Australia’s cinephiles have been well served by this year’s Melbourne international film festival, with a program that – as usual – sources an eclectic range of productions from around the globe. Announced on Tuesday, the festival’s 71st iteration runs in Melbourne cinemas from 3-20 August – and in regional cinemas from 11-13 and 18-20 August. An additional online version will run from 18-27 August.
Many of this year’s highlights have already played at Sydney film festival – so click here to read more about No Bears, Hello Dankness, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, 20,000 Species of Bees and How to Blow up a Pipeline.
Below are 10 other things to see and do.
Showing Up
Director: Kelly Reichardt / Country: US
Auteur Kelly Reichardt is known for quietly contemplative slice-of-life productions – so don’t go into her latest film expecting to be blown away. What you can count on is a modest, thoughtfully constructed film with a layered performance from Michelle Williams as Lizzy, a sculptor preparing for an exhibition. When she begins nursing an injured pigeon back to health, the film eases into comedy, maintaining its gentle rhythms.
If you don’t warm to Showing Up’s unhurried pace, watching it will be like observing an elderly person holding up the line in a retail store, counting their coins. Go with it and you’ll be taken into a lived-in world with nuanced characters.
Autobiography
Director: Makbul Mubarak / Country: Indonesia, France, Singapore, Poland, the Philippines, Germany, Qatar
Has every film critic in history, other than me, had a desire to direct their own productions? Why can’t criticism be a profession unto itself? Anyway. I’m glad Indonesian critic Makbul Mubarak put aside his keyboard and picked up a camera, because his debut feature is excellent: a heavily atmospheric drama, drifting in a good way, pivoting around the toxic relationship between young housekeeper Rakib (Kevin Ardilova) and retired general Purna (Arswendy Bening Swara).
The latter becomes a kind of father figure for Rakib, but things get complicated and morally murky. This isn’t the kind of film that can be well summarised in a few words, but it’s worth adding to your itinerary; myself and four other judges at last year’s Adelaide film festival awarded it one of the festival’s major prizes.
Planetarium showcase
The dominance of a flat horizontal screen for viewing film was a historical coincidence – not an inevitability. Large dome-shaped screens were hardly going to catch on domestically, but their continued existence, however niche, remind us that the concept of a screen isn’t fixed.
Held at the Melbourne Planetarium, this year’s full-dome screenings include −22.7°C (“an immersive work inspired by the musician Molécule’s adventures in the polar circle”) and Biliminal (an audiovisual experience exploring “the liminal space between the palpable and the elusive”).
A Couple
Director: Frederick Wiseman / Country: France, US
Frederick Wiseman is a legendary documentarian who began producing films in the early 1960s and started directing later that decade. He’s more than aware that the genre of documentary is narrativised, stylised and fictionalised, just like any other – famously describing his own films as “reality fictions”.
Now into his 90s, Wiseman’s third non-documentary narrative feature was described by my colleague Peter Bradshaw as “a belletristic homage to the most famously unhappy marriage in literary history; an intimate, pared-down chamber piece about Sofia Tolstoy, wife of Leo”.
La Chimera
Director: Alice Rohrwacher / Country: Italy, France, Switzerland
Indiana Jones isn’t the only grumpy archaeologist on cinema screen this year. Josh O’Connor’s Arthur, the protagonist of La Chimera, sets out with a very Jones-esque objective: to locate a door to the underworld. Arthur is also the leader of a group of grave-robbers, because why not? We all need ways to pass the time.
Bradshaw was “utterly captivated” by “a movie bustling and teeming with life, with characters fighting, singing, thieving and breaking the fourth wall to address us directly.”
BlackBerry
Director: Matt Johnson / Country: Canada
Films about products, God help us, are all the rage at the moment: see Flamin’ Hot (about Cheetos), The Beanie Bubble (about Beanie Babies) and Tetris (about Pac-Man – kidding, kidding. About Tetris). Matt Johnson’s dramatisation of the titular gadget was described by Observer’s Dylan Roth as an “intriguing” and “cerebral” account of “the unprecedented rise and calamitous fall of the revolutionary smartphone company”. Which sounds like hyperbole for a film about a phone with the physical qwerty keyboard – but other critics are very much on board.
Virtual reality experiences
Consumer-available virtual reality will enter a new phase when Apple’s Vision Pro headset arrives next year. If you’re yet to experience VR, or haven’t for a while, it’s worth checking out titles in the Miff XR program. This year’s includes In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats (a “multi-sensory joyride about the 1980s Acid House movement”), Limbotopia in VR (“ a surreal trip through a post-apocalyptic Taiwan”) and Surfacing (“an immersive fairytale whose everyday heroes are mothers and children in Italian prisons”).
Shayda
Director: Noora Niasari / Country: Australia
Executive produced by Cate Blanchett, Noora Niasari’s debut feature is an Australian film set in the 90s about a woman (Zar Amir Ebrahimi’s titular character) who seeks refuge in a women’s shelter in an attempt to free herself from an abusive relationship. Domestic violence remains an under-explored topic in Australian film and television, despite the recent SBS drama Safe Home and Jess Hill’s grimly compelling docuseries See What You Made Me Do. Critics have heaped praise on Ebrahimi’s performance, describing her as “perfectly cast,” “terrific” and “stunning”. The film will open this year’s festival.
Femme
Director: Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping / Country: UK
The program guide describes the plot of this British thriller as follows: “After being attacked outside a London nightclub, a drag queen decides to turn the tables in this Hitchcockian queer noir.” The word “Hitchcockian” presumably references suspense, tension, jiggery-pokery, maybe some good old-fashioned murder? We’ll see.
The Rooster
Director: Mark Leonard Winter / Country: Australia
Mark Leonard Winter recently delivered an excellent, vividly detailed portrait of an introvert in the under-appreciated Australian film Little Tornadoes. Here he jumps behind the camera in his directorial debut, helming a drama about a cop (Phoenix Raei) who, after a troubling incident, runs into the woods where he meets a scabby hermit played by Hugo Weaving. The last six words in that sentence should be enough to get you through the door.
Melbourne international film festival 2023 runs 3-20 August in venues across the city and regional Victoria; and online 18-27 August. Tickets sales open now for Miff members and will open to the general public on 14 July
