Sydney Film Festival 2021 program packed with blockbusters, premieres
Next month’s Sydney Film Festival screens some of the year’s biggest blockbusters and critically acclaimed films in Australia for the first time.
Call it clever programming or just a bit of rare good luck, but the twice-delayed Sydney Film Festival next month boasts the first opportunity for many Australians to watch some of the year’s most talked about films.
Part live and part virtual, the festival is director Nashen Moodley’s 10th at the helm and he tells The Australian he is hoping to make the best of both formats with those trapped interstate able to tune in while Sydneysiders (fully masked and vaccinated) can watch films by auteurs such as Wes Anderson, Jane Campion and Leah Purcell on the big screen as nature intended.
Cannes Palme d’Or winner Titane, Jessica Chastain vehicle The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Anderson’s lauded The French Dispatch are among the notable international films to have their Australian premiere courtesy of this year’s festival – a smaller program of 200 films compared with the usual tally of about 300. Fewer sessions will allow cinemas to be cleaned between sessions
The festival had flourished under Moodley, with a record attendance of 188,000 in 2019 before pandemic shock sent last year’s program online. This year he is hoping to see bums back on seats.
“I’m really hopeful that people will return to cinemas in great numbers,” he says. “I really hope that will be the case. Over the past two years people have watched a lot on various streaming services at home. There have been really encouraging signs when cinemas have reopened in Europe and the US, and some films have done extremely well at the box office.
“I hope that people will return to cinemas in the numbers they went before the pandemic.”
Among the blockbusters and festival circuit favourites will be a retrospective on the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who died in 2016, and the Dendy Awards for short films, while the festival will open with Here Out West, stories from eight western Sydney writers, from five female directors.
Moodley says the opener “gives a great sense of contemporary Australia that we don’t really see very much on screen”.
“I think people are going to love it on opening night,” he says. “It looks at various themes, mostly involving family. But it also looks at assimilation, the challenges that new migrants or refugees face when coming to a new society. It looks at racism. It’s a variety of topics, all united by family.”
Don’t miss:
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Titane
At Cannes this French film had a late 10.30pm screening as befitting its status as a kind of horror film. After I decided to take a look and maybe leave early to get some sleep, it proved impossible to tear myself away. What on earth would happen next? Julia Ducournau’s audacious follow-up to her 2016 female cannibal movie, Raw, came as a surprise Palme d’Or winner. Newcomer Agathe Rousselle is stunning in the lead role as Alexia, who has a titanium plate fitted into her head following a car accident as a child. And we’ve never quite seen French star Vincent Lindon like this before. Make sure not to read too much before viewing as it is well worth the surprise.
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The Power of the Dog
Many critics agreed that Campion’s Netflix film should have won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, but the jury preferred to award another female-directed French film, Audrey Diwan’s Happening. Campion came away with the best director Silver Lion and went on to win more plaudits as the film played at festivals in the US and Canada. Benedict Cumberbatch is emerging as a lock for a best actor nomination in the awards season for his portrayal as a mean, troubled, closeted cattle rancher in 1920s Montana, but look out for Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, who all but steals the film. Again the plot – and its turns – should come as a surprise.
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The Hand of God
Director Paolo Sorrentino, whose movie The Great Beauty won an Oscar for best foreign language film in 2014, is a towering figure of Italian cinema and in this Netflix film has laid his early life bare. His parents died in an accident when he was young and he shows how happy his life was before that tragic event. He won the grand jury prize at the Venice film festival and Filippo Scotti, the young actor who plays him, won the prize for best newcomer. Sorrentino’s regular collaborator, consummate Italian actor Toni Servillo, plays the father.
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Dune
Some call it a blockbuster art film and Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel is certainly a joy to watch. The all-star cast is on form and you leave the cinema wanting more as this is only the first half of the story. Apparently Warner Bros will green-light the second part if the film does well, so maybe go and see what you think. I’ve seen it twice, the second time in Paris, where the three gigantic Les Halles cinemas played it at once – and all were packed (even if double vaccination is required for entry).
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The Card Counter
Of his three films in Venice I preferred Oscar Isaac in the heart-wrenching HBO series Scenes from a Marriage, though he has his romantic moments alongside Rebecca Ferguson in Dune too. In The Card Counter Paul Schrader cast the actor in a leading role, in which he plays a lonely disgraced military man, a former interrogator at the notorious Abu Ghraib in Iraq, who learnt to count cards in prison and now hops from casino to casino playing blackjack and poker. Isaac brings his sly, soulful magnetism to the character who tries to make amends, though like so many of Schrader’s characters a violent end seems inevitable.
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Parallel Mothers
Penelope Cruz won Venice’s best actor Volpi Cup for her latest performance with her great friend and collaborator Pedro Almodovar. Her Janis character, named after Janis Joplin, is happy to be a single mum, whereas her teenage hospital roommate (a stunning Milena Smit) is not. There are twists here too, as well as historical backgrounding that makes this a more serious offering from the Spanish director.
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King Richard
Will Smith is hoping for awards attention for his typically fast-talking portrayal of Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena. Apparently the film is not as strong as his portrayal but for tennis-loving Australia this is a must.
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Cow
Andrea Arnold’s first feature length documentary is told from the point of view of two cows. Sounds silly? It proves surprisingly effective as an examination of how cows have feelings too, even if they exist to serve a supply chain for our appetites. It’s a must-see.
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Writing With Fire
This debut documentary feature by New Delhi-based married couple Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh was one of the standouts at the Sundance festival this year. It focuses on three brave young female journalists who have experienced unprecedented success via India’s first all-female news agency Khabar Lahhariya. What makes this all the more exceptional is that the women belong to the Dalit caste, the lowest caste in India, long labelled “untouchables”, and operate out of highly conservative Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.
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The Justice of Bunny King
A tale of triumph over adversity, about women fighting their way back from the bottom of society, this well-reviewed New Zealand film stars Aussie Essie Davis and Kiwi Thomasin McKenzie. Screen magazine says Davis “brings rough-edged authenticity to a portrait of a mother in crisis”, as she tries to regain custody of, or at least access to, her two children.
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The Drover’s Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson
Competing for the festival’s $60,000 main prize and directed by Indigenous Australian Leah Purcell, who also stars as the lead, this film is a feminist and anti-racist reimagining of Henry Lawson’s short story. It’s billed as an outback revenge thriller about a woman’s determination to protect her family from the harshness of 1890s life in a picturesque Snowy Mountains township. Australian Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney calls it an “engrossing thriller” that “is admirably ambitious but choppy”.
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The French Dispatch
Anderson’s film was given a nine-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere yet a lukewarm responses from subsequent audiences suggests this may not be up there with the American director’s biggest commercial successes, The Royal Tenenbaums or The Grand Budapest Hotel. Told in three parts, the film is set in the fictitious French branch of a US publication and is styled after Anderson’s beloved The New Yorker. Explaining his decision to close the festival with the film, Moodley says: “Wes Anderson is one of the most distinctive filmmakers of our time. You could look at a few frames and know that it’s his. This film assembles such a fantastic cast. I just feel it’s a film that will put a smile on everyone’s face, having seen a film that’s very much made for the cinema, and extremely detailed like all his films.”
Just to see stars including Frances McDormand, Benicio Del Toro, Timothee Chalamet (the star of Dune) and No Time to Die star Lea Seydoux (briefly going full frontal) is worth the price of a ticket.
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My Best Part
Call My Agent!’s Nicolas Maury stars in his directing debut comedy-drama alongside Nathalie Baye (also from Call My Agent!) as his mother. In the film the openly gay actor-director plays Jeremie, who is struggling in his relationship with Albert (the ultra-appealing Arnaud Valois from 2017’s Beats per Minute) and moves back home with mum.
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Paris, 13th District
A Prophet and The Sisters Brothers director Jacques Audiard’s black-and-white drama, set in one of Paris’s less salubrious 1970s high-rise-dominated neighbourhoods, focuses on a sexy three-way relationship. Who will Camille (Makita Samba) end up with? The French-Taiwanese Emilie (Lucie Zhang) or Nora (Noemie Merlant, star of Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire)? Sciamma, whose latest directing effort, Petite Maman, also is screening at the festival, co-wrote the screenplay.
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Nowhere Special
If it’s an emotionally engrossing tear-jerker you’re after, look no further than Nowhere Special. Uberto Pasolini writes and directs a story about a terminally ill father (an incredible James Norton) who must find a new home for his young son (an equally incredible Daniel Lamont).
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Zola
Inspired by a viral Twitter thread, Zola was a huge hit at Sundance last year just before the pandemic changed our lives. It follows two exotic dancers, played by Taylour Paige and Riley Keough (Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, who appeared in Mad Max: Fury Road), on a Florida road trip accompanied by Colman Domingo. His X character has an unhealthy involvement with the women and Domingo delivers a chilling performance.
The Sydney Film Festival runs from November 3 to 14.
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