In decades to come, when historians reflect on a bygone form of social recreation known as “cinema-going”, I hope they’ll find room to include examples of film festival programs. They’re such wonderful snapshots of art, expression and the breadth of human experience.
As usual, the program for this year’s Sydney film festival – running from 7 June to 18 June – is packed with treats for cineastes, containing more than 200 films screening across the city. Here are 10 suggestions.
The New Boy
Director: Warwick Thornton / Country: Australia
The Indigenous auteur Warwick Thornton – whose work includes Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country and The Beach – is one of Australia’s greatest film-makers, here teaming up with one of our greatest actors: Cate Blanchett. In the 40s-set The New Boy, which opens this year’s festival, Blanchett plays a nun running a remote monastery where a young orphan boy (newcomer Aswan Reid) arrives late at night. A rare example of a major writer/director who is also a cinematographer, Thornton is the multi-hyphenate par excellence.
General release: TBC
Asteroid City
Director: Wes Anderson / Country: US
Self-plagiarism is style, as Alfred Hitchcock famously said. Few directors are as distinctively stylish as Wes Anderson, whose 11th feature film is set in 1955 in a fictional desert town that hosts a Junior-Stargazer-slash-Space-Cadet convention. As usual, his cast is stacked with stars keen to be playthings in the kitschy Anderson dollhouse – including Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Margot Robbie, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum.
General release: 22 June
No Bears
Director: Jafar Panahi / Country: Iran
Speaking of auteurs: another of the greats is the Iranian writer/director Jafar Panahi, whose films are playful, personal, political and coyly self-referential. The Iranian government banned Panahi from directing in 2010, but he’s found ways to sneak his work through the censors, including secretly filming Tehran Taxi in a cab and smuggling This Is Not a Film out of the country on a USB stick hidden in a birthday cake. His latest is No Bears, which collected the special jury prize at last year’s Venice film festival and stars Panahi as a fictionalised version of himself, remotely directing a film about a couple in Turkey attempting to acquire fake passports and flee the country.
General release: TBC
Hello Dankness
Director: Soda Jerk / Country: Australia
The two-person collective Soda Jerk (Sydney-born siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro) create highly original work that, paradoxically, is almost entirely comprised of pre-existing materials. As I wrote in my review, Hello Dankness “uses remixing and reappropriation to jokily ponder the end of consensus reality – the idea that dramatic events of recent years have not just changed the course of human history but destroyed general agreement about what is real and what is not”. It repurposes footage from old and new films to reflect on the election of Donald Trump and the madness of a global pandemic.
General release: TBC
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
Director: Anna Hints / Country: Estonia, France, Ireland
I never realised until now that the world is terribly bereft of films about woodland smoke saunas in southern Estonia. This is one of the great virtues of cinema: to bring to the big screen visions of exotic places and situations. In this case, the hot and steamy kind. Anna Hints’ documentary visits a log cabin sauna where a group of women sweat, chat and bond, exchanging stories and secrets.
General release: TBC
20,000 Species of Bees
Director: Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren / Country: Spain
I also never realised until now that the world is terribly bereft of films set among beehives near the border between France and Spain. Peter Bradshaw observed a “gentleness and delicacy in this heartfelt family drama” starring Sofía Otero as Cocó, an eight-year-old who comes to realise her true gender identity. At nine years old, Otero became the youngest ever recipient of the Berlin film festival’s silver bear award.
General release: TBC
Sisu
Director: Jalmari Helander / Country: Finland
Action-movie trailers don’t get much more badass than the extremely violent sizzle reel for this cranked-to-11 Finnish spectacle about a gold miner in the second world war who “lost his home and his family in the war” and “became a one-man death squad”. One critic entertainingly described it as “something akin to pure cinema run through a Nordic meat grinder”. Sold. Also: gross.
General release: 27 July
Reality
Director: Tina Satter / Country: US
In 2017, Reality Winner was arrested for leaking to the media a top-secret document detailing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The dialogue in Tina Satter’s film is taken entirely from FBI interrogation transcripts: a strange and interesting way to draw connection to real-life events. Winner is played by Sydney Sweeney – best known as Olivia, the snooty college sophomore from the first season of The White Lotus, as well as her award-winning turn as Euphoria’s Cassie.
General release: 29 June
Jane Campion retrospective
Jane Campion’s magnum opus remains her 1993 masterpiece The Piano, which explores a recurring theme in her work: women on the fringes of social norms. But the New Zealand auteur has crafted many other fine films including Sweetie, In the Cut, Bright Star and An Angel at My Table. This year’s festival includes a retrospective of her work, with Campion appearing in person for a conversation with David Stratton.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Director: Daniel Goldhaber / Country: US
Director Daniel Goldhaber has described his fictionalised adaptation of Andreas Malm’s provocative nonfiction book as “Ocean’s Eleven about environmental activism”. A group of activists come together to sabotage a Texas oil pipeline, aware that their actions will blur the line between activism and terrorism. Wendy Ide called Goldhaber’s second film, following up his brilliant debut Cam, a “nervy thriller” that will act as “a lightning rod for the mounting anger of climate-conscious audiences that feel let down by government inaction on a looming global crisis”.
General release: TBC
