SFF 2022: the best films to see from world premieres to Cannes hot tickets
The Sydney Film Festival’s first full-scale program since 2019 is packed full of cinema’s hottest tickets.
Now it’s Sydney’s turn. With major arts events returning to their pre-pandemic timeslots, the 11-day Sydney Film Festival is back this week, hot on the heels of Cannes’ glittering orgy of cinema and offering Australian film buffs the chance to see some of the hottest tickets on their first stop after France.
Jury president David Wenham will preside over the panel judging the official competition of 12 films, among them Archibald prize-winning artist Del Kathryn Barton’s feature, Blaze.
The festival will present the world premiere of We Are Still Here for its Opening Night Gala – a multi-genre First Nations collaboration interweaving stories by 10 directors from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the South Pacific.
Festival director Nasheen Moodley and his team have taken it down to the wire ahead of the festival’s opening night on Wednesday, announcing on Monday a slew of new films to the program, including Ruben Ostlund’s Palme d’Or winner, Triangle of Sadness, which is bound to lure filmgoers.
Moodley says: “The past few years have been tough for the film industry, with many films halting production across the globe. Now the world is starting to open back up again, we’re seeing a resurgence of gutsy, innovative and compelling storytelling.
“It’s an exciting time to be programming a film festival when there is such a wealth of groundbreaking films, giving audiences an opportunity to discover unique and timely stories from home, and across the world.”
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, also screening as part of SFF, is bound to energise the crowd, as should a newly restored version of the film which started it all for the visionary director – Strictly Ballroom.
Here’s all you need to know about the 2022 SFF.
VIA CANNES
Woody Harrelson plays a Marxist cruise ship captain in the Swedish director’s English-language debut that disturbed, delighted and nauseated Cannes.
“Ruben is a maestro” Harrelson said during the festival, describing working with the director as a “revitalising experience, one of the greatest experiences of my life,” but clarifying that the character who “carries the message of the film” is not his alter ego. “My character is a Marxist, but I’m not a Marxist, I’m an anarchist. So in that sense we’re different.” Harrelson was so enamoured of the director that he will now star in Ostlund’s follow-up comedy, The Entertainment System is Down, as the captain on an aeroplane.
BROKER
Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda’s Broker – for which South Korean superstar Song Kang-ho (Parasite) won the Cannes best actor prize – will close the SFF. Koreeda has explored the humanity of family relationships in the past, in films such as his 2018 Palme d’Or winner, Shoplifters, which also focused on a family of small-time crooks who take in a child. In The Broker, the crooks are trying to sell a young prostitute’s baby for adoption at a high price.
“I’ve seen almost all of Koreeda’s films,” Song Kang-ho said in Cannes. “Here he has created not a biological but an alternative family and it’s the forming of the family that is important, drawing on all the precious feelings that we have in our lives, which sometimes get lost.
“The film is rich and subtle as he talks of family themes that are dear to him. It’s very realistic.”
HOLY SPIDER
The Cannes best actress prize went to Iranian Zar Amir Ebrahimi for Holy Spider. Directed by Danish-Iranian Ali Abbasi, it’s inspired by the true story of a working-class man who in the early 2000s killed prostitutes in the holy city of Mashhad in Iran and became known as the Spider Killer. Ebrahimi plays a journalist trying to solve the murders.
The film reflects the 41-year-old’s own experiences of being the victim of a smear campaign when a sex tape supposedly featuring her was leaked online in 2006. That led to her moving to Paris 16 years ago. “They wanted to delete me from everywhere, remove me from cinema, maybe for me to suicide, to die. But in the end I’m here with this award,” she said emotionally at the winners press conference in Cannes. Holy Spider was shot in Jordan.
BOY FROM HEAVEN
Swedish writer-director Tarik Saleh won for best screenplay for Boy From Heaven. The son of a Swedish mother and an Egyptian father, Saleh, who has directed episodes of Westworld and Ray Donovan, has a commercial touch. A thriller set in Al-Azhar university, the foremost institution for studying Sunni Islam in Egypt, Boy From Heaven explores high-end corruption through Egyptian society, as a young fisherman’s son is recruited by a State Security agent (Fares Fares, from the director’s The Nile Hilton Incident and who also appeared in Chernobyl, Westworld and Zero Dark Thirty) to spy on various parties during a secretive election, following the death of the university’s Grand Imam, the highest-ranking religious leader. A dense, complex must-see.
CLOSE
When Close came late in the Cannes competition, critics believed the Palme d’Or winner had finally emerged. Yet Lukas Dhont’s follow-up to his 2018 Camera d’Or winner for best first film, Girl, was awarded the Jury (second) prize ex aequo in a tie with Claire Denis’s French film, Stars at Noon.
Dhont, 31, a handsome director with a keen fashion sense who really knows how to tug at the heart strings in his youthful stories, focuses on the friendship of two 13-year-old boys, Remi (Gustav De Waele) and the angelic blond Leo (Eden Dambrine). When Remi feels uncomfortable at their new school for being delicate and the pair are teased for their close relationship, Leo abandons him with disastrous results.
STARS AT NOON
Claire Denis’s film starring Margaret Qualley (Maid) and Joe Alwyn (Taylor Swift’s partner who also stars in the TV series based on the cult novel by millenial author Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends) garnered mixed reviews out of Cannes but critics were full of praise for Qualley’s stellar performance.
The actor plays a journalist stranded in Nicaragua and surviving by working as a prostitute when she meets a mysterious businessman and they fall passionately in love.
TORI AND LOKITA
The immigrant drama Tori and Lokita, about two kids pretending to be brother and sister to gain asylum in Belgium, marks a return to form for the Dardenne brothers. The film received a Special 75th Anniversary Award in Cannes for its story about how the young are often left to fight alone.
THE NIGHT OF THE 12th
German-born French director Dominik Moll (Lemming) can always be relied on to deliver a ripping yarn and this is one of his best. An investigate drama based on a single case in Pauline Guena’s non-fiction book, 18.3 – Une annee a la PJ, the film follows the murder of a young woman as she walks home late at night from a party.
JOYLAND
The winner of the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard and the Queer Palm for best LGBTQ film, this was the first Pakistani film to screen at the festival. Saim Sadiq’s cinematic debut tells the story of a married man who joins a dance theatre and falls in love with a trans woman.
The film focuses on a family torn between modernity and tradition in contemporary Lahore.
WILL-O’-THE-WISP
The Hollywood Reporter describes Portuguese director Joao Pedro Rodrigues’s musical fantasy as: “Queer, inclusive, eco-conscious and frankly pretty pornographic … The abundant images of penises in every state of excitation will mean hardcore certification in most territories, but it’s sure to find an audience all the same.”
One imagines that SFF will be the place to see this one. The film follows Prince Alfredo on his deathbed recalling how he wanted to become a fireman in his youth and how he fell for another fireman. The film is a hoot and includes a lot of dancing.
THE BLUE CAFTAN
The Moroccan film that won the FIPRESCI (press) Award for Best Film in Un Certain Regard (Cannes’ arthouse section) follows Saleh Bakri’s tailor as he wrestles with his sexuality when a young tailor comes to work with him. Though the story is as much a portrait of marriage – he’s married to the always wonderful Lubna Azabal in this riveting three-hander.
LOCAL TALENT
WE ARE STILL HERE
Told through the eyes of eight heroic protagonists traversing 1000 years, it focuses on the love and hope required to overcome trauma that Indigenous people from these regions continue to face.
BLAZE; YOU WON’T BE ALONE
Two Australian debut features are among the 12 films in the competition: Kathryn Barton’s Blaze, an ode to female courage that was making waves in the Cannes market (and world premieres at Tribeca), stars Julia Savage, Simon Baker and Yael Stone; and Goran Stolevski’s witchy female fantasy, You Won’t Be Alone, which stars Noomi Rapace and Alice Englert, and played to great acclaim in Sundance.
GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE
A British film directed by Australia’s Sophie Hyde. This is a romantic drama with a difference as Emma Thompson hires a sex worker and is unsure that she can go through with it.
DON’T MISS
WHERE IS ANNE FRANK
From Israeli animation specialist Ari Folman, who made the Oscar-nominated Waltz with Bashir, Where is Anne Frank follows the adventures of Kitty, Anne’s imaginary friend, who believes she is still alive in today’s Europe.
TCHAIKOVSKY’S WIFE
Kirill Serebrennikov’s film about the famed composer’s disastrous marriage to Antonina Miliukova. Until recently, the writer-director was under house arrest in Russia and now lives in exile in Germany, so he was the second refugee to have a film in competition, together with best actress winner Ebrahimi.
ONE FINE MORNING
Mia Hansen-Love’s romantic family drama, a Director’s Fortnight entry that stars Lea Seydoux (from the last two Bond films), is far better than Hansen-Love’s 2021 competition film, Bergman Island.
ALCARRAS; INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE
Carla Simon’s Berlin Festival Golden Bear winner about a farming family from Catalonia is highly recommended. But if you’re looking for something adventurous and out there, you can go no further than another Berlin entry, Incredible but True, directed by French absurdist and cult favourite Quentin Dupieux (Deerskin, Mandibules), in which Benoit Magimel has one of his funniest roles – he has an electronic penis and insists it’s a huge advancement but of course it has problems.
COSTA BRAVA, LEBANON; SIRENS
Lebanese powerhouse actor-director Nadine Labaki (Capernaum) sticks to the front of the camera for this award-winning environmental feature about a family struggling to live away from the city. Also from Lebanon via Sundance comes Sirens, a documentary about the Middle East’s first female band, though the co-founders face numerous struggles in their bid to become thrash metal rock stars.
CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH
(Streaming on Apple TV+ from June 17) Was a Sundance winner and crowdpleaser, with Dakota Johnson beguiling as a woman reluctant to have an extramarital affair with college grad Cooper Raiff, also the film’s director.
BEST DOCOS
NOTHING COMPARES
Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary about Sinead O’Connor, which was one of my Sundance favourites. Some critics complained that the film fails to tread new ground, but it’s impeccably made and delivers insight into the life and career of the fearless Irish singer and trailblazer.
NAVALNY
While the secretly filmed documentary about poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny might seem out of date, his incredible resistance is more important to watch than ever. The film won Sundance’s audience award for best documentary.
FOR LAUGHS
FORGIVEN
John Michael McDonagh (Calvary) delivers black comedy with his adaptation of Laurence Osborne’s novel starring Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes as a married couple heading out to the Moroccan desert for a party at an ostentatious estate owned by an eccentric gay couple, played by Matt Smith and Nitram’s Caleb Landry Jones. When Fiennes’s alcoholic David hits and kills a local boy with his car, things go awry.
NUDE TUESDAY
Possibly funniest of all, and certainly wanting to be, is Armagan Ballantyne’s Kiwi comedy starring Jemaine Clement, Jackie van Beek and Damon Herriman, who will also attend a SFF filmmaker’s talk where they will not speak in gibberish as they do in the film. They will also be fully clothed. Clement plays Bjorg Rasmussen, a sexual healing guru at a couples retreat Herriman and van Beek attend to try to save their marriage. As the title suggests, lots of nudity ensues. On Friday, June 10, the team will give a talk at Sydney Town Hall as part of the SFF’s FestivalHub series.
The Sydney Film Festival runs from June 8-19; sff.org.au
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