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Adam Goodes doco among titles set to premiere at Sydney Film Festival
By Garry Maddox
A documentary about the racism controversy that engulfed Sydney Swans champion Adam Goodes, a Japanese comedy starring an Australian comic as a doll-sized Jesus and a British horror film about a designer dress that kills everyone who wears it.
The first batch of titles for the 66th Sydney Film Festival in June are typically colourful.
As he finalises the program ahead of opening night, festival director Nashen Moodley believes it will be a particularly strong year for Australian feature films and documentaries.
One of the highlights is expected to be the world premiere of the documentary The Final Quarter from director Ian Darling, best known for Suzy & the Simple Man and Paul Kelly: Stories of Me.
It's described as a Senna-style re-examination - using archival footage and interviews - of the incidents that clouded the last three years of Adam Goodes' great AFL career, including Eddie McGuire's infamous King Kong comments, abuse by a 13-year-old Collingwood supporter, booing by opposition fans and the reaction to his indigenous war dance after a goal.
"It's a film that really takes us into those heated moments as they happened," Moodley says. "It's a stirring film that will have people talking."
New documentary: Adam Goodes playing for the Sydney Swans in 2015. Credit: AAP
Tokyo-based Australian comic Chad Mullane plays a tiny Jesus who becomes a playmate for an introverted boy in the offbeat comedy Jesus, from Japanese writer-director-cinematographer Hiroshi Okuyama, who is making a splash in international cinema aged just 23.
"It's a really beautiful, very playful film with some quite biting commentary underneath it all," Moodley says.
Four years after The Duke of Burgundy screened at the festival, British director Peter Strickland returns with In Fabric, a comic horror film about a designer dress that kills anyone who wears it.
Australian comedian Chad Mullane plays a tiny Jesus who becomes a playmate for an introverted Japanese boy in Jesus. Credit: Sydney Film Festival
The cast includes Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies) and Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones).
"It's very bizarre," Moodley says. "Strickland has a wonderful ability to create real creepiness but it's also quite funny."
The latest film from Australian director Sophie Hyde (52 Tuesdays) is Animals, a comic drama about two hard-partying women in Dublin whose friendship is tested.
Starring Holliday Grainger (Cinderella) and Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development), it's a film that Variety lauded as a welcome addition to the still-thin ranks of "female friendship studies" when it debuted at Sundance in January.
Killer dress: comic horror film In Fabric.Credit: Sydney Film Festival
Moodley raves about Amazing Grace, a 1972 film of an Aretha Franklin concert that has finally reached the screen after extended technical and legal delays. "It's just such an incredible performance," he says.
"Aretha was 29 at the time and she went back to a Baptist church to perform a gospel concert after becoming a popular star."
Hard-partying friends in Dublin: Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat in Sophie Hyde's Animals. Credit: Sydney Film Festival
Already acclaimed overseas are Never Look Away, an Oscar-nominated drama about a German painter directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others); Midnight Family, a documentary about a privately-owned ambulance in Mexico City; and The Kleptocrats, an expose of the huge 1MDB scandal in Malaysia.
Among the well-known names in the program are Juliette Binoche, Robert Pattinson and André 3000 as travellers on a slowly failing spaceship in French director Claire Denis' sci-fi pic High Life; Dev Patel as a kidnapper in Michael Winterbottom's thriller The Wedding Guest; and singer-songwriter PJ Harvey in the documentary A Dog Called Money.
Singer-songwriter PJ Harvey in the documentary A Dog Called Money.Credit: Sydney Film Festival
Already announced is a retrospective of 10 trailblazing films by Australian women directors that includes Nadia Tass' Malcolm, Jane Campion's Sweetie and Jennifer Kent's The Babadook.
The festival runs from June 5 to 16, with the rest of the program announced on May 8.