‘Bigger than Barbie’ Italian movie wins Sydney Film Festival competition

An Italian comic drama that was a bigger hit than Barbie in its home country has won Sydney Film Festival’s $60,000 competition for “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous” cinema.

There’s Still Tomorrow, an inventive black and white film from popular Italian comic actor and singer Paola Cortellesi, is about a woman trapped in a toxic marriage in Rome just after World War II.

“We relive every woman’s struggle for equality through Cortellesi’s Delia”: There’s Still Tomorrow.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

What could have been a troubling period story about a dark topic has a surprising light touch and warm heart, drawing on stories of Cortellesi’s grandmother in the 1940s.

A jury headed by Bosnian director Danis Tanovic announced There’s Still Tomorrow as winner, the second consecutive film directed by a woman to claim the top prize, as the festival closed at the State Theatre on Sunday night.

The $20,000 Australian documentary competition was won by James Bradley’s Welcome to Babel, about Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen painting an epic work about the history of Communism.

In There’s Still Tomorrow, Cortellesi plays Delia, a mother of three whose abuse at the hands of her buffoonish husband Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea) is physical, psychological and financial.

The jury described the film as intensely relevant, adding: “We relive every woman’s struggle for equality through Cortellesi’s Delia [and] we face the brutal cycles of domestic violence with an immense empathy”.

The film plays like a cross between the Italian neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves, the more recent Italian classic Life Is Beautiful and Mexico’s Roma.

It struck such a chord in Italy, where women being killed by male partners is as much of a crisis as it is in Australia, that it sold more tickets than Barbie in that country last year.

Elsewhere, one of the festival’s highlights was the world premiere of the documentary Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line.

Writer-director Paul Clarke tracked the great Australian rock band’s career from their early days on Sydney’s northern beaches to their final show in 2022, showing their uncompromising attitude to music industry success and embrace of Indigenous, anti-nuclear and workers’ rights and environmental issues.

Winner of the Australian documentary prize: artist Jiawei Shen in Welcome To Babel.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

Another highlight was Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, a muscular drama about a 1960s Chicago motorbike club that is told from the perspective of sassy Kathy (Jodie Comer), who meets simmering Benny (Austin Butler) in a bikie bar and marries him five weeks later. It shows how the Vandals turned from a club of motorbike racing enthusiasts, founded by terse Johnny (Tom Hardy), into a drug-running, murderous gang.

With films screening in 10 venues, everyone’s festival will be different but here’s how I saw it:

Biggest disappointment - Yorgos Lanthimos was deservedly acclaimed for The Favourite and Poor Things, which meant expectations were high for the absurdist comedy Kinds of Kindness, which stars Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley. While it was typically surreal and audacious, a trilogy of stories about love and control was an unsatisfying way to spend three hours.

Most surprising trend - while Hollywood has backed away from tobacco use on screen, there was so much smoking in The Bikeriders and other festival films, and vaping in disappointing competition film September Says, that passive smoking was a risk.

Smoking hot: Austin Butler stars as Benny in The Bikeriders, which follows 1960s motorcycle club the Vandals.

Most raucous night out - Kneecap was a comic musical biopic about a Northern Irish hip-hop outfit with that name who want to keep the Irish language alive. The rappers played themselves and it was crude, violent, laced with drugs and great fun. A young Irish-dominated audience lapped it up.

Best Western - Forget Kevin Costner. Viggo Mortensen wrote, directed and starred in The Dead Don’t Hurt. It was a very likable feminist Western starring Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) as a French-Canadian woman who settled outside a frontier town with a Danish immigrant (Mortensen). As one American critic said, it’s a Western for people who don’t like Westerns.

Best surprise - the appeal of Megan Park’s comedy My Old Ass seemed to be Audrey Plaza, playing the future self of an 18-year-old girl, and Margot Robbie as producer. Then you discover it’s a fresh and touching romance dominated by the livewire Canadian actor-singer Maisy Stella (Nashville), playing Elliott, who is down to the last weeks of living on her family’s cranberry farm before heading to uni in Toronto.

Wildest true story - how is it possible that an aspiring comedian could take part in a Japanese reality TV show for more than a year without knowing that six minutes of his life inside a small apartment was being broadcast every week? How is it possible that the producer could insist he be alone and naked for all that time? At least the documentary The Contestant showed Tomoaki Hamatsu found some redemption for what he went through.

Wildest fictional story - Hands down, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Read the review here.

Also announced on closing night, the $35,000 prize for First Nations filmmaking went to New Zealand filmmaker Awanui Simich-Pene’s short film First Horse, about a young Māori girl in 1826; and the $40,000 Sustainable Future Award going to American filmmaker Alina Simone’s Black Snow, a documentary about a Siberian eco-activist.

In the Dendy Awards, best live action short was Nathan and Nick Lacey’s Die Bully Die, best animated short was Natasha Tonkin’s Darwin Story, and the Rouben Mamoulian Award for best director went to Pernell Marsden for The Meaningless Daydreams of Augie & Celeste.