SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Another Sydney Film Festival. This year a hundred and forty programs were on offer over eleven days. There was no way to see the lot and  making an informed choice was hard, with a lack of information on the more obscure offerings. Dividing them up into sections like Europe - Voices of Woman on Screen and Screenability didn't help. It's such a battle that I find it hard to understand why these fill up with the people that film societies and Cinematheques here failed to attract with better documented offerings.

First time Turkish director Selcen Ergun ‘s Kar Ve Ayi / Snow and the Bear is a nice and not all that common example of the way film festivals should function - a presentable item from a film culture that we know diddly about. Star Merve Dizdar made the cover of Elle Magazine Turkey and has been in four features and a TV series since Snow & the Bear was made. We  lost track of her industry back in the days of Yilmaz Guney thrown into the slammer or little Mujde Ar in her scanties, standing up for women’s rights.

In this one, Dizdar is a nurse determined to serve out obligatory service, despite her dad on the ‘phone telling her he can put in the fix and have her transferred. She has been allocated to an isolated Anatolian village to assist a doctor, whose transport has failed. Her own car gets stuck in a snow drift and she has to be helped by attentive local Saygin Soysal, who gets in there cutting firewood and showing her through the frozen forest, despite her doing hostile and independent. 

Soysal is on the outer with the locals in the oppressively close community, because he dobbed in butcher Erkan Bektas for killing a government protected bear. Soysal has a kind of Prince Mishkin mystic relationship with the bears after the voice-over related experience of his dad who faced off with one, which made a plaintive gesture to him with its paws when the man held a rifle to its head, and gored him when the piece misfired. In the winter, Soysal takes food into the trees for the animals, in smelly sacks which put off the locals. These include the women reading tea leaves, while the butcher’s teen daughter can’t wait to get away from the place. The faces of authentic villagers add conviction.

Then Bektas disappears. He's been antagonistic over the nurse interfering with the care of his pregnant wife, who she wants to rest. Suspicion falls on Soysal. The local Gendarmerie Commander has them in to investigate and leads search parties in the woods. The film goes on too long after an intimidating encounter with an actual brown bear but Ergun manages to effectively mix suspense, fashionable female assertive and eco themes, in blue tinted images. Location shooting cost them the first half on each of their twenty nine days filming, setting up in freezing conditions.

Hopes centered on Roter Himmel / Afire, the new Christian Petzold film, which proved rather subdued. Couple, chubby Thomas Schubert (Breathing) and black lover Langston Uibel’s car breaks down (curious echoes of the 1973 Phil Noyce short Caravan Park also shown in an interesting Film School retro.) on their way to the family chalet, facing them with manifestations of a distant fire. Smoke comes off boars running through the trees and a scorched piglet expires in front of them. They are assured that the wind from the sea will keep the flames away. 

  Rotter Himmel - Schubert & Beer

Getting to their destination, they find themselves sharing with Schubert’s mother’s cook’s daughter, the ever-appealing Paula Beer, already in residence with the noises of her make-outs with local life guard Enno Trebs coming through the wall.

They visit the village, where Beer (who is not what she seems) runs an ice cream cart and the beach. Relationships shift among the the group. Ash is blowing across the chalet and there is a red glow distant through the trees. This all combines to distract Scubert from working on his MSS. before the visit of his editor Matthias Brandt, who eventually spends the time chatting with the other residents instead of getting to the discussion of Scubert's work, on which we see he has crossed out complete pages.

The players are good enough to make the lack of action acceptable but the climax turns out to be Schubert's moment of truth - he makes his declaration of love to Beer, who has dismissed his writing - and she doesn’t even notice, concerned about rushing Brandt to the local oncology unit. The fire stays off screen with characters disposed of as interlocked burned hands and the finale turns out to be Brandt recuperating in hospital, with Scubert's new work, an account of the incidents we have witnessed, while Paula runs his wheel chair along the ward verandah. 

We feel cheated at being left with Scubert's not all that interesting self discovery as the film’s end product. Craft aspects are straight forward and performances superior. 

 

One let down was South Korean Jeong-Hong Lee’s first feature Goein / A Wild Roomer  (definitely no relation to the the same name Charley Bowers film) kicking off with a hint of mystery as a pair of renovators have trouble operating the key pad of a piano business, sleeping over where they will be working the next day and finding the toilet locked. 

Wild Roomer.

Then we get two hours of them drinking together, discussing short apprentice ships and freelancing, putting up a ceiling with a nail gun, repairs to the van roof where a dark figure in the security footage jumped on it, having conversations with clients, suppliers and the builder’s sister sharing a suburban house. Highlight is a brief and I suspect unscripted visit by the tradesman, who points out all the things they are doing wrong.

Stop. I’m making it sound too interesting.  

The ending has the surprise refuge-raised squatter character visit and pick up the grocery bill. There is some novelty in always placing the characters in newly restored surroundings but not enough. The director attended the screening. The theme of rootlessness, echoes his earlier 47 min. film No Cave.

Finding Emanuele Crialese’s name on the Italian L'immensità attracted attention after his Respiro and the imposing refugee drama Terrafirma. It’s not that the new film is bad. It’s that it fails to deliver on its many promising elements, instead foregrounding those over-familiar characters the Earth Mother and the Heavy Father.

L'immensita - Penélope Cruz

The ever glamorous Penélope Cruz is raising a family in a lovingly filmed 1970s Catholic Rome. Attention settles on daughter Luana Giuliani, who her siblings deride for wanting to be the boy she dresses as.

One quite involving sub-plot has Giuliani making her way through the forbidden rushes on the vacant land next to the family apartment and meeting the girl from the transient camp there, with whom she begins an uncertain romance, only to find the area cleared by bulldozers.

Her story runs parallel with a sea side vacation, the break up of Cruz’ marriage to Vincenzo Amato  (“I hear dad beat mum”) and the stuffy society which such an (of course) free spirit finds confining. This is punctuated by dance numbers with Penny and the kids and Giuliani mesmerised by the TV’s gleaming black and white Amanda Lear routine, which foreshadows the character’s own final taking the microphone in dinner suit for a similarly lavish presentation, all choreographed by Blanca (le defi) Li.  Production values are first rate but it’s a disappointment to find such an ambitious attempt at significance working out less than involving.

After his savage Bacarau, anything from Brazilian Kleber Filho Mendonça was going to get my attention and his new  Retratos Fantasmas / Pictures of Ghosts promised nostalgia, movie fervor, and the changing face of cities. Unfortunately it sounded better than it is. We end with a film diary, cobbled together from his family movies documenting growing up in their refurbished Setúbal apartment in Brazil’s Recife, cross cut with stills of the changing streets and the odd news clip, like the back and white ones covering Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis and family visiting, complete with Jamie Lee swinging on her mother’s arm.

The film homes in on the maker’s fascination with cinema, which dominates the center section, where the city’s massive thirties movie palaces faced one another round a central square, with the German UFA chain (which had a cinema in twenties’ Sydney) abandoning its ambitious WW2  plans, and subsequent audience decline condemning the one time show places to life as run down malls, awkwardly still housing their projection boxes, lounges, even a left over 35 mm. projector shoved out of the way into a corridor. From the windows, the new retail heart of the town can be seen on the far side of the river.

Kleber Mendonça, taking VHS of the operator friend at work on his last day, along with  PR events and hand sketched plans and diagrams butted onto shots of the decaying buildings, is kind of dull and worse, only occasionally suggests the place, that these once thronged show places held in the life of their communities, paralleling Carnival.

The film recalls Mendonca’s 2012’s O Som ao Redor / Neighboring Sounds which incorporated the next door barking dog we see here montaged in videos, or his admired 2009 24 minute short  Recife Frio. Baracau star Sonja Braga’s 1976 hit Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos / Dona Flor & Her Two Husbands features in the posters that customers queue past.  Throw in a peculiar final episode with a mystic cab driver. 

These long 100 minutes contain material, which could compress into an interesting half hour - Mendonca’s notion of cinema marquee’s as place markers to history (“secret messages to people”), a King Kong craze, the story of the dictatorship restricting Hair to over eighteens, because it disrespected the military, or a national hero now reduced to selling off movie photos and the film copies themselves on the path outside their one time place of exhibition.

 

We're not all that far from David Redmon & Ashley Sabin's Kim's Video, following the fortunes of what we are told was a legendary New York East Village store, which accumulated 55,000 titles, an imposing figure by any standard. It was represented by fanatic followers as the best source in the city. We get anecdotes which stick in the audience’s memory - the Cohen Brothers’ six hundred dollars in late fees,  F.B.I raids filmed in black and white, as the operatives scooped out bays of unlicensed copies, only to have chain owner Yongman Kim re-stock them immediately, to the approval of the staff.  “We felt we were above the law. The law said, ‘Ownership matters.’ We said, ‘Film knowledge matters more.'"

When streaming wiped out the take home movie business, the question of what was going to become of the stock became pressing. Kim offered the movies free to a respectful home and, rather than N.Y.U., the winner was the remote Italian community of Salemi Sicily. The film crew set out for Italy to explore, waving their Kim’s Membership, which guaranteed their access under the deal, and they located the collection in an unlocked building, with a leaky roof - which no one ever visited.

Tracking down responsible officials, they got to be on chatting terms the Salemi Police Marshall  Diego Muraca and sought out Yongman Kim, immigrant film school graduate, who built his video empire from a laundrette operation, directed some girlie movies on the side and was somewhat bemused by their activities. The film makers undertook the re-location themselves and, under the guise of making a movie in Salemi, made off with about half the stock, while filming the team in action wearing movie director masks. One disturbing shot makes it look as if the ghost of Agnes Varda is participating in the heist.

A deal was struck, which included flying the Mayor of Salemi to New York and putting his team up for a week, so he could be thanked publicly for preserving the holdings. They finally retrieved about two thirds.

Kim’s Video seemed to go down a treat with the audience, while it irritated me. It took me a while to work out why.  They were trying to hit the ironic note of the Ross McElwee documentaries (Sherman’s March), which they reference, but the personality those project is more endearing. Also there’s a schizoid quality. They reference their work with clips of serious cinema - locating their childhood with Paris Texas and the activity with Videodrome or The Conversation but the box spines we see are usually tacky exploitation films. Now these may well be in more danger of vanishing than the prestige titles and a better indication of the taste of their audience but, if that’s what they mean, someone should say it.

 What we were seeing was only a detail of  the big picture - the wide belief that films are ephemera, the wasteful creating and scrapping of formats, the lack of  ownership by the audience who financed them (sometimes inadequately I know), the problems of degradation and access.

I’ve been there, once trying to save the Amalgamated library’s seven hundred sixteen millimeter prints, a much better record of productions going back to the twenties. The National Collection offered to house twenty five. The Herald printed a letter saying they weren’t even Australian ... but I'm getting nostalgic.

 

Homing in on the event's movie themed items did land me the pick of my selection, Chandler Levack's Canadian I Like Movies. This one, like  Cinema Pardiso before it, often makes uncomfortable viewing for a determined movie addict.

Lehtinen

Unprepossessing seventeen year old Isaiah Lehtinen has erected an elaborate ritual around his film fixation, doing a comic routine with fellow High Schooler Percy Hynes White to introduce their home viewings of Saturday Night Live and stalling their completion of the media course's end of year production, though White's dad wants his video camera back. 

Lehtinen makes a tentative move into adult society by taking a part time spot at Sequels Video in the local mall (using Vancouver's last Blockbuster), though it's so far away his widowed mum has to drive him. One way or another, his frail stability is undermined - not least by having to wear a sash reading "Ask me about Schreck Three" on the job. A new guiding light moves into his life, in the person of branch manager Romina d'Ugo. This however doesn't go too well, ending with a massively embarrassing session with the company's Human Resources guy. Turns out that d'Ugo has followed a trajectory not unlike the one Lehtinen has in mind, which came to a halt when a producer became fascinated by her panty line.

I watched these people, who are so good here that I couldn't help wondering whether they'd could do anything else. Turns out that d'Ugo, whose character justifies herself by demanding "Look up my IMDB page", has been on screen for decades and Lehtinen also has a string of credits. Music Video maker Levack has nailed the detail - Stanley Kubrick & Todd Haines, staff picks, Tisch School, sixteen millimeter, Toronto based comics. His uncomfortable accuracy has more than one commentator squirming. 

 

Throw in The Return of Becky, where our still teenage heroine, Lulu Wilson’s Becky, is back in a sequel to her previous run-in with the ratbag right. This time it’s the Noble Men (think Proud Boys) all set to arm an insurrection.

A nice set of strip 'toon titles and we open with Wilson smarming a new set of foster parents (“Good night, mom!”)  before she hits the road to find a haven with elderly black Denise Burse and get a job in the local diner. She fantasises about taking out a stroppy customer with the jagged edge of a broke plate. In come three hoons who give her a hard time, so she spills a cup of hot coffee in the crotch of body built Matt Angel. He and sidekicks Aaron Dalla Villa & Michael Sirow plot revenge, following her home and taking out Burse, when she interferes with a leveled shot gun - and stealing Wilson’s sleepy dog.

Kitting herself up in a scarlet track suit and shoving a pepper spray canister in her backpack, Wilson knows that the trio are headed to a Noble Men rendez vous and finds their standard flying in front of the nice ranch house of Stifler himself, Sean William Scott working on his image but not really coming over as a charismatic cult leader.

Predictable mayhem ensues. The action is staged with suitable comic glee - grenade in mouth, arrow through the cheeks, serried bear traps, a grenade launcher and, to keep things on ideological track, setting the dog on the Woke master villain whose vision is impaired by having a hunting knife planted between the eyes.

We can’t help noticing that all we ever get to see of Scott's planned uprising is a store of death dealing devices and a scrolling membership list on his computer drive. While it’s obviously not big budget, the film making in The Wrath of Becky is very pro and on target.

The festival ran to a hundred and forty programs. Time was I'd have tried to keep up with that. Even subtracting the ones that would rapidly hit theaters and streamers, there were quite a few more I'd have liked to check out but cost and time are limiting factors now. I missed the whole Amitah Bachchan retro, complete with a Yash Chopra I didn't know! I can only wonder how representative the films that I did watch were. 

Barrie Pattison 2023