The ‘ advocacy doco’ as a genre has flourished in the last decade, but do 'message movies' reach beyond the converted? If so, how do you ensure that happens?

I hope we are not just preaching to the choir. They will turn up, (but) we have gone for a more personal, emotive story, to avoid it being a movie just for the converted. We have been inviting the (mining) industry to the screenings and they are accepting the invitations, which is very cool. I hope all the workers watch it. It doesn’t matter whether they agree or disagree but I’m sure it will stir up some debate and conversation and that is what we hope to achieve.  It has the potential to effect social change. Only time will tell.

Like every other superhero franchise, is there a ‘Frackman 2’ in the works?

It will be up to Dayne and how long he wants to stay in CSG world. No doubt we are both welded to the subject now and that is OK, but Frackman 2…mmm, not sure about doing another lap. 

Oden Roberts’ A Fighting Season is a film about a soldier’s heroism, although it takes place a world away from the hot zones of international war. A searing character study, it examines the courage needed to fight for the honour of a soldier’s life on home soil, while summoning the strength to battle one’s own inner demons. Set amongst a team of recruiters stationed in an everyman enclave of middle America in 2007, it is a dark, disturbing take on the swirling maelstrom of national pride and muddied morality that swept through Roberts' homeland post-9/11.

An NYU Film School graduate, Oden Roberts’ debut feature had its world premiere at the recent Byron Bay Film Festival, where a rapturous response from festivalgoers secured it a ‘Jury Special Mention’ honour and earned the filmmaker the Best Director trophy. Roberts was a popular attendee, his droll humour and engaging love of cinema proving a winning combination. SCREEN-SPACE spoke with the LA-based auteur about the personal journey that inspired his narrative, the function that film plays in dissecting the impact of war and how dissenting voices are crucial in a true democracy…

The ‘recruitment office’ dynamic is a setting that will be unfamiliar to many outside the US, although the target-oriented desperation and the immoral methodology recalls films such as Glengarry Glen Ross and Tin Men. Were the characters drawn from men and situations you have known? 

My work always draws from personal experiences and people I’ve met in my travels. A Fighting Season is based on being recruited during a six month (period) in my senior year of high school. The characters are based on an assortment of real people and hundreds of hours of private interviews with Army recruiters, so I hope it feels very real. I drew from my own recruiter’s charismatic, machismo personality to create the characters. In fact, (the) supporting cast features former military recruiters and some of the recruits are now serving overseas. A kind of ‘art depicts life’ moment. 

The conflicted complexity of your lead character, Mason (Clayne Crawford; pictured, right, on-set with the director) creates a tangible tension throughout the narrative. How did his character develop, from your first thoughts in the early stages of the script to Crawford’s contribution?

My goal for Mason was to depict (a) modern day hero but avoid the clichés seen in Hollywood, such as American Sniper's Chris Kyle, where one man takes down the entire enemy - the Rambo film. The subdued nature of Mason is an honest depiction of a PTSD-affected soldier, trying to survive after being torn apart by war. And Clayne’s alpha-male persona, coupled with his ability to keep a stiff upper lip, made him a perfect choice for the role. After the first two screenings of the film, I had a handful of audience members ask me how I received permission to shoot the actual recruiters. This comment says so much about Crawford’s performance, (that) he’s the real thing. Sometimes heroes aren’t larger then life, they are normal people just like you and I under extraordinary circumstances. 

Was there an extended rehearsal period that allowed for the actors and yourself to detail backstory and foster the on-screen chemistry?

I always write with an actor in mind, one that represents the tone and mannerisms I hope to achieve on and off camera. I’ve known both Lew (Temple) and Clayne (pictured, left; in uniform on set, with co-star James Hechim) for years and admired them as performers and as individuals. With A Fighting Season, I was extremely lucky to get the two leads I wrote for. Our rehearsal process was short because I knew what to expect out of the gate from these two talents. Lew and Clayne were only with us for 14 days, so my initial choice for chemistry was create on the page and in casting. 

Your film will draw comparisons to two of the decade’s most acclaimed war films – The Hurt Locker and, as you’ve mentioned, American Sniper. As an interpretation of the plight of the returned serviceman, what does your film have in common with those films and what is its point-of-difference?

A Fighting Season makes a commentary on the controversial recruiting practices post 9/11, particularly the Army policies that support the cherry picking of the meek or underprivileged and the taking advantage of woman sexually. The film points out very clearly that recruiters are under extreme pressure to make their numbers and in doing so are often pushed to make immoral decisions. The major point of difference is to not celebrate the war, but hone in on what is important about soldiers and the battles they face internally when returning home. Other films about war are often blockbuster action hits, used to feed the American image of ‘no guts, no glory’. A Fighting Season is what I consider an honest film about real American soldiers, not a poster boy from a polished “Army Strong” commercial. 

Cinema takes a while to process the costs of war – M*A*S*H came well after the Korean conflict; Coming Home, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, a decade after Vietnam. In the wake of 9/11 and the Bush/Cheney administration’s morally ‘murky’ deployment of troops, is portraying wartime heroism on screen harder than it should be?

We lack cinema that portrays troops with any real accuracy. There are documentaries on the subject, (but) even there you find a collection of films that are financed by the Army and military branches. The film is meant to lend an alternative opinion to that fuelled by 9/11 propaganda. We can never know the costs of war until decades later, but for now the film serves as a reminder that troops are suffering by the hundreds of thousands, returning with trauma, and battle scars. It’s extremely hard to get past the superhero complex that American audiences buy into. In war, there aren’t always heroes, sometimes, just survivors.

How do you answer those inevitable protesters who will claim anything less than glowing portrayals of US soldiers is ‘unAmerican’ or ‘unpatriotic’? 

Our first amendment right is freedom of speech, (so) I encourage any protest through words. But I’d challenge the critic by asking them to create something they consider American before they’d cast A Fighting Season as anything less. We live in interesting times and under a cloud of ‘American Propaganda’ that casts around the world. This film offers a different perspective on how many Americans who protest the current war perceives the issues. Diversity sparks conversation, leads to debate then results in more diverse thinking. A Fighting Season is a film that brings the debate of war and terrorism to the forefront. It clearly states, ‘what is the war on terror and why are we in it?’

As a boy, Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad would sit spellbound as his elders retold the story of the Jinn. Mythological creatures that have walked amongst the living since the dawn of time, they have all but disappeared, unseen to the shallow gaze of modern man. Ahmad’s fascination with the legend has led to his debut feature Jinn, in which a centuries-old curse resurfaces to terrorise the present-day descendant of an ill-fated clan. For the young auteur, bringing to life the folklore of his Middle Eastern ancestry for a modern audience proved an enormous yet rewarding challenge…

“There has not been one particular project, book or film, that has attempted to modernize the concept,” Ahmad (pictured, above) told SCREEN-SPACE from his US base. Inherent to the spiritual teachings of Arabic and Asian cultures, the legend of the Jinn speaks of supernatural entities, conjured from ‘smokeless fire’, and are referenced throughout the Islamic holy text, the Quran; thought to be the basis for the legend of the ‘Genie’, they are one of the three creations of God, alongside man (made of clay) and angels (made of light). Says Ahmad, who also wrote and edited his film, “We wanted to use ‘Jinn’ the movie to not only bring the concept to the western world but to also create a mythology that had some rules to it.”  

For Ahmad and his production team at Exxodus Pictures, crafting a modern action thriller from a centuries-old text brought with it great responsibility. “Basically, (the narrative) stayed true to the beliefs that are common around the world, and then (we) filled in the story gaps so it became more fully-realised,” he says. The central figure is Shawn (Dominic Rains), a strapping hero whose life with his beautiful wife Jasmine (Serinda Swain) becomes the focus of a vengeful demonic force. He teams with wizened cleric Father Westhoff (William Atherton, of Ghostbusters fame) and mysterious warrior-type, Gabriel (fan favourite Ray Park, pictured, right; from X-Men, G.I. Joe and Episode 1: The Phantom Menace) to see off the powerful foe. (“Ray was a big win for us,” admits the director.)

Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad cites as his filmmaking influences the great modern directors whose works combine vivid imagery and assured technique with strong, soulful characters and storytelling. “The short list, of course, is made up of Spielberg, Cameron, Ridley Scott, Lucas,” he says. “These directors were able to create new worlds for people to visit and I want to do the same thing. Jinn was a exercise in that (style of) direction.” Raised in the once thriving American industrial hub of Detroit, Ahmad was determined to shoot his first production on the streets from which he drew much inspiration over time. “Detroit and the state of Michigan were integral to the creation of Jinn and rolled out the red carpet wherever and whenever we needed them to” he states. “We are all proud to be from here and are even prouder to have been given the chance to give something back.”

Raised in strict adherence to the Islamic faith, Ahmad was aware that a film steeped in Muslim iconography and originating from a culture misunderstood by many of his fellow Americans may prove to be a tough sell. But his faith in his family’s adopted homeland was unwavering. “I'm a firm believer that America is, in general, a great place to live, made up of mostly good people with open minds. If that weren't true, I don't think my father would have chosen to come here and settle with his family,” he says. “I know that prejudice still lurks in dark corners, (but) I grew up seeing a very fair America.” As his script began to take shape, Ahmad became determined to tell his unique, original genre story in a strong voice, confident that fans would respond. “Rather than concentrate on who wouldn't like the concept of Jinn based upon those prejudices, I think I was hoping that there would be more people that were interested in learning about a new idea and making it their own,” he says. “After all, that is what the U.S. was founded on. And I think that ended up being true.” (Pictured, left; the director, on-set)

Supporting that notion is the fan base that Jinn has generated since its release. Following a limited US theatrical run, the film has played to enthusiastic international audiences, both in densely populated Muslim communities and with broader western filmgoers. “We've been very lucky in that our fan base has grown substantially around the world,” says Ahmad, citing the social media following and VOD traffic numbers as evidence. “There have been thousands asking for a sequel and we feel that Jinn could easily support more movies. With a little luck, I'm sure we'll be back in production on another Jinn concept soon.”

Jinn will be released in Australia across all platforms on April 16 via Third Millennium Entertainment.

One of Sri Lanka’s most adored stars, Mahendra Perera has been a box office draw for over three decades. But his latest work, Prasanna Jayakody’s 28, is a challenging social drama that refuses to pander to the mainstream; it follows three working class men as they transport a murdered woman across mountain roads for a hometown burial. As Abasiri, Perera loses himself in one of the most complex screen characters of his long career; the performance earned the veteran star a Best Actor nomination at the 2014 Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA). With his writer/director by his side (for whom the actor kindly provided translation), Perera spoke with SCREEN-SPACE about the career-defining role, the establishment’s reaction to the non-conformist narrative, and the fearlessness being embraced by Sri Lanka’s new wave of talent… 

"When I first read the script, I was a little confused,” admits Perera, star of such regional blockbusters as Walls Within (1997), Flying with One Wing (2002), Boungiorno Italia (2004) and Machan (2008). “I did not form too many ideas. It took a dialogue with Prasanna (pictured, below), and many discussions afterwards, for me to form a picture of this man.” His character is unaware until the day of the long journey that his cargo is to be his late ex-wife, Suddhi (Semini Iddamalgoda). “Finally, I was able to understand his emotional side and bring that out. The inconsistent nature of his behaviour, the ways in which he confronted the situations he found himself facing…well, it proved a challenge to get to the core of this complex character but somehow we did it.”

The inspiration for 28 (the title representing the morgue drawer in which Suddhi’s body is kept) was, as they say, ripped from today’s headlines. Writer/director Jayakody (Sankara, 2007; Karma, 2011) had become disillusioned by the violence that had become increasingly endemic to his homeland and wrote the script as a means by which to interpret this dark shift in the population’s psyche. “In the past few years in Sri Lanka, the newpapers have been full of horrible accounts of violent crimes, especially sexual crimes against women,” says the softly spoken auteur. “Sex is a beautiful, natural thing and it is always disturbing when human desires lead to horrible acts. It is destructive to our society, to any society.”

Wavering between pitch-black character comedy, a searing indictment of patriarchal brutality and open-road travelogue, the film is at its most daring when Suddhi breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience from beyond the grave. Jayakody acknowledges the bravery required for his leading lady (pictured, left) to take on such an artistically and culturally challenging part. “Semini was required to do some extraordinary things, perform in a way that she had never been called upon to do in her other movies,” he says. “Her character is a portrayal of so many Sri Lankan women and hopefully conveys so much of what the women of Sri Lanka must endure. Sri Lankan women can’t speak the truth when they are alive; it is only possible for a dead woman to speak the truth.”

A revelation as the everyman Abasiri, Perera establishes a rich chemistry with his male co-stars Sarath Kothawala and Rukmal Nirosh (pictured, below). But it is likely that a single scene, in which the identity of the woman dawns upon Abasiri and grief and memory overwhelm him, impacted most upon the APSA judging panel. “My studies in the Stanislavsky method of acting were called upon in that scene,” the actor recalls. “I sought out friends who had suffered through a similar grief and drew upon them for guidance, to spark that emotion deep within myself. I was determined not to act, but to try and find that truth within myself, as if that was my wife. It was very difficult, because we shot that scene many times, to get the precise emotion.”

28 has emerged as one of the ‘new wave’ Sri Lankan works, steeped in both high-end artistry and strong social commentary. For Perera, the period represents a rebirth-of-sorts for the local sector. “After 30 years of war and terrorism, it is finding a new shape,” he says. “We still have problems, and there are still those for whom films like 28 will be too disturbing, but we have new, young filmmakers who are willing to work with very challenging concepts. And we have a huge audience in Sri Lanka for this movie, for any movie that comes with new ideas or new themes that can be discussed.”

The national cinema of Sri Lanka faces a number of uphill battles to retain its potency. The exhibition sector is dire; prior to the outbreak of war, 400 cinemas serviced the population. Today, 120 operate; only half of those screen locally made product (it is expected that the region will be fully upgraded to DCP technology in 2017). More worryingly, cinema is often overseen by conservative governing bodies, which monitor content and distribution channels. Says Perera, “There are these political and philosophical officials, who think that these films do damage to our country, but these are unique subjects that need to be addressed in our cinema. As the films begin to get recognition at international events like APSA, a new respect forms.”

Impressive in scope and continuing to expand its vision even as it heads into its 62^nd incarnation, the Sydney Film Festival launched the 2015 programme at Customs House in the Harbour City’s picturesque Circular Quay district this morning. Festival director Nashen Moodley beamed with pride when speaking of the 12-day schedule that kicks off June 3 and features more than 250 films from 68 countries.

Addressing a packed media gallery and in the presence of dignitaries that included The Honorary Troy Grant, State Minister for The Arts, and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, Moodley described this years film roster as, “political, sexy and entertaining,” and assured all that the selection featured, “uncompromising visions, that were sure to provoke and challenge.” In his welcoming statement published in the official programme, he referred to the event’s 2015 theme, ‘We Are Made of Movies’, revealing that, “it might seem obvious at first, but it’s one that unfolds to reveal just how complex and central the role of cinema is to the human experience.”

As previously announced, Opening Night honours have been bestowed upon actor/playwright Brendan Cowell’s feature directorial debut, Ruben Guthrie. The event will close out with Neil Armfield’s same-sex romantic drama, Holding the Man, on June 14. It is the first time homegrown fare has filled the coveted slots since 2001, when Ray Lawrence’s Lantana and Steve Jacob’s La Spagnola topped and tailed the celebration.

Twelve titles will vie for best of the fest as part of the Official Competition line-up. Local contenders include Kim Farrant’s missing-child drama Strangerland, with Nicole Kidman and Hugo Weaving; Jennifer Peedom’s affecting documentary Sherpa, shot against the rugged landscapes of Mount Everest; and, Simon Stone’s family drama The Daughter, with Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush, Miranda Otto and US actor Paul Schneider. Overseas fare includes Me and Earl and The Dying Girl, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Sundance winner; Miguel Gomez’s 6½ hour reimagining of the classic, Arabian Nights, transported to the Portugal of today; and, Sean Baker’s highly-touted Tangerine, an urgent, often hilarious look at life on the streets of LA shot and entirely with an iPhone. See all Official Competition titles here.

The Documentary Australia Foundation will again present its Documentary prize to the outstanding locally-made factual film. Amongst the ten films up for the honour will be new works from Gilliam Armstrong (Women He’s Undressed), Andrew Lancaster (The Last Aviator), Maya Newell (Gayby Baby) and Steve Thomas (Freedom Stories). Arthouse leader Dendy Films will reward our leading short-film artisans, with ten mini-movies bidding for one of the three categories on offer (amongst the contenders, Oscar winner Adam Elliot with his latest, Ernie Biscuit).  

Highlights from the vast array of World Premiere screenings scheduled include Jeremy Sims’ Last Cab to Darwin, featuring an all-star Australian cast lead by Michael Caton and Jacki Weaver; Wide Open Sky, Lisa Nicol’s feel-good account of an outback kids choir (to screen in the newly-launched Family Films sidebar); and, a big-screen airing for Daina Reid’s mini-series adaptation of Kate Grenville’s bestseller, The Secret River, starring Sarah Snook.

Special event strands include Destruction Cinema, a rebellious genre from the 60s and 70s that brutally assaulted the conventions of contemporary film, to be represented by five films including Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small and Jackie Raynal’s Deux Fois; Focus: South Africa reflects the festival director’s roots in the cinema of Africa and will welcome filmmakers Sibs Shongwe-La Mer and Francois Verster; and, Essential Bergman, a mammoth ten film retrospective compiled by internationally-renown critic and former SFF director, David Stratton, that will span the great Swedish director’s career from 1955’s Smiles on a Summer Night to 2003’s Saraband.

Popular programme staples returning in 2015 include Variety critic Richard Kuipers’ horror sessions, Freak Me Out, which will feature two works from festival guest Ant Timpson - Deathgasm and Turbo Kid; for the musically-minded, Sounds on Screen will present the Australian premieres of Asif Kapadia’s highly-anticipated bio-doc Amy, and the French buddy-road drama Max & Lenny, from Fred Nicolas; and Restorations, which will present fully-restored director’s cuts of Mark Christopher’s 54, Armenian Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates, Bong Joon-ho’s Korean thriller Mother (the 2009 classic remastered in monochrome by the director), and Djibril Diop Mambety’s 1973 landmark Senegalese work, Touki Bouki.

There was some muttering amongst cinephiles during the post-launch dissection about the notable no-shows, including Australian director Justin Kurzel’s Cannes-bound Macbeth, starring Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender; Woody Allen’s latest, Irrational Man, with Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone; actress Natalie Portman’s directorial debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness; and, Hungarian auteur Kornel Mundruczo’s canine thriller, White God.

Full programme details for the 2015 Sydney Film Festival can be found on the event’s website.

Impressive in scope and continuing to expand its vision even as it heads into its 62^nd incarnation, the Sydney Film Festival launched the 2015 programme at Customs House in the Harbour City’s picturesque Circular Quay district this morning. Festival director Nashen Moodley beamed with pride when speaking of the 12-day schedule that kicks off June 3 and features more than 250 films from 68 countries.

Addressing a packed media gallery and in the presence of dignitaries that included The Honorary Troy Grant, State Minister for The Arts, and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, Moodley described this years film roster as, “political, sexy and entertaining,” and assured all that the selection featured, “uncompromising visions, that were sure to provoke and challenge.” In his welcoming statement published in the festival’s programme, he referred to the event’s 2015 theme, ‘We Are Made of Movies’, revealing that, “it might seem obvious at first, but it’s one that unfolds to reveal just how complex and central the role of cinema is to the human experience.”

As previously announced, Opening Night honours have been bestowed upon actor/playwright Brendan Cowell’s feature directorial debut, Ruben Guthrie. The event will close out with Neil Armfield’s same-sex romantic drama, Holding the Man (pictured, right), on June 14. It is the first time homegrown fare has filled the coveted slots since 2001, when Ray Lawrence’s Lantana and Steve Jacob’s La Spagnola topped and tailed the celebration.

Twelve titles will vie for best of the fest as part of the Official Competition line-up. Local contenders include Kim Farrant’s missing-child drama Strangerland, with Nicole Kidman and Hugo Weaving; Jennifer Peedom’s affecting documentary Sherpa, shot against the rugged landscapes of Mount Everest; and, Simon Stone’s family drama The Daughter, with Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush, Miranda Otto and US actor Paul Schneider. Overseas fare includes Me and Earl and The Dying Girl (pictured, top), Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Sundance winner; Miguel Gomez’s 6½ hour reimagining of the classic, Arabian Nights, transported to the Portugal of today; and, Sean Baker’s highly-touted Tangerine, an urgent, often hilarious look at life on the streets of LA shot and entirely with an iPhone.

The Documentary Australia Foundation will again present its Documentary prize to the outstanding locally-made factual film. Amongst the ten films up for the honour will be new works from Gilliam Armstrong (Women He’s Undressed), Andrew Lancaster (The Last Aviator), Maya Newell (Gayby Baby) and Steve Thomas (Freedom Stories). Arthouse leader Dendy Films will reward our leading short-film artisans, with ten mini-movies bidding for one of the three categories on offer (amongst the contenders, Oscar winner Adam Elliot with his latest, Ernie Biscuit).  

Highlights from the vast array of World Premiere screenings scheduled include Jeremy Sims’ Last Cab to Darwin, featuring an all-star Australian cast lead by Michael Caton (pictured, right) and Jacki Weaver; Wide Open Sky, Lisa Nicol’s feel-good account of an outback kids choir (to screen in the newly-launched Family Films sidebar); and, a big-screen airing for Daina Reid’s mini-series adaptation of Kate Grenville’s bestseller, The Secret River, starring Sarah Snook.

Special event strands include Destruction Cinema, a rebellious genre from the 60s and 70s that brutally assaulted the conventions of contemporary film, to be represented by five films including Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small (read the Screen-Space feature on the film's production here) and Jackie Raynal’s Deux Fois; Focus: South Africa reflects the festival director’s roots in the cinema of Africa and will welcome filmmakers Sibs Shongwe-La Mer and Francois Verster; an evening of retro bliss, with the double feature Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1956; pictured, right) and the giant ant movie, THEM!, screening at Blacktown Drive-in; and, Essential Bergman, a mammoth ten film retrospective compiled by internationally-renown critic and former SFF director, David Stratton, that will span the great Swedish director’s career from 1955’s Smiles on a Summer Night to 2003’s Saraband.

Arguably the hottest ticket at the 2015 Sydney Film Festival will be Alex Gibney: In Conversation, a live Q&A with the acclaimed director who will screen and discuss his incendiary documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and The Prison of Belief.

Popular programme staples returning in 2015 include Variety critic Richard Kuipers’ horror sessions, Freak Me Out, which will feature two works from festival guest Ant Timpson - Deathgasm and Turbo Kid; for the musically-minded, Sounds on Screen will present the Australian premieres of Asif Kapadia’s highly-anticipated bio-doc Amy, and the French buddy-road drama Max & Lenny, from Fred Nicolas; and Restorations, which will present fully-restored director’s cuts of Mark Christopher’s 54, Armenian Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates, Bong Joon-ho’s Korean thriller Mother (the 2009 classic remastered in monochrome by the director), and Djibril Diop Mambety’s 1973 landmark Senegalese work, Touki Bouki.

There was some muttering amongst cinephiles during the post-launch dissection about the notable no-shows, including Australian director Justin Kurzel’s Cannes-bound Macbeth, starring Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender; Woody Allen’s latest, Irrational Man, with Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone; actress Natalie Portman’s directorial debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness; and, Hungarian auteur Kornel Mundruczo’s canine thriller, White God.

Full programme details for the 2015 Sydney Film Festival can be found on the event’s website.

Australian audiences first tasted the bittersweet world of Zach Clark’s White Reindeer on the genre festival circuit in 2013. The story of Suzanne, a recently widowed suburbanite who uncovers her dead husband’s hidden world and eventually her own renewed inner strength, has at its core a pitch-perfect performance by Anna Margaret Hollyman. The actress, adored in the indie sector after performances in Small Beautifully Moving Parts (2011) and Gayby (2012), is a revelation in Clark’s cult classic, which took out the Best Feature trophy at the Boston Underground festival. She spoke with SCREEN-SPACE about her friendship with the director, the inspirations that helped her understand Suzanne and the enduring, endearing legacy of the film…

I was fortunate to have met and interviewed Zach when he brought the film to the 2013 Revelations Film Festival in Perth.

I remember I wanted to go to that festival so badly! Zach was trying to get me there but I was shooting something at the time.

What immediately struck you about Suzanne when you first encountered her in early script drafts?

I responded to the quiet heroism in her that I really admired. I equate Suzanne to being my own personal superhero or avatar. She continues to persevere and push forward and put herself in uncomfortable situations in order to work through her mourning. She has a huge heart. She put herself into extreme situations with no judgement of others or herself and that’s admirable to me.

Zach has been very precise in interviews about the film that he wrote this as a break-up movie.

When Zach and I first sat down to talk about it, over tacos in Williamsburg (laughs), he just stated outright, ‘Essentially, this is a break-up movie.’ I do think that is a great way to describe it. I’ve never lost a loved one in the manner that Suzanne has to deal with but we’ve all gone through some kind of heartbreak in our life. Her arc is such a heightened kind of a break-up, because there are so many issues of betrayal and new definitions as to who this person was she was in love with. Recovery is a cyclical process and when someone has passed or murdered in (Suzanne’s husband) Jeff’s case, it seems more extreme but the experience is still a very universal one.

He has been very clear about Douglas Sirk’s classic melodrama All That Heaven Allows being an inspiration for White Reindeer. The collection of DVDs he made you watch to prepare for the shoot has become a thing of legend.

Yes, his stack of DVDs is legendary at this point. I actually thought about them this morning and hoped I could remember all of them (laughs). Apart from All That Heaven Allows, which was so important to Zach and to the film, is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman* (pictured, left). It is three and a half hours long and is so meditative and quiet and very pervasive. There is such power in the rudimentary and the stillness of this human being. The repetition of this woman’s home life, juxtapositioned with the running of a prostitution ring from her apartment, is so impactful. The two extremes pull her and the audience in a really realistic and emotional way. Understanding how the counter-culture can exist with the mundane in a very symbiotic way was very helpful to me.

*Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Dir: Chantal Akerman, 1975; IMDb)

As dark as White Reindeer goes at times, a very positive Christmas message is part of the film’s resonating charm.

Well, Zach also made me rewatch Scrooged and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. At the heart of it, as I’m sure Zach told you, he really, truly does love Christmas, is very inspired by it. He has this childlike appreciation for it that he really feels and it was inspiring to come into contact with that as well.

You’ve mentioned words like ‘stillness’ and ‘quiet’ and ‘meditative’, all of which come through in your performance and Zach’s film. Suzanne’s journey often feels so painfully personal…

So much of what the film explores is a sense of ultimate aloneness, which is something that each of us experience in our own way. It is something that is not explored a lot on film but it is not necessarily a fun feeling, but one that is often particularly uncomfortable. The reason that many of us go to the movies in the first place is to escape that loneliness. And yet there is something relatable about watching a woman process being alone. It is something we all do every day, yet is something we never really talk about when we do interact. Nobody goes on a dinner date then confides that they spend all day alone and crying. The movie really takes the time to explore the externalizing of an individual’s internal self.

White Reindeer screens in January at the Brisbane Underground Film Festival. It will be available on DVD and Blu-ray in Australia through Accent Films on December 17.

Since its inauguration in 2008, the Sydney Film Prize has been awarded to works by such filmmakers as Steve McQueen (Hunger, 2008), Yorgos Lanthimos (Alps, 2012), Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, 2011) and Xavier Dolan (Heartbeats, 2010). On the eve of the 62^nd festival’s Opening Night bash, SCREEN-SPACE analyses the twelve Official Competition entries and gauges who is leading the race to the nation’s top film festival honour...

ARABIAN NIGHTS (Dir: Miguel Gomes / Portugal, France, Germany, Switzerland; 383 mins / pictured, above)
What the Program says…: “Ambitious, indignant and filled with offbeat humour, Miguel Gomes’ extraordinary new film draws on the structure of ‘Arabian Nights’ to create a vivid portrait of Portugal today.”
The Buzz: Taking on all three volumes on Gomes’ six-hour contemporising of 1001 Nights may be this year’s greatest challenge, but it’s the kind of event screening that die-hard festivalists crave (see also Lav Diaz’s From What is Before). Indiewire called the epic “the most ambitious and entertaining film” at Cannes 2015.
Can it win? Lack of international festival kudos to date may hurt it; will be an enormous about-face to 2014, when the top prize went to The Dardennes Brothers minimalist drama, Two Days One Night. A front-runner.

BLACK SOULS (Dir: Francesco Munzi / Italy; 108 mins / pictured, right)
What the Program says…: “Likened to The Godfather and Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, Black Souls is an enthralling story of a Calabrian criminal family and three brothers faced with a crisis with no easy resolution.”
The Buzz: Found lots of love in its homeland, where it took home four trophies from the 2014 Venice Film Festival. Variety noted that it uncovers “the feudal nature of honor” and “is set to be this year’s mafia pic.”
Can it win? Must transcend its genre roots if it is to find favour.

THE DAUGHTER (Dir: Simon Stone / Australia, 96 mins / pictured, right)
What the Program says…: “Simon Stone’s feature film debut is based on his adaptation of Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck. This heart-rending drama about two intertwined families stars Geoffrey Rush, Ewen Leslie, Paul Schneider, Miranda Otto, Anna Torv, Odessa Young and Sam Neill.”
The Buzz: If the drama on-screen matches the journey that debutant director Stone undertook to get his reinterpretation of Ibsen’s play from the Belvoir Street Theatre stage to a competition slot at Sydney, it will grandly announce the arrival of a new filmmaking force. The prestige pic of the festival for local industry giant, Roadshow Films.
Can it win? Will be in the final mix if it delivers on expectations.

ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL (Dir: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon / USA; 105 mins)
What the Program says…: “This wonderfully original film about friendship, creativity, mortality and the love of cinema was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.”
The Buzz: Hot. Sundance has traditionally had the inside running on the US indie scene’s ‘Next Big Thing.’ Reps a breakout film for respected genre auteur Gomez-Rejon (The Town That Dreaded Sundown, 2014; episodes of the TV hit, American Horror Story). Parodies of classic films that feature heavily in the plot (Pooping Tom, Senior Citizen Cane) will play well with festival audiences.
Can it win? Probably not ‘serious’ enough for the Jury’s top honour, but will score high in the audience-voted category. 

A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE (Dir: Roy Andersson / Sweden, Norway, France Germany; 100 mins)
What the Program says…: “Swedish cinematic visionary Roy Andersson brings his trademark absurdist humour and singular vision to this winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion.”
The Buzz: If the title shouts ‘pretension’, the joke is that it’s meant to. Veteran Swedish director Andersson has made a subversive, absurdist gem that will feel revelatory to even the most jaded of cinephiles. A great deal has been made of the energy generated by septuagenarian George Miller in Mad Max Fury Road; at 72, Andersson proves the intellectual counterpoint with this remarkable work.
Can it win? The bolter. Won’t sit well with those that think film festivals foster an elitist view of cinema, but a win will be thoroughly deserved. 

SHERPA (Dir: Jennifer Peedom / Australia; 96 mins / pictured, right)
What the Program says…: “This visually stunning and commanding documentary, directed by Jennifer Peedom captures the 2014 Everest climbing season from the Sherpas’ point of view, including the tragic avalanche and its aftermath.”
The Buzz: Expect the greatest ever DVD extras package; as incredible as the onscreen drama is in Jennifer Peedom’s profound work, the behind-the-scenes details of her humanistic Himalayan odyssey are remarkable. This multi-tiered account of life and death on Mt Everest honours the memories of those lost to the mountain with an acute, heartfelt empathy.
Can it win? Since the inception of the Official Competition strand in 2008, neither an Australian film nor a documentary has taken the top prize. That may change in 2015.

STRANGERLAND (Dir: Kim Farrant / Australia; 112 mins)
What the Program says…: “Nicole Kidman makes a welcome return to Australian independent cinema in this striking film about the disappearance of her two teenaged children, and the cop (Hugo Weaving) who tries to solve the case.”
The Buzz: Mixed. High anticipation based upon the pairing of Nicole Kidman and Hugo Weaving, the directorial feature debut of theatre director Farrant and the promise of a ‘Wake in Fright/Picnic at Hanging Rock’-type outback odyssey earned it a Sundance spot, but critics were unimpressed. The Hollywood Reporter said, “The film remains stranded in a sort of genre no man's land.”
Can it win? Long shot. There is festival pedigree – Farrant had her short doco Naked on the Inside compete in 2007; Weaving headed the 2013 jury – but it may not be enough.

TALES (Dir: Rakshan Bani-Etemad / Iran; 88 mins)
What the Program says…: “The latest work from Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Iran’s leading female filmmaker, is a richly layered, episodic look at life in Tehran featuring a stellar ensemble cast. It won Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival.”
The Buzz: The Grand Dame of Iranian cinema, director Rakshan Bani-Etemad defied strict governmental controls to craft a series of seven shorts, that she then spliced together to create what may be her crowning achievement. Screenplay winner in Venice and the Grand Jury honoree at the 2014 Asia Pacific Screen Awards, her study of life in Tehran across the vast expanse of the city’s complex societal structure is a masterwork.
Can it win? The festival’s love affair with the region’s film culture will ensure Tales is a prime contender. Features actor Peiman Moaadi, star of the 2011 Film Prize recipient, A Separation.

TANGERINE (Dir: Sean Baker / USA; 88 mins)
What the Program says…: “Wickedly funny and refreshingly offbeat, Tangerine is a hilarious journey with two transgender sex workers through the lively streets of LA. The film is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed entirely on an iPhone 5s.”
The Buzz: Under festival director Nashen Moodley, The Sydney Film Festival has skewed determinedly younger in recent years. If the 2015 Jury is on board with that agenda, expect Tangerine to be high in contention. Shot entirely on an iPhone 5s, Sean Baker’s crowd-pleasing LA night-life romp, “teems with the sort of wry, deceptively offhand details that convey an authentically fascinating sense of place (Variety).”
Can it win? Sydney is not above awarding top honours to ultra-contemporary, left-of-centre works – Nicholas Winding Refn’s flouro-drenched shocker Only God Forgives won two years ago. May surprise… 

TEHRAN TAXI (Dir: Jafar Panahi / Iran; 82 mins / pictured, right)
What the Program says…: “Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, this is the third film made in secret by Jafar Panahi since a ban on filmmaking was imposed on him in Iran, and finds him at his most creative and entertaining.”
The Buzz: The very presence of Iranian great Jafar Panahi places Tehran Taxi amongst key contenders at any festival. Here, his incisive direction is coupled with his affable on-screen charm as he chaffeurs unsuspecting countrymen, engaging them in conversation on the state of their homeland.
Can it win? The Berlinale Golden Bear trophy suggests Panahi’s latest is more than just ‘Taxi Cab Confessions’ Iran style. The Sydney Film Festival has long supported his films; this, his first official nomination, may see him rewarded for his incredible body of work.

VICTORIA (Dir: Sebastian Schipper / Germany; 140 mins / pictured, right)
What the Program says…: “Breathtaking and audacious, this one-shot wonder is a spectacular Berlin heist thriller. Where single-shot films are usually bound to a narrow location, Victoria is expansive, boldly exploring the city over one crazy night.”
The Buzz: A high-voltage blast to the bank robbery genre, director Schipper’s single-shot thriller is a vast, often dizzying technical marvel (not too far removed from the equally inventive Run Lola Run, in which Schipper acted). The illusion of single-take cinema is a hot-button issue at present, thanks to Alejandro Inarritu’s Birdman); if Schipper’s vision expands on that offered by the Oscar winner, expect awards glory.
Can it win? Strong odds.

VINCENT (Dir: Thomas Salvador / France; 77 mins)
What the Program says…: “A young man takes on superhuman qualities when he comes into contact with water in this gentle, minimalist French superhero film with a difference, filled with playful humour, deep emotion and constant surprises.”
The Buzz: May be as close to that long-overdue bigscreen version as us closet Aquaman fans will ever get. Understated yet very funny, Salvador’s quirky character study has a disarmingly directionless charm that will win it many fans…
Can it win?…though probably not the Sydney Film Festival top honour.

Ticketing and venue information can be found at the Sydney Film Festival website.

In Paris overnight, before an audience at the world headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), director Shawkat Amin Korki screened his acclaimed third feature, Memories on Stone. A film-within-a-film account of a disparate crew’s efforts to produce an epic based upon the horrific Al Anfar genocide, the Iraqi/German co-production earned the honour after having taken out the prestigious UNESCO Award at the 2014 Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) in Brisbane last November. A few hours before he accepted the trophy (pictured, below; with presenter, actor Jack Thompson) he sat with SCREEN-SPACE to discuss his most personal and acclaimed film to date…

“It is sort of a backstage version of production on my previous films,” said the softly spoken Korki, 42, a Kurdish Iraqi native who has lived in self-imposed exile in Iran for over two decades. Having fled the regime that ruthlessly controlled his homeland, he has forged an international career with his films Crossing the Dust (2006) and Kick Off (2009) finding audience and festival favour globally. Says the director,  “Memories on Stone is an account of many of the experiences that Kurdistani filmmakers must endure when filming in our homeland.” The script was developed after having received in 2011 the Motion Picture Association APSA Academy Film Fund.

The moving, darkly humourous narrative follows childhood friends Hussein (Hussein Hassan) and Alan (Nazmi Kirik) and the tumultuous personal and social hurdles they must overcome to film their pet project – a bigscreen take on the murder of 180,000 Iraqi Kurds under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. From the powerful prologue that puts in context the importance of cinema for both Hussein and his countrymen, we meet such vivid characters as the egocentric celebrity Roj Azad (Suat Usta; pictured, right centre) and Sinur, the meek, troubled teacher (Shima Molaei; pictured, below) who must face her own terrible memories of the massacre if she is to honourably portray victims of the killings.

“The many characters made it very difficult to write,” recalls Korki, “but we were able to focus on Sinur and Roj as key characters. They push the story, even though there are many stories. But somehow, Sinur make’s (the story) very unique and binds all the thematic strands together.”

With meagre budgetary support available and strict controls on content in place, filmmaking in the sector falls to impassioned artists like Shawkat Amin Korki to bring their ambitious visions to life. With Memories of Stone, the task the director set himself was manifestly more difficult. “It was like making two movies but with only one budget,” he recalls. “We shot the two movies concurrently with each other. My co-writer and producer Mahmet Ashktar, and I did not expect it to be such a huge and difficult production for our region, but when we started shooting it proved very difficult, both with the budget and the condition present in Kurdistan.”

In addition to his skill as a storyteller, Korki displays a deft technical touch, switching between film stock and aspect ratios to further delineate between his shoot and the fictional production. “While we were shooting, I knew we had to make the two different films somehow very distinctive,” he recalls. “We shot on different cameras, but I wasn’t sure about switching between 1:85 scope and the (wider) frame to convey the (two narratives) until much later. That decision came during post-production, but proved difficult because I hadn’t shot to the specifics required.”

For Shawkat Amin Korki, his vision for Memories on Stone was as a contemporary testament to the centuries of hardship his fellow Kurds had suffered. “Kurdistan has many tragic moments in its history, perhaps none bigger than Al Anfar,” he states. “The film-inside-the-film was not (originally) about that event, it was more about our old history, but I decided to make it about our present. It is the people of modern Kurdistan that are interpreting our nation’s past and it’s suffering through art and their stories.”

Footnote: As part of the UNESCO screening event in Paris, APSA Executive Chairman Michael Hawkins made the announcement that Shawkat Amin Korki will act as Chair of the APSA Youth Animation and Documentary International Jury for the 2015 APSA ceremony.

With East coast film buffs re-engaging with the real world in the wake of Sydney’s 2015 festival season, moviegoers of the Western capital are just getting revved up.

Revelation, Perth’s annual international film festival event, bows its 10-day screening schedule on July 2 at the city's arthouse mecca, The Luna, with director Jeremy Sims’ Last Cab to Darwin. Starring Aussie acting great Michael Caton (pictured, above; with co-star, Ningali Lawford), the wry comedy/drama follows a terminally-ill outback cabbie as he seeks a painless, dignified final few days in the care of Jacki Weaver’s right-to-die doctor.

The challenging, hot-topic pic may not seem to be the first choice for an opening night ‘party starter’, but program director Jack Sargeant (in conjunction with festival head Richard Sowada) saw a balance of light and dark in the work that was a good fit for Revelation. “It's a movie about life and what living means. I think that we open with films that feel right, that set a mood and inspire conversation,” says Sargeant (pictured, right). “Last Cab… does that, I think. It’s a very human story.”

Revelation’s reputation as a key supporter of domestic film output is evident in the three world premieres of locally produced works. They are co-directors Jenny Crabb and Susie Conte’s retro-themed celebration of Perth’s iconic live music venue, Parkerville Amphitheatre: Sets, Bugs and Rock’n’Roll; feature debutant Platon Theodoris’ Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites (a co-production with Indonesia); and the third feature from Stefan Popescu (founder of Sydney’s Underground Film Festival), a melding of the porn and undead genres evocatively titled Vixen Velvet’s Zombie Massacre.

Sargeant was convinced that the three warranted the coveted ‘world premiere’ status, even if the ‘why?’ of Revelation programming remains elusive. “The qualities that we look for are shifting all the time,” he says, hinting at the free-spirited, enigmatic nature synonymous with the event. “A good movie has no set criteria but when you watch it, it works. Some films may not work one year but may another year. There's a sense that the process of curating is also about the relationships between movies as well as just the movies standing alone.”

The program strand Get Your Shorts On! focuses on the talents of six locally-based short-form filmmakers (including Kelrick Martin's Karroyul; pictured, right), whose works have received funding from such local entities as ScreenWest, Lotterywest and the Film & Television Institute. International mini-movies feature alongside local works from Bryn Tilly (Umbra) and David Coyle (Enfilade) in the 13-strong Experimental Showcase line-up, which welcomes works from Russia (Andre Silva’s Cybergenesis; Alexei Dimitriev’s The Shadow of Your Smile); the United Kingdom (Point and Untitled014, both from Christopher Macfarlane); and, the USA (Irina Arnaut’s Working Title; Kelly Kirshtner’s A Nice Bowl of Soup).

International features bowing on our shores include expat Australian filmmaker Kane Senes’ moody western, Echoes of War (featuring It Follows star, Maika Monroe); Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia’s haunting sci-fi oddity, H.; Katherine Dohan and Alanna Stewarts’ left-of-centre coming-of-age feelgooder, What I Love About Concrete; the hauntingly beautiful The Creeping Garden, Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp’s study in the properties of plasmodial slime; Belinda Sallin’s melancholy biography Dark Star: HR Giger’s Welt; and, SXSW 2014 Audience Award winner, Yakona, from Paul Collins and Anlo Sepulveda. Festival hits making their Perth debut include The Tribe, Tehran Taxi, The Duke of Burgundy, Spring and The Forbidden Room.

Perhaps certain to mess with minds more than anything else at Revelations 2015 is the Australian premiere of Asphalt Watches, a Crumb-like work of animated surrealism from Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver. The story of Bucktooth Cloud and Skeleton Hat and their hitchhiked journey across Canada in 2000 rattled even the experienced eye of Jack Sargeant. “Asphalt Watches just made me think, 'what the hell?'” he recalls. “Its a glimpse inside some crazy nightmare/dream, a cross between something like South Park and classic underground comix. It has that sensibility that animation can be crazy and stupid and funny and do things nothing else can. I like that.”

Sargeant’s encyclopaedic knowledge of and love for music is evident in his programming of Denny Tedesco’s The Wrecking Crew (pictured, right), a tribute to the largely unknown session players that created the LA sound of the 60’s; Theory of Obscurity, Don Hardy Jr’s profile of oddball San Francisco new-wavers, The Residents; Marc Eberle’s study in a country’s musical heritage and unique pop performers, Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock and Roll; the genre deconstruction Industrial Music for the Urban Decay, from Travis Collins and Amelie Ravalec; Robert Nazar Arjoyan’s ethereal study of gender, race and electronic music, When My Sorrow Died: The Legend of Armen Ra and The Theremin; and, Wes Orshoski’s biopic-doco of punk trailblazers, The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead.

The cinema of both Iran and Poland will be represented in sidebar events, as will a 10-strong shorts program suitable for family audiences. The RevCon Workshops and Panels feature Festival Patron, actor Steve Bisley (The Power of The Monologue), Last Cab to Darwin director Jeremy Sims (Building Director’s Skillsets; pictured, right) and digital pioneer Craig Deeker (Digital Filmmaking Masterclass). Launching in 2015 is the Film Festival Director’s Forum during which the likes of Sydney’s Nashen Moodley and Iranian Film Festival toppers Anne Demy-Geroe and Armin Milardi dissect festival curation. Returning will be the much-loved Revel 8 mini-fest, celebrating the 8mm film format, and Revelation Academic, the engaging gabfest that allows for voices from all corners of the industry to be heard on the most immediate issues.

“I hope that with the academic strand they get the chance to think about new ideas, theoretical and cultural aspects of film, and I hope that with the workshops that they get inspired to pick up cameras and make their own works,” says Sargeant who, since he joined Sowada’s team in 2007, has helped form a unique film festival experience in Australia’s most remote capital city. “I hope that I've introduced audiences to things they'd otherwise not know about, and may otherwise never get to see on the big screen. If there's any legacy, I hope it is that people have the opportunity to see interesting work, meet filmmakers and become inspired. That would be a good legacy for Revelation.”

Full details of Revelation Perth International Film Festival can be found at the event’s official website.

When Davidson Cole announced his talent in 2002 with his feature debut Design, the film world took notice. The AV Club said his leading man turn had, “…Nicolas Cage-like volatility, (making) for a compelling, put-upon hero”; Variety called his direction, “…comparable to the David Lynch of Blue Velvet”. Thirteen years later, his multi-faceted talents utilised in fields such as video game design, short documentary and experimental filmmaking and fiction writing, the LA-based auteur brings audiences Hollywood, his slightly screwy, darkly-shaded, wildly engaging sophomore effort. Ahead of the international premiere of Hollywood at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Cole spoke at length with SCREEN-SPACE about the passion it takes to stay committed to your vision, the origins of his latest narrative and the dark, funny love letter to film lore his new work represents…

You’ve a very eclectic film resume, from the documentary The 95^th to Design and now Hollywood. Who are the artists and filmmakers that have inspired your creativity?

The movie that inspired me to make films was Raiders of the Lost Ark. I have no desire to ever make a movie like it, but the summer it was released, I must have seen it 20 times. I even knew the inflections of the dialogue by heart. This past year, my favorite film was Godard's Goodbye To Language. His work has always been a touchstone for me. Love Lynch, Altman and Cronenberg. I try to watch American Movie at least once a year, my favorite film about making movies. Sam Shepard's dialogue, especially how he navigates a monolog. Dogs inspire me too. Big fan of dogs.

Hollywood represents the type of adventurous but assured work audiences rarely get to see in this era of ‘palatable product.’ Was the determination to film Hollywood on your terms part of the reason it has been over a decade since Design, which Variety called, “a most auspicious narrative debut,” citing your “fascinatingly complex screenplay and bold direction”?

Following the Sundance premiere of Design, I planned on shooting Angels, this twisted, low sci-fi take on the after life; an ambitious project, tried for years to put it together, with actors attaching then moving on when we couldn't wrangle all the financing. It was frustrating. It can be a time-sink to remain too hopeful on a project getting financed at the expense of creating. The last couple years I've become more focused on what is possible with the resources at my disposal, shooting shorts or micro-budget features. I'm much happier with the prospect of shooting 3 to 4 films for next to nothing, than running around for 3 to 4 years trying to finance something for millions. That being said, I never stop trying to develop big ideas. Before we decided to make Hollywood we were tossing around this psycho-sexual nightmare titled Bathyal; insanely ambitious at the micro-budget level, but doable. After script reads and discussions with my producers Sam (Zuckerman) and Tom (Bailey) (pictured, above; on-set, with the director) and my cinematographer Dominique Martinez, Hollywood emerged as the film within reach, the one with the fiercest hold on my imagination at the time.

How did you pitch the look and decidedly offbeat narrative of Hollywood to potential investors?

I always make it clear to investors that I don't plan on playing it safe as a director but the discussion starts with the script. The narrative flourishes and visual style are rarely apparent for me at that stage. That develops, throughout the process, so I let the script and my past work be the pitch.

The heightened reality of Hollywood is brought to vivid life by some extraordinary characters.  How much of ‘Dave’, ‘Champagne’, ‘Brad Pitt’ and ‘Mary Elizabeth’ was on the page, and how much came alive in rehearsal and on-set?

I don't rehearse with my actors. I enjoy the danger of discovery on-set. I convey my own impressions of a character beforehand with a meeting or two, then rely on the actor to bring their own inner life, make their own choices, adjusting quickly on-set if need be. It seems counter-intuitive, on a micro-budget project, where time is so precious, but it works for me and keeps the cast and crew vibrant and focused on set, and when a moment really hits, is genuine, everyone knows it and that is contagious. (pictured, right; Michael Serrato as 'Brad Pitt', left, and William Belli as 'Champagne').

As important as the eccentric, larger-than-life cast is, the need for two central perfs that ground the film is even more crucial. Tell us about the creating the chemistry with Dana Melanie…

The role was a challenge for Dana, very different from anything else she had ever done. We knew going in Farrah was the toughest role to cast, to execute. My initial vision for the role changed to encompass the innocence Dana naturally brings to the screen, but then there is this strange fire and mischievous flicker that pops into her eyes when least expected. That combo is why we cast her. I was very proud of Dana. (pictured, below; Melanie as Farrah).

You dabble in some well-worn genre clichés – the hooker with the heart of gold; the Las Vegas gambler, in deep with The Mob; the flamboyant homosexual archetype. Yet the story beats, stylisation and drama feel fresh. Is Hollywood your take on classic B-movie lore?

The film is loaded with tropes and references, some more obvious than others, but all of them woven into the narrative with satirical intent. The big film biz is morbidly obsessed with trotting out the same clichés, the same narrative structures. Whenever someone mentions the "Hero's Journey", I get hit with a slight wave of nausea. Audiences are tired of it. As a framing device for the real narrative, I introduced overused tropes then push them into unexpected directions. Familiar territory quickly becomes unfamiliar, unsettling. It was fun finding opportunities to morph a trope then chisel it into our narrative.

Hollywood explores reconciling with one’s heritage. It is inherent to some of your other projects, too – your grandfather’s life and legacy in both The 95^th and There is No Car, for example. Why do the ‘sins of the father’ hold such a thematic fascination for you?

While there are certain aspects of my relationship with my own dad in Hollywood, fearing the inability to avoid the failures of your bloodline is more reflective of my dad's experience with his father. Ultimately, as much as he tried to be different, in many ways he wound up making some of the same self-destructive decisions with his own family. It haunts him a bit, I'm sure. I think we all secretly dread the prospect of becoming just like a parent, no matter how healthy or toxic the relationship. The demons of a bloodline are difficult to shake, though.

The tech aspects are very slick – the production design; the cinematography. What was your ‘directorial mantra’ to the key creative crew?

Dominique (pictured, right; on-set) and I spent a lot of time crafting the shots beforehand. She has an amazing eye for composition and many of the most striking shots in the film were the result of her taking our initial ideas and adapting them to the confined space. I wanted long takes, wide shots, subtle moves. Let the action unfold within a single shot as often as possible, which proved a challenge to G & E and production design, since an entire room was in play most shots with the camera moving through the space. Given our limited resources and time, the skill and creative energy of the crew was vital to the visual style of the film.

From here on in, is your career geared towards being before the camera or behind the lens?

Acting for me is the loosest, most chaotic part of the process. I enjoy the physicality of acting and the immediacy of it, but I don't have much interest in pursuing a career as an actor. First and foremost, I consider myself a writer. My ideas always begin with character, with an exchange of dialogue. The narrative and visuals evolve from there. As a director, I base the visual beats of my scene off the characters - who currently has the power, whose point of view matters most at a particular moment - and move the lens accordingly.  Traditional coverage doesn't interest me. I rarely shoot a master shot. I almost never use them in post-production. If the opening beat of a scene warrants an extreme close-up, then we shoot that. If the next beat needs an uber wide to establish the tension of distance, we shoot that. No need to waste time shooting anything else, acquiring coverage. I love Werner Herzog's quote on coverage..."When you do open heart surgery you don't go for the appendix or toenails, you go straight for the beating heart".

Hollywood has its International Premiere at Revelation Perth International Film Festival on Saturday July 4, with further screenings to follow. Ticket and venue information can be found at the official website here.

Two upwardly mobile Iranian students are hours away from departing their Tehran apartment for a new life in the titular Australian city when, asked to briefly care for a sleeping infant, their destinies take a harrowing turn. Debutant writer/director Nima Javidi’s complex, harrowing morality tale, one of the most anticipated films at the 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), plays out as both a tragic drama and riveting psychological thriller in its dissection of two lives altered in an instant. Despite a fine grasp of English, Javidi spoke to SCREEN-SPACE via a translator ("I want to concentrate on the answers, I don’t want to worry about my translation.”), only hours before being awarded the Best Screenplay honour at the 2014 Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) last November…

“It took me about 11 months to write the script,” says the 35 year-old filmmaker (pictured, above), eager to chat despite feeling the effects of jetlag, having only arrived in Brisbane for the APSA ceremony the morning of the interview.  “But before I even sat down to write, I spent a great deal of time on the structure of the story and how to create my characters. There any many layers to this film, both narratively and in the lead characters.” He cites a personal experience as the inspiration for the premise; six years ago, while staying at a mountain retreat with friends, he was left alone with a newborn and found himself gripped with anxiety while the child slept motionless.

As Amir and Sara, the couple whose lives are irrevocably altered by both fateful circumstance and desperate rationalization, Javidi sought two of Iranian’s most talented and bankable stars, Peyman Moaadi (About Elly, 2009; A Separation, 2011; Camp X-Ray, 2014) and Negar Javaherian (Tala va mes, 2011; Howze Naghashi, 2013; Tales, 2014). Each bought nuance and detail to the protagonist roles, working with the first-time feature director to flesh out the dark but very human dramatics of the story. “The characters undergo experiences that are universal – fear, doubt and the responsibility of being an adult,” notes Javidi.

Leading man Moaadi’s experience working with Iranian filmmaking great Asghar Farhadi on the international hit A Separation was particularly useful; critics have noted the similarities between Farhadi’s everyman protagonists and Javidi’s single-setting character study. Says Javidi of his actor, “He liked the script from the early stages and collaborated with me from very early on. (He was) especially aware of how best he could help a first time filmmaker. He is particularly strong when you need a very realistic presence in your film; he brings a grounded, very human quality to his characters.”

The presence of Moaadi and Javaherian was also a commercial coup, their profiles helping the film find a domestic and international prominence that a first-time director may not usually find forthcoming. “When you have a star name, the doors do swing a little more easily with regard to financing. But I never considered casting (them) as a means to get the film financed,” reassures the filmmaker. “I needed (actors) who could serve the characters and tell the story I wanted to tell.” On the back of universal acclaim (Variety praised the “gripping premise, craftily orchestrated”), Javidi has travelled with his film to Venice, where it opened the prestigious International Critics Week strand, as well as festival slots in Stockholm, Tokyo, Cairo, Lisbon and Zurich ahead of it’s MIFF showing. (Pictured, right; the director with his 2014 Best Screenplay APSA)

One key aspect in creating the intense drama is the rhythmic soundscape conjured by Javidi and his masterful sound designers, Vahid Maghadasi and Iraj Shahzadi. As the clock ticks towards the character’s departure time, ambient sounds begin to clip the actor’s dialogue and seep into the real world tension with shattering effect. “Most of those sounds – the mobile phone noise, the sound buzzer, the sirens – were written into the script, specifically complementing my intentions with the scenes,” says the director. “There was no music soundtrack in the film so it was crucial to use the detailed sound effects to convey the story in the best possible way.”

Finally, driven by the fiercely parochial Sydney-based mindset of the Screen-Space office, we had to ask Nima Javidi why he settled on the admittedly cosmopolitan but decidedly chilly climes of Melbourne as the dream destination for his young Iranians. The director laughed, finally explaining, “Two reasons. First, some surveys came out over the last ten years that nominated Melbourne as one of the best cities in the world, a title that I think it maybe earned a couple of years ago.* And then, I just like the way you guys pronounce it! The way you drop the ‘r’ and make it ‘Melbun’. That’s funny to me. Why waste all that ink!”

*"Melbourne named world's most livable city..." - ABC News, August 2014

Ticketing and venue information for all 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival sessions can be found at the official website here.

Read more about Melbourne in 'The SCREEN-SPACE Ten: Our Favourite Films of 2014'.

Debutant director Rhiannon Bannenberg tackled her debut feature, the striking and thoughtful Ambrosia, with a bold self-belief rarely seen in first-time filmmakers. Thematically entwining loss, memory, grief and love, Bannenberg’s script follows a troubled young woman named India (Rebecca Montalti), who returns to her childhood home with family and friends to find peace; a chance meeting with an enigmatic stranger called Harriet (Natasha Velkova) changes the lives of everyone. A deeply personal, skillfully realized drama, Ambrosia puts the local industry on notice that Bannenberg is a unique talent. Hailing from the Illawarra region on the New South Wales southern coast (a key locale that her camera captures exquisitely), Bannenberg spoke to SCREEN-SPACE ahead of her film’s hometown debut…

The film exhibits a very strong European sensibility, comparable to the likes of Mia Hansen-Love; it will play very well in upscale festivals overseas. What filmmakers, artists, writers inspired your vision?

I grew up in an old house, with a family that encouraged me to value both the past and present. As I grew older, I was drawn to English literature, painting, poetry and history. I have a particular love for John Keats ‘Endymion’, John Fowles ‘The French Lieutenants Woman’, Gillian Armstrong’s film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’ and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’.

It is clearly a very personal film. But is it a recollection on a moment in your life or does the ‘personal’ extend to something more cathartic?

The film is in part drawn from my own experiences of chronic pain as a young adult, and also just as much a figment of my imagination. Now when I watch the film in its entirety, I can see the cathartic qualities that helped me accept and manage life with chronic pain.

The chemistry between the cast is very strong. Was there an extended rehearsal period or were they chosen from a core group of colleagues? Was there much improvisation?

I am very fortunate to have a supportive, energetic and creative group of friends – all of whom I recruited to become the cast and crew of Ambrosia. We didn’t have much rehearsal time, but we did have open discussions about the tone and style of the film and everyone was able to put their ideas forward. I knew if the cast and crew had a strong friendship, it would be reflected in the story we were telling on screen.  These friendships have lasted beyond Ambrosia and I hope to work with such a vibrant and talented group of people on another film. 

It is an exceedingly ‘beautiful’ film – it’s rich look, the beauty of all the cast members, the photogenic setting, the lush and varied music, the costuming. How does the ‘styling’ of your film, its aesthetic qualities, enhance the drama?

The visual tapestry of the film was influenced heavily by my home environment and my own desire to find and be immersed in beautiful, haunting places. I wanted the story of India and her experiences to take place in a slightly altered reality, one where there was an ambiguity of time and place. I also wanted to bring the characters to life in the very places I spent my own childhood – the beautiful Illawarra on the South Coast of NSW.

Be it painting or poetry or prose or even kite building, creativity and artistry fuels and defines every key character in your film. What does Ambrosia, your own artful creation, express about you?

In reality, I’d say I was quite pragmatic but in my imagination and creative expression, I am a complete romantic.  I’m fascinated by the idea of being connected to people and to places and I definitely have a romanticised nostalgia for the past. I am constantly driven forwards by the desire to connect to others and express human thoughts and emotions – and I think film is such an eloquent, powerful and experiential medium to express these stories beautifully.

Ambrosia will screen August 8 at the Gala Theatre in Warrawong; session and booking information can be found here. Further information about the film’s screening season can be found at Fan-Force.com

“I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey…” – The Criminologist (Charles Gray), The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In his new book, ‘We Can Be Who We Are: Movie Musicals from the 1970s’, author Lee Gambin delves deep into the decade when the movie musical became, in the author’s words, “a diverse, free thinking wild animal.” Referencing his mammoth work and its commitment to both the sublime (the Bob Fosse classics, Cabaret and All That Jazz; pictured, below) and the ridiculous (Nancy Walker's Can't Stop the Music), SCREEN-SPACE thought we had asked the impossible of the Melbourne-based writer; “Of the 200-odd movies, docos and TV specials featured, can you pick your five most memorable moments?” His response (edited for space, regrettably) provided insight into the mind of a passionate film academic and a compelling teaser for his exhaustingly researched, wonderfully entertaining ode…

“Chava’s Ballet” from FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)
Canadian director Norman Jewison was on a winning streak (The Cincinnati Kid, 1965; The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming, 1966; In the Heat of the Night, 1967; The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968) when he helmed the adaptation one of the most successful stage musicals in history. With writer Joseph Stein and star Topol reprising roles that saw them become the toast of the theatrical world, Jewison delivered; the film won 3 Oscars, including the first of five for composer John Williams. Jewison double-downed on iconic 70’s musicals, following up Fiddler… with Jesus Christ Superstar.
Says Gambin, “Late in the mournful and downbeat second act, Golde (Norma Crane) tells Tevye (Topol) that Chava (Neva Small) has married a young Christian boy in an extreme act of tradition-breaking. Tevye, proclaiming angrily that Chava is “dead to us,” saddles himself to his cart (now without his lame horse, adding to the misery of the piece) and begins to plough the dead fields. The gorgeous fiddle, ringing out such a sorrowful tune, is outstanding. The staging of this dance, set in a dreamlike silhouette, is sheer movie magic.”

"It's Not Easy" from PETE'S DRAGON (1977)
Rarely spoken of amongst Disney’s classics, Pete’s Dragon nevertheless earned solid box-office numbers (including re-issues) and has grown in stature over time. A rare foray into the live-action/animation crossover genre, its turn-of-the-century setting and cast of ageing Hollywood greats (Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Shelley Winters, Jim Backus) seemed anachronistic for a film released in the late 70s, but its charm and innocence have endeared it to generations. Director Don Chaffey’s skill with non-human stars (Greyfriars Bobby, 1961; Ride a Wild Pony, 1975; The Magic of Lassie, 1978; C.H.O.M.P.S., 1979) and groundbreaking effects (Jason and The Argonauts, 1963; One Million Years BC, 1966) ensured the titular beast inspired real emotions; songstress Helen Reddy, as Nora, and cherubic tyke Sean Marshall, as Pete, warm hearts in Gambin’s favourite moment.
Says Gambin, “Here are two people who have found each other, and here in the lighthouse - a building used to lead ships to shore, reuniting the sea bound with the land - these two isolated characters come to understand that life and love are most certainly “not easy”. The lyrics are charming and work on a number of levels, as Nora sings “Now that you have him, hold him, treasure him from day to day”. While singing about this supposedly fabricated dragon, she is also lamenting her own personal angel, her absentee lover, a sailor believed to be missing at sea.”

"Jack and Jill" from OH! CALCUTTA! (1972)
(CONTENT WARNING – Sexually Graphic)
The off-Broadway play was a groundbreaker, tackling the counter-culture generation’s free-love vibe at the frontline of America’s theatrical traditions. Created by UK drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the full-frontal nudity and blunt, brutal satire made it the must-see stage event of the new decade. The film version, not so much. Critics savaged director Jacques Levy’s musical-revue take on sexual mores, despite contributions by such talented wordsmiths as Sam Shephard, Robert Benton, John Lennon and Jules Feiffer; Tynan disowned it. Tech issues didn’t help; Levy filmed a stage version on CCTV, before adapting the footage for theatrical distribution.
Says Gambin, ”The sexually frustrated Jack (George Welbes) declares, “I got my imagination and I got my cock.” Jill (Patricia Hawkins) tells Jack that she is scared of him because “he is a boy” and she worries about him using her for sex before deserting her. Jack gains Jill’s trust, persuading her to measure his penis – hence, participating in the game. He then inserts the ruler into her vagina. Startled, Jill slowly begins to enjoy the penetration. Jack gets violent, raping Jill, before resorting to moving her mouth and forcing a smile to stretch across her face. This is a final insult and a brilliant condensation of male sexual dominance, implying that she will enjoy what she is dealt. Jack’s misogyny is a slap in the face to the sexual liberties of the late sixties and early seventies, which is what the musical is singing – and stripping – about.“

The argument at the dinner table in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)
One of the biggest ‘zeitgeist’ hits in Hollywood history, director John Badham’s urban drama/disco dazzler is remembered for John Travolta’s star-making dance floor moves, set to the Bee Gee’s bestselling music. But Gambin points to the film’s other great strength, namely it’s depiction of working class, inner city ethnicity and the inherent difficulties of the traditional patriarchal structure.
Says Gambin, “The dinner sequence features Tony draped in a table cloth to protect his clean silk shirt, like an ancient Roman; a leftover of Italian royalty stuck in a rut, living with his defeatist family. The film garnered some negative criticism regarding the stereotypical depiction of Italians, but director John Badham is not creating cartoons, rather concocting an acute dramatic portrayal of the distress that underlies percolating domestic violence. There is a subversive message here: this reincarnation of an Italian godlike superstar is not welcome in modern day Little Italy. When Tony enters the discos he frequents in and around Brooklyn, he becomes that god: he is in charge, carefree, highly sexual and the object of everyone’s admiration and affection.”

Staging and the use of Central Park in HAIR (1979)
The musical book from Gerome Ragni and James Rado filled out Milos Forman’s vast cinematic canvas in the acclaimed director’s bigscreen version of the iconic 60s story. Expectations were high - the stage play was the soundtrack to a generation of young people, whose social activism changed the course of American history; Forman had taken a four year break after sweeping the Oscars with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Critical response was mixed; Roger Ebert said the Czech director “brings life to the musical form in the same way that West Side Story did,” while Variety bemoaned, “The spirit and elan that captivated the Vietnam protest era are long gone.” Nearly 40 years since its release (and half a century since the events of its narrative), the debate continues as to Forman’s ambitious vision is masterpiece or folly.
Says Gambin, “Forman set the title song in a prison, highlighting freedom of expression. Long hair on men represents rebelliousness and a disregard for authority, whilst in jail (and in the military) short hair and crew cuts are mandatory, evidence of submission to dominant paradigm. The Be-In at Central Park is a beautiful piece, with the number Initials showcasing its dancers all in white and singing about the wonders of L.S.D. Forman sees the American context from an outsider’s perspective; he has a European eye, looking in and seeing suffering. Hair is an angry piece, but it also a funny, tender, moving piece of artistic expression. The film has its faults, but it is a successful translation of what is essentially a vaudevillian masterpiece, working a tribal element into this traditional theatrical style. Hair, a celebration and manifestation of Satanic panic, opened the same year as Rosemary’s Baby, evidence that Christianity was starting to be scrutinized and undervalued by the young."

We Can Be Who We Are is available on Amazon, via the publisher Bear Manor Media and via order where all good books are sold.
Read our interview with Lee Gambin about his last work, Murdered by Mother Nature: Exploring the Natural Horror Film.
Gambin is a regular contributor to Fangoria magazine; he is currently working on two new books - Blood Among The Stars: The Making of Carrie, and The Howling: Studies in The Horror Film. He is a key contributor to Melbourne's leading film appreciation group, Cinemaniacs.

Few films in recent memory have buzzed with such cinematic brio as The Visit, the terrifyingly entertaining story of teenage documentarian Rebecca (Olivia DeJonge), her kid brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) and the unnerving week they spend with their off-kilter grandparents (Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie). It is the latest vision from M. Night Shyamalan, the auteur whose blockbusters The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002) and The Village (2004) saw a Newsweek cover label him "The Next Spielberg". Yet The Visit represents a bold departure for the 45 year-old; his chilling, blackly funny script is brought to life using first-person perspectives and handheld camerawork. It exists in that ‘found-footage’ realm, but both deconstructs and revitalises the genre. The morning after a crowd-pleasing preview in Sydney’s cinema district, M. Night Shyamalan sat with SCREEN-SPACE to discuss his latest work…

There is a clarity, a leanness, about the storytelling in The Visit. I sensed that you were having a lot of fun making this film…

I’m so close to it still, but it seems like the most fun I’ve had making a film. I think it tops the last ‘most fun’ experience I’ve had, which was Signs. I think in both films you can sense a kind of buoyancy that was coming from me, like I was goofing around and having a good time playing with the movie. I think good energy comes from that.

After more than a decade of big studio projects, were there habits you had to unlearn or techniques you had to reassess when shooting the smaller scale, ‘first-person’ perspective used in The Visit?

I’m naturally a more intimate filmmaker. I think and view more in those terms. This idea of limitations and looking through one person’s perspective is naturally how I see things. Even when I’m shooting some big scene, with action and extras and all that stuff, I have to fight the instinct to see it as an intimate thing, to film it as one soldier’s perspective and examining it from the point of what they’re feeling. A story like this fits well for me, fits what I like to call the filmmaker's ‘accent.’ Some filmmakers are great journeyman directors. You hire them and they adapt and can be whatever you need them to be, but they don’t have a strong accent with the way they tell the story. In that way, The Visit is a really good match for me. I know I wrote it but I did that to match the story to my accent. I tend to come from a very optimistic place but do enjoy telling very dark stories, and my protagonists match that. (Pictured, above; Peter McRobbie as Pop-pop in The Visit)

In much of your work, your narratives centre on children in both lead roles (Wide Awake; The Sixth Sense; The Last Airbender; After Earth) and strong support parts (Signs). Why does childhood hold such a fascination for you?

It speaks to that period of time when we are growing up, let’s say between 10 and 15, that I find extraordinary but also sad and tragic. That’s when we stop believing, when we are throwing away childish beliefs and aspects of our imagination that help us be so present as children, and we start to believe instead in the real world. Those are sad moments. I spend a lot of time thinking about characters that are put in an extraordinary situation and then try to convince the adults, “Hey, something’s going on here.” And they are able to do this because they can still believe a little bit. I am anchored in that period because a lot of my movies are about faith and belief.

The casting of these two Australian actors, Ed Oxenbould and Olivia DeJonge, continues an incredible winning streak in your unearthing of child actors…

Casting is so critical and it is a very hard skill set to learn. You have to see something in them that you are going to have to draw out. That may be something that they may not have necessarily given you in the auditions, but you have to see it in them somewhere. It is their anchor; they are pivoting their emotions off this anchor, and you have to be able to say, “Ok, that’s it.” That’s hard to do, especially when casting early on and the material is still forming. I was very lucky with Ed and Olivia. I always look for a handful of traits when casting kids. I need them to be super smart, because we are going analyse the craft of acting in such a deep way I have to be able to talk to them about it as if they were adults. Secondly, they have to be good people, because that is what I want to bring out of the characters. And the third thing, perhaps the most important thing, is their family situation. Their parents need to be people who I can talk to and I can respect, because it is a team game when working with a child actor; I’ll push them and push them and I’ll eventually need to go through the parents to get to them. (Pictured, above; Shyamalan, left, directing Ed Oxenbould on the set of The Visit).

When directors place a camera in their character's hands, it is an opportunity to comment on the nature of their craft. What does Becca’s attitude to film reveal about you?

You know, both the kids represent two sides of me. Becca is kind of in awe of the art of filmmaking and an aspiring artist, even when it tips over into pretension or into a dogma about it, a pompousness that is stiff and unwavering. I feel all those things about filmmaking. Then there is the other side, that being ‘the entertainer’ and that’s Ed. Sometimes I just want to be a mischievious kid, capturing something shocking on film.

The core emotional arc in The Visit is about a family’s generational divide. How did this form?

Every story I write, I glimpse scenes and dialogue that ultimately pose the question, “What is the film about?” There’s a unifying thematic theory underneath it all, so that every scene represents a goal, one same thing. The Visit is about forgiveness. What happens when we do forgive, or when we don’t forgive. There’s a lot of pain in all the backstories of all the characters; the mum and her parents, or the kids and their dad. They are being juxtaposed throughout the film. When we don’t forgive, we eventually have to consider the years that are lost, the love that lost, the opportunities that are lost. That is the lesson that Becca comes to learn. (Pictured, above; Olivia DeJonge as Rebecca, left, and Deanna Dunagan as Nana in The Visit).

Prior to the screening last night, you made some very passionate points about the value of seeing films like The Visit as a shared, communal experience…

It is everything to me, that’s why I do what I do. Whenever someone tries to suggest that we can release across all these platforms, I just say, “No!” When I saw Raiders of The Lost Ark, I remember thinking, “Wow, this is it.” I saw it in an old theatre, something like 1500 seats, a sold-out session; I couldn’t sit with my friends. The experience I had bordered upon religious (laughs). And I use that word because it was like a group hysteria was happening. I was transported; this enormous crowd was transported. Now would I want to watch Raiders… for the first time, alone on my couch in my den? That’s sad! I would have been denied that shared experience. It is one of my great memories, seeing those great movies in great movie theatres. With The Visit, I was determined to make every gasp, every laugh, a crucial part of that shared experience. It is a film that is really about the responsibilities we, the filmmakers, take on when we choose to tell our stories to a group of strangers.

The Visit opens in US theatres on September 11; the film opens in Australia on September 24. Check local listings for other territories. 

The name Kristen Condon doesn't register with the numbed masses of middle-class suburbia. But for the counter-cultural types that embrace the alternative edge of our national cinema, the actress is one of the brightest, most enigmatic stars in their dark, often disturbing universe. At the 2015 Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF), Condon features in no less than four films from directors at the forefront of subversive cinema. “Many of the best filmmakers to come out of Australia have their roots in this community,” Condon tells SCREEN-SPACE, “It is an invaluable talent pool to be involved with and an integral part of Melbourne’s alternative culture.”

Kristen Condon has built an impressive resume of indie sector roles (The Beautiful and Damned, 2010; Ricky! The Movie, 2010; Start Options Exit, 2014; Chocolate Strawberry Vanilla, 2014) and been seen by 2million YouTubers as co-star of the 2013 Tropfest runner-up, Makeover. That experience affords her unique insight into the low-budget filmmaking process, knowledge that she drew upon when asked to recall her time shooting the four movies in which she can be seen at MUFF 2015… 

Under a Kaleidoscope (Dir: Addison Heath; 2014)
Addison Heath’s directorial debut features Condon as Beatrice, the abused neighbour to oddball shut-in Caleb (Kenji Shimada). The pair bond through their adjoining wall and form a friendship that draws Caleb out of his home and ultimately himself, albeit into the violent world of Beatrice’s gangster boyfriend.
Says Condon, “This was my most challenging role to date. From the start I knew Beatrice’s story had to be portrayed with the upmost respect for victims of intense physical abuse. I tried to bring a dimension to the character that people could empathize with. At it’s core this is the tale of a girl who feels trapped. I can relate to feeling trapped, in other ways to Beatrice, and this feeling was what I believe anchored my performance. Addison is an exceptional filmmaker and human being.  

Sizzler 77 (Dir: Timothy Spanos; 2015)
Alt-sector heavyweight Timothy Spanos’ indulges in some retro inner-city criminal (and comedic) mayhem, with hookers, pimps and undercover cops all decked out in the afros, platforms and bell-bottoms of the Summer of ‘77. Condon brings the funny as Vivian; in one memorable, she goes laugh-for-laugh with Tim Burn’s outrageous underworld kingpin, ‘Bossy Jim.’
Says Condon, “The two best things a comedic actress can be given are a script with a clear objective and an objective that is too great for the character to achieve. Tim is an actor’s director; he directs, acts and edits in his head on a shoot. It was apparent he knew precisely how he would cut the scenes together. This ability to see the big picture makes it easy to trust Tim. And trusting him is especially important when I am asked to don an afro wig, silver platform boots, a revealing halter neck dress and scream ‘PIG!!!!!!!’ multiple times in a suburban street.”

The Second Coming (Dir: Richard Wolstencroft; 2015)
Part 1 of his wildly experimental take on W.B. Yeats classic poem, MUFF Festival Director (and Condon’s real-life partner) Richard Wolstencroft presents his sixth feature as a ‘Special Event’ screening. In a cast that includes seemingly free-form acting contributions from the likes of adult industry identities Michael Tierney and William Margold, bad-boy rocker Pete Doherty and writer Gene Gregoritis (of ‘Sex & Guts’ magazine fame), Condon appears fleetingly ahead of an expanded role in Part 2. She was, however, present for much of the five-year shoot across several continents.
Says Condon, “Richard wanted to push things with this new film, to do something he hadn't done before.  Adopting techniques used by the likes of Paul Morrissey, Kenneth Anger and Terrence Malick, Richard wanted to try some more experimental methods of working. This approach is refreshing, fascinating, if sometimes at a little scary. It’s an entirely improvised story; Richard would wait until moments before rolling to tell me a scene and what it was about. Working as an actor that, not knowing how all the scenes would fit together, can be challenging.”

Lesbo-A-Go-Go (Dir: Andrew Leavold; 2003)
A decade before his obsession with Pinoy cinema led to the cult doco The Search for Weng Weng (also at MUFF 2015), Andrew Leavold unleashed upon the world this mockumentary chronicling the tawdry, debauched, hedonistic-fuelled downfall of 60s pornographer Doris Wishman. For the youthful, impressionable Kristen Condon, it was only her second time on a feature film set. (Also screening is Jarret Gahan’s making-of account, Gone Lesbo Gone: The Untold Tale of an Unseen Film.)
Says Condon, “Back in 2003, when I first entered the doors of Andrew’s legendary cult video store Trash Video, I had no idea what I was in for.  I just wanted to borrow a video, yet somehow became a part of his bizarre and wonderful film. Andrew is as fun and spontaneous a character as he is a director. I am so pleased to have been part of his first feature. I am only in Lesbo–A–Go-Go for a moment though, so blink and you’ll miss me.”

The 2015 Melbourne Underground Film Festival runs September 11-19. Ticketing and session information can be  found at the official website.

In the same week as global media is consumed by some of the most tragic images ever captured detailing the immigrant plight, SCREEN-SPACE spoke with filmmaker Prashant Nair about his latest film, Umrika. It is the story of Rama (Suraj Sharma, from Life of Pi), a soulful innocent thrust into manhood as he searches for Udai (Prateik Babbar), the older brother who left to chase dreams of a better life in the U.S.A. Having announced his talent with his debut feature Delhi in a Day (2011), Nair’s sophomore work is a deeply humanistic take on the refugee experience, an artfully crafted, compelling piece of contemporary Indian cinema with a truly international voice; it scored the Audience Award (World Cinema) at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival...


From the very first frame, the images of family and community unity in the rural setting are beautifully warm and engaging. Is it your belief that the essence of India can be found in a simpler, more traditional way of life? 

Rural India is often portrayed as gritty and backward with an emphasis on issues like caste, poverty and illiteracy. And while all this is certainly present, there is also a warmth and simplicity that is equally present. On our research trips we were overwhelmed by the generosity and spirit of the people we met in the various tiny villages and I really wanted to capture that aspect. There is a certain joy that you experience in villages that is hard to find in the big cities of India.

Why the title Umrika? The subtitles translate into full English except for the word ‘Umrika’, perhaps suggesting it is less about a place and more about an ideal.

Exactly. There are many ways to spell America in Hindi and this one is slightly unusual. I wanted it that way because, in many ways, it is not America they are discussing but their own very specific idea of what America is -  an ideal that they have fabricated through the various letters that arrive and their own personal fantasies, hopes and dreams. As Andy Warhol said: “Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see… you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.” (Pictured, right; actors Suraj Sharma, left, and Tony Revolori)

What were the thematic reasons you set the film in the 1980s? Is the image of America as the land where dreams can come true no longer believable in 2015?

Actually, my reasons for setting the film in the 80s are mainly selfish. I grew up the kid of Indian diplomats and we would move every three years. I never lived in India but we would visit every second summer for three months throughout the 80s. It’s the India of my childhood and the India I wanted to portray out of nostalgia. Things were very different – the country was much more closed. There were only several types of cars, Doordarshan (State TV) was your only choice, the advertising, movies, music – I wanted to recreate all that.  Indian fascination with America was also peaking during those years. I do think America’s image as the land of opportunity, although not as strong as before, is still very much alive and well across the planet.

The film details a very particular set of intrinsically Indian circumstances that lead to the Rama’s plight, yet his journey could represent the refugee experience of any nationality…

Large numbers of Indians try to immigrate both legally and illegally each year. Just last year, a container was found in New Jersey and U.S. Border control continues to find a significant number of Indian migrants attempting to enter through the Mexican border. In terms of immigration as a global phenomenon, UNHCR’s figures are devastating and we are in one of the worst periods since the Second World War in terms of displaced people, immigrants and refugees. The recent events in Europe are heartbreaking and I hope, in some small way, Umrika allows its audiences to think of immigration beyond statistics and to connect with the story and background of one very particular immigrant in a personal way.

Can you put in context, primarily for non-Indian audiences, the role that the Nepalese women play in your film? One glances suggestively at Rama; Ubai has married one. It may be construed that they are negative influences, based upon ethnicity.
 
It’s not at all a statement on any community in particular but more about fear, in general, of what is not familiar. In Jitvapur village, there is a neighbouring community of Nepalese migrants who live alongside the villagers but who are not accepted by the villagers. Rama’s mother believes that her sons should marry someone of their own community and will not tolerate any exception to that. We learn later that one of the reasons Udai left was to marry the woman he wanted to, who happened to be Nepalese and who his Mother would never accept because she is not of the same community. It could have been any community other than their own, she would be equally unhappy. There is a lot of cinema about caste in India and it’s rare that I have a conversation with someone outside of India and it doesn’t come up. I felt like ethnic and racial prejudice in India is less addressed but unfortunately equally prevalent. (Pictured, left; (l-r) actor Prateik Babbar, director/writer Prashant Nair and actor Suraj Sharma, at Sundance 2015).

The final scenes unfold with a heartbreaking ambiguity. Given the setting is 30 years ago, the revelations about the destinies of Rama and Ubai seem horribly current. That makes for a very sad story, doesn’t it?

I had seen a lot of great films about how difficult the immigrant journey is or how hard it is once they reach their destination. I wanted to make a film about everything up until the decision to immigrate is made – to really give a glimpse behind statistics and tell a personal and unique story, (one that) leaves the audience hoping that our protagonist reaches where he is heading. I hope that the magnitude of his decision has a very concrete impact on the audience, in terms of humanizing this incredibly courageous and heartbreaking decision that millions do make. As we speak, someone is making the same decision that Rama makes in the film, facing odds of unimaginable proportions and willingly heading towards an uncertain future. As heartbreaking as it might be in the film, these are decisions people are making every day.

Umrika begins its Australian season on September 10; check local listings for release dates in other territories.

‘Sentimental’ is not a word often bandied about when discussing the films of Gaspar Noe, but the director of such envelope-pushers as I Stand Alone, Irreversible and Enter the Void is out to change a few minds with his latest film, Love. “This is a movie that has made a lot of people cry,” he tells SCREEN-SPACE from his home in Paris, as the Sydney Underground Film Festival organisers brace themselves for reaction to the Opening Night screening of the latest from the ‘enfant terrible’ of international cinema...

“I wanted to do a melodrama,” explains the 51 year-old Argentinian-born, French-based filmmaker, who premiered the long-in-development drama at Cannes 2015. “I envisioned the movie as both very arousing and also very sad, with the hope that people would cry at the end. It became much more melancholic than what I thought because image is so much more powerful than text. The movie is best described as being made up of my desires and fears.”

Drawing upon his days as a film school student cutting a swathe through the bars and bedrooms of 1980s Paris, the auteur’s narrative follows brash American expat Murphy (Karl Glusman) as he recalls the passionate details of a doomed love affair with the sexually energized Electra (Aomi Muyock; pictured, with Glusman), while coping with the corrosive resentment he has for his young wife, Omi (Klara Kristin). “‘Murphy’ is a mix of me and my film school mates, who I would hang out with and party with. And I know certain characters who [populate] the movie, people from the party scene in Paris and the art world,” explains Noe. “I wanted this guy to be cool but also a bit stupid; he’s not a ‘winner’ at all. He’s just a normal film student, sometimes driven by his brain cells and sometimes driven by his dick.”

Over a decade ago, the project was pitched to then husband-and-wife stars Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel when the pair worked with Noe on Irreversible, the 2002 revenge drama famous for Noe’s notorious single-shot rape scene. But the international stars baulked at the director’s intention to shoot full penetration intercourse. By 2015, Noe’s creative impulses were sated, with Glusman and first-time actors Muyock and Kristin portraying graphic, reportedly unchoreographed sexual acts (in 3D, no less). The film opens with an extended single-take scene of oral sex and mutual masturbation, from beginning to end.

“Erotic cinema has disappeared, and with it the erotic malady,” observes Noe. “The point of this movie, the reason it exists, was to portray the passion between two willful young people. I could not see how you could film that nowadays, after the sexual revolution and after the past 40 or so years of our western world, without portraying exactly how it is in real life. I decided that now is the time to film scenes with a truthfulness that the subject of my movie deserves. I’m surprised there are not more movies dealing with the subject like my film does”

It is the search for the blunt truths of existence that have driven Noe’s works to date; in his last film, Enter the Void, his first-person camera examined a body’s demise and the re-emergence of its soul. Love represents a similar pathway from the dual perspective of emotion and sensation. “These natural desires that we have, to have the faith to give our lives and share our journey with someone else, produce very human, powerful emotions,” says Noe. “Most people recognise much about themselves in the characters in the film and about the experience of being in love.”

Noe achieves his thematic goals by expanding upon the reverse-storytelling device that he employed in Irreversible (pictured, right; star, Monica Bellucci). Initially, Murphy’s present-day inner thoughts narrate small recollections; ultimately, the entire film is given over to his indulgences in the past. “The whole way [Love] was structured was to try to reproduce a memory. When you think about your own past, you do not do it in a linear way,” Noe explains. “In Irreversible, the backwards storytelling was very mechanical, in a clockwork way; in Enter The Void, the journey was very linear. In Love, it gets as close as I’ve gotten to that ‘stream of memory’ framework.”

As confronting as Gaspar Noe’s visions have been, each has represented a yearning to explore and further understand base elements inherent to the human experience. As shocking as scenes of frank sexuality may be to many, it is what the images represent that matters most to the director. “I wanted to make a sentimental film about what love is, how hard love is, to show that, even with the best intentions in the world, love can fail and ultimately destroy your mind,” he says. “To be addicted to passion means that you can suffer through passion and your life is over. I needed to find a way to portray this power, a power that can consume and destroy your life. What is the truest aim of our existence? I think it is to find love and to share the strongest physical love with someone, and my film explores that.”

LOVE screens as the Opening Night presentation of the 2015 Sydney Underground Film Festival. Full venue and session information can be found at the official website.