Melbourne is never in short supply of festivals. The year so far has seen large crowds congregate to celebrate subjects as diverse as comedy, jazz, fashion, food and wine, dogs, activist-hijacked digital projections and homemade flying machines destined for failure.
As always, the Melbourne international film festival stands out among the pack, even if the Australasian Quilt Convention may be gaining traction. And once again the city’s cinephiles are spoilt for choice, with hundreds of films packed into 17 eyeball-fatiguing, bum-crunching days. Here are 10 highlights from this year’s program.
1. The Butterfly Tree
Take a gawk at the visually resplendent trailer for The Butterfly Tree, writer/director Priscilla Cameron’s Queensland-shot feature film debut. Now that’s how you shoot a greenhouse. Those intensely saturated, almost day-glo colours sure look luxuriant, even Luhrmann-like.
Melissa George plays a burlesque queen-turned-florist who entrances a single dad (Ewen Leslie) and his teenage son (Ed Oxenbould, from Paper Planes). The trailer reveals vision of a chainsaw-wielding Leslie, suggesting the film isn’t all butterflies, roses and lovely hanging plants. The film certainly looks the part; fingers crossed it conjures magical realism as fabulous as last year’s Girl Asleep.
2. Girl Unbound
Professional Pakistani squash player Maria Toorpakai Wazir used to dress up as a boy in order to play sport, defying strict laws in place in her home in the mountainous region of South Waziristan – the heartland of the Taliban.
Drawing on her background in news journalism, including making video content for Time, director Erin Heidenriech follows Wazir from her current residence in Toronto to her old home in Pakistan, where her family reportedly receive death threats on a near-daily basis.
Girl Unbound sounds like a fascinating story. It is affiliated with the Maria Toorpakai Foundation, which promotes gender equality, according to its webpage, by “investing in education, sports and healthcare programs for young girls and boys in remote regions of the world”.
3. Overnight sci-fi marathon
In my younger and bolder years I made a habit of attending film marathons at Melbourne’s Westgarth cinema, some of which lasted a debilitating 12 or even 24 hours. Were they fabulous or excruciating? I’m still not sure. I do know that the person I hold personally accountable for such ordeals is the programmer, Zak Hepburn.
Now the general manager at the historic Astor theatre, Hepburn is up to his old antics again, hosting Miff’s overnight Sci-Fi Marathon. Titles on the bill include A Boy and His Dog, The Visitor, Existenz, and one of my favourite dystopian future films: the grungy midnight movie Dead End Drive-In. BYO No-Doz.
4. There Will Be Blood, featuring the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling 2007 masterpiece, about fictitious oil baron Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) continues to accrue accolades. It was recently named the third greatest film since the turn of the century by a BBC critics poll, and the greatest by the New York Times’s critics. See it on the big screen at the Arts Centre, with a live performance from the MSO.
5. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
I am rather fond of the poster for Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos second English-language film, though I struggle to explain why – just as most viewers struggle to explain anything about Lanthimos’s films. The director is one of the key figures in the Greek weird wave movement, a range of strange and cryptic films forged in the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis.
Teaming up again with Colin Farrell after 2015’s The Lobster, and adding to the mix Nicole Kidman and Alicia Silverstone, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a horror-thriller about a heart surgeon’s relationship with a peculiar teenage boy.
6. The Silent Eye
Amiel Courtin-Wilson is one of the most interesting Australian film-makers working today. The Melbourne-born artist is best known for his documentaries, although he also directed a stunning 2012 narrative feature, Hail, for which he dropped a dead horse out of a helicopter.
Courtin-Wilson’s new film The Silent Eye (shot over three days in January 2016) captures jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and Japanese dancer-choreographer Tanaka Min. Details are scarce; the director described the film as “literally 70 minutes of these men performing in a room”.
Also on the program is the director’s excellent 2008 warts-and-all documentary, Bastardy, about much-loved but troubled Indigenous actor Jack Charles.
7. The Square
Elisabeth Moss is becoming increasingly associated with the words “critically acclaimed”. The star of The Handmaid’s Tale, Top of the Lake and Mad Men (let’s not dwell on her performance in 2009’s much-maligned Did You Hear About the Morgans?) co-stars in this satire from Swedish director Ruben Östlund. In his crosshairs are Swedish politics, art and commerce.
In May, The Square (not to be confused with the criminally under-watched Australian noir film of the same name) became the unexpected winner of one of the world’s most prestigious film prizes: the Cannes film festival’s Palme d’Or.
8. Pioneering Women
The Pioneering Women program contains an eclectic array of films from Australian women, from zany musical (Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck) to multicultural drama (Clara Law’s Floating Life) to Josh Hughes-esque teen caper (Nadia Tass’ The Big Steal). It also includes work from Ana Kokkinos, Susan Lambert, Laurie McInnes, Tracy Moffatt, Mary Callaghan and Ann Turner. It is an impressive line-up of films (for more details check the Miff website) some of which are difficult to find on home rental formats – and, especially, on the big screen.
9. A Man of Integrity
Like his film-making colleague and fellow countryman Jafar Panahi, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof has been arrested and banned from making films – but continues to ply his trade and defy the censors. His latest film, the clandestinely shot drama A Man of Integrity, arrived in Cannes transported in secret on a USB. The story follows a goldfish farmer in Northern Iran who finds himself embroiled in conflict with a rich and nasty neighbour who is intent on buying his property.
10. PACmen
Following neurosurgeon-cum-GOP-candidate Ben Carson’s failed 2016 tilt for leadership of the Republican Party, Australian film-maker Luke Walker’s fly-on-the-wall documentary is the first cinema-released doco about Super Pacs: committees that are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money for political candidates, provided they don’t contribute directly to their campaigns. What could go wrong?
For Carson, quite a lot. His hostile relationship with the media, coupled with intense scrutiny into the contents of his best-selling autobiographies, led to a very strange situation: a potential presidential candidate insisting that he really, really did try to stab somebody when he was a teenager. The director keeps a cool, critical distance, building a compelling portrait of a campaign that went off the rails.
• Melbourne International Film Festival runs from 3 to 20 August
