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The 2011 Sydney Film Festival runs from 8th – 19th June and screens Australian and International films during the day and evening at The State Theatre, Event Cinemas George Street, Dendy Opera Quays and Art Gallery of NSW.

Twelve features are selected for Official Competition, SFF’s flagship program, on the basis that they demonstrate `emotional power and resonance; are audacious, cutting-edge, courageous; and go beyond the usual treatment of the subject matter’.

2011 SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL OFFICIAL COMPETITION LINE-UP

Competing for the Sydney Film Prize, worth 60,000 Australian dollars, are the following 12 films that will be judged by a jury led by Chen Kaige.

TOOMELAH

The tiny community of Toomelah is made up of Gamilaroi and Bigambal people living in an old Aboriginal mission north of Mooree. This is the country where director Ivan Sen’s (Beneath Clouds, Dreamland) mother grew up and his deep personal connection to the place is palpable throughout this confronting, brutally honest dramatic feature that draws its acting talent from within the community. Ten-year-old Daniel (Daniel Connors) is a good little boxer like his dad Buster (Michael Connors) used to be. Impatient with the other kids at school – except for his sweetheart Tanitia (Danieka Connors) – he starts hanging out with Linden (Christopher Edwards), the local dealer, who trains him up to be a gangster. When a thug named Bruce (Dean Daley-Jones) returns to town after a stint in jail, he threatens Linden’s territory and Daniel is suddenly propelled towards violence. Raw, intimate, and laced with mob humour, Toomelah seamlessly intertwines issues like the Stolen Generation, substance abuse and cultural erasure with an everyday story about one boy caught in the downward spiral of a neglected community. Selected for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, Sen’s provocative film “tastes like dust in the mouth [and] strikes like iron in the mind.” (from The Back of Beyond)

 

THE TREE OF LIFE

The elliptical narrative of Terrence Malick‘s rapturously beautiful, emotionally arresting film audaciously segues between the particular (the repressed desires and shimmering aspirations of the O’Briens, a middle-American family in the 1950s) and the universal (the continuous cycle of existence, from the age of the dinosaurs to the new world). “There are two ways through life – the way of nature and the way of grace,” says the voice of Jack’s mother in the opening moments, and while young Jack (Hunter McCracken) must choose a path – between father (Brad Pitt) and mother (Jessica Chastain), competition and allegiance, success and happiness – old Jack (Sean Penn) has lost his way and is searching for permanence in a gleaming, chaotic modern city. Dreams and memory collide in Jack’s spiritual, emotional and intellectual journey as he seeks to reconcile with the past, to reclaim his relationship with his father and to properly mourn the loss of his brother. More densely labyrinthine than any of Malick’s previous films (The New World, The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven, Badlands), the slippery editing is in absolute collusion with Alexandre Desplat’s soaring music and Emmanuel Lubezki’s glorious cinematography. The result is a commanding cinematic paean to life – its intimacy, messiness and grandeur.

 

THE FUTURE

Captivating filmmaker, performer and video artist Miranda July embraces the beauty and absurdity of everyday life with “an artistic eye wide open.” (The New York Times) As peculiar and endearing as her Cannes- and Sundance-winning debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, July’s second feature film follows Los Angeles couple Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) who decide to live out their dreams in the 30 days before their freedom is curtailed by the arrival of newly adopted cat Paw Paw – the film’s feline narrator! Quitting their jobs as dance instructor and IT-support guru, and disconnecting their internet, the pair get panicky in the face of unlimited choice and shift into realities that threaten to become as mundane as the one they are trying to transform. Sliding along the edges of romance, satire and suburban horror, July creates an unsettling film about fear and how it undermines our aspirations while retaining her characteristic playfulness. Sophie’s attempts to film her dance routines for YouTube are amongst the film’s many delights.

 

THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD

Joshua Marston – whose directorial debut Maria Full of Grace (SFF 2004) was set between Colombia and New York – sinks his incisive allegorist’s teeth into the pulsating veins of another culture in this suspenseful twist on the cautionary tale. Buoyed by life and its possibilities, 17-year-old Nik is a carefree teenager in small-town northern Albania with a crush on the school beauty and ambitions to start his own internet café. His world is suddenly up-ended when his father and uncle become entangled in a land dispute that leaves a fellow villager murdered. According to the Kanun, a 15th-century code of law, this entitles the dead man’s family to take the life of a male from Nik’s family as retribution. His uncle in jail and his father in hiding, Nik is the prime target and confined to the home while his studious 15-year-old sister Rudina is forced to leave school and take on their father’s bread delivery rounds. Working with non-professional actors, Marston’s achieves a resounding authenticity, boldly contrasting antiquated traditions with the lives of the young people whose future is put at risk by them.

 

TAKE SHELTER

Jeff Nichols‘ daring psychological thriller stars Academy Award® nominee Michael Shannon (who also gave a knock-out performance in Nichols’ debut film, Shotgun Stories, SFF 2007) as Curtis LaForche, a working man living in small-town Ohio with his beautiful wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and their young, hearing-impaired daughter. When Curtis’s recurring dream of an ominous storm becomes increasingly vivid, he fears for both his sanity and the safety of his family. Internalising his anxieties, his outward behaviour becomes progressively stranger to his wife and fellow workers, and then the hallucinations start to invade his waking life with terrifying consequences. Is Curtis experiencing deranged visions or premonitions? David Wingo’s broody, foreboding score and Nichol’s exacting script allude to the possible origins of Curtis’s psychic malady – impending ecological disaster, economic uncertainty and threatened masculinity – all the while, like Todd Hayne’s Safe, maintaining a slippery and perfectly measured ambiguity. As dramatic metaphor, his disruptive behaviour holds a mirror to the fears and contradictions pervasive in contemporary life. With a performance reminiscent of James Mason’s in Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, Shannon is totally transfixing as the unhinged everyman.

 

TARGET

Alexander Zeldovich‘s dystopian spectacular is set in 2020 Russia and stylistically combines the philosophical futurism of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris with the flagrant consumer excesses of AES+F’s hit installation The Feast of Trimalchio (Sydney Biennale 2010) via a heady mix of contemporary sci-fi references and Felliniesque flourishes. The Russian economy is booming thanks to its vast mineral deposits and the busy Guangzhou-Paris superhighway. The political order is an ‘ecological democracy’ and social structures are rigorously maintained by an exam system that ensures all citizens are correctly positioned in the hierarchy. Victor (Maksim Sukhanov), the minister for natural resources, his wife Zoya (Justine Waddell), her TV-celebrity brother Mitya (Danila Kozlovskiy) and Nicolai (Vitaly Kishchenko), a colonel assigned to commandeer the superhighway, are all members of the elite class with everything but happiness and time at their disposal. Together they travel to the Altai Mountains to an abandoned astrophysics plant – the Target – in order to expose themselves to cosmic rays which prolong life and rejuvenate the mind. Initially elated by the short term fix, the long-term impact sends them spiralling into decadence and destruction. Luxuriously shot and designed, this rampant odyssey is a bold and compelling meditation on sex, communication and contemporary power.

 

SLEEPING BEAUTY

Julia Leigh – the award-winning Australian author of The Hunter and Disquiet – was mentored by Jane Campion on her filmmaking debut, an unsettling erotic fairytale selected for Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Emily Browning is alabaster perfection as Lucy, a university student working numerous self-effacing jobs. She is socially isolated from her housemates and fellow students and spends her limited free time ministering to the peculiar desires of her morbidly depressed best friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie). Her strong-willed drift towards oblivion is anchored only by a need for money and she signs up with an exclusive lingerie club run by the elegant Clara (Rachael Blake), whose controlling demeanor is both intoxicating and comforting. Like a heroine from a film by Marguerite Duras or Luis Buñuel (directors with whom Leigh shares an austere intellectualism and visual mannerism respectively), Lucy is a sexual and thinking being, neither innocent nor totally complicit. Mysterious and bewitching, her disruptive impulses derive from a mix of boredom and discontentedness and ultimately lead her into a dangerous, heady slumber from which, like the titular princess, she will be awakened.

 

NORWEGIAN WOOD

Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya, Cyclo) brings a perfectly honed outsider’s eye to this delicate, visually ravishing adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s lyrical bestselling novel. Set in the late-60s when Tokyo universities were rife with political unrest, Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) is a student whose deepening relationship with the emotionally fragile Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi of Babel fame) is haunted by the spectre of a past tragedy. Caught between her emotional and then geographical retreat and the expanding world of college life, Watanabe’s loyalty is tested by adventurous best friend and dilettante Nagasawa (Tetsuji Tamayama) and the enchanting and strikingly independent Midori (impressive newcomer Kiko Mizuhara). The themes of awakening, loss and melancholy that ripple through both the novel and The Beatles song from which it derives its name are perfectly accentuated by an evocative score from Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, gorgeous production design and Mark Lee Ping Bin’s lush cinematography (Lee is a regular collaborator of both Tran and Hou Hsiao Hsien’s and shared credit with Christopher Doyle on In the Mood for Love).

 

CAIRO 678

Mohamed Diab‘s bold, uncompromising debut feature film tackles the issue of sexual harassment in Egypt – a subject veiled in collective silence – with a rigorous eye for everyday detail, a potent serve of anger and a deliciously wry sense of humour. Fayza (Egyptian pop sensation Bushra) is a devout, working-class wife and mother who can barely endure the frequent molestations experienced on her daily bus trip. Seba (Nelly Karim) is a wealthy jewellery designer who starts a self-defense class for women after she is abused at a football match. Nelly (Nahed El Sebaï), a budding comedian attacked when crossing the road from her fiancée’s car to her family home, is the first woman in Cairo to file a sexual harassment lawsuit. Unsupported by their loved ones, the legal system or the media, their lives unexpectedly intersect and a vendetta is hatched. Enter the sardonic, quick-witted detective Esam (Maged El Kedwany) assigned to solve the case of a series of attacks on Bus 678. With full regard for the sense of violation each woman feels, Diab’s taut, thoroughly engrossing script avoids didacticism, deftly navigating religious, secular and class differences to foreground the multitude of conflicting angles on this controversial topic.

 

ATTENBERG

Athina Rachel Tsangari‘s striking drama, set in a Greek factory town by the sea, follows 23-year-old Marina, an unpredictable creature whose isolated habitat and limited human interaction have led her to mimic the repetitive behaviour of animals featured in the David Attenborough documentaries she so hungrily devours. Her world is shaped by her father, a modernist architect whose health is decaying as if in empathy with the concrete buildings he designed; and by her promiscuous friend Bella, who provides her with kissing lessons and tantalising accounts of her own sexual adventures. Tsangari (who produced cast member Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Oscar®-nominated Dogtooth, 2009) applies the camera like a magnifying glass, approaching her small sample of human characters with the intense analytical gaze of the film’s scientific hero. (The title is a deliberate mispronunciation of Attenborough’s name.) Stylistically bold and featuring a finely choreographed performance by Ariane Labed, the film’s emotional trajectory intensifies when Marina begins to experiment with desire and is forced to confront her father’s mortality.

 

AMADOR

Laced through with twisted black comedy and subtle social critique, Fernando Léon de Aranoa‘s (Mondays in the Sun, Princesas) film about the plight of an immigrant worker living in Spain wickedly subverts the slice-of-life drama and ultimately packs a punch that is as scathingly funny as it is devastating. Marcela (Peruvian actress Magaly Solier, who also starred in Altiplano, SFF Official Competition 2009) is an immigrant living on the outskirts of Madrid with her boyfriend Nelson who scrapes together their meagre living by selling flowers. Frustrated with Nelson’s limited ambitions, she is on the brink of leaving him when she discovers that she is pregnant. Forced to take another job, Marcela keeps her pregnancy hidden and starts caring for a bedridden old man, Amador, while his daughter and her family are on summer holidays. Initially they are reserved and somewhat brusque with each other but an unlikely conspiracy is formed when they discover each other’s best-kept secret. Aranoa slyly infuses this barbed morality tale with the golden hues of the Spanish summer, giving the film a lyrical feel that is counter to its sharp, calculated observations about class order and the tenacity and resourcefulness of the dispossessed.

 

A SEPARATION

This utterly compelling, emotionally resonant drama from Asghar Farhadi – director of About Elly (SFF 2009) – was awarded Best Film and both acting prizes for its superb ensemble cast at the Berlin Film Festival. Not exactly out-of-love, Nader and Simin are attempting to divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. They have acquired visas to emigrate from Iran – Simin is anxious to ensure a better future for their 10-year-old daughter Termeh, but Nader refuses to leave his elderly father who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. When the judge refuses to formalise their separation, Simin resolutely departs the family home, leaving the obstinate Nader to contract the services of a housekeeper. Razieh is a devout, impoverished woman who tends to the apartment and Nader’s father with her own four-year-old daughter in tow. When Nader returns one day to find his father alone and compromised, his fury leads to an altercation that has unexpected and devastating consequences. Propelled by an acute attention to class, religious and gender differences, Farhadi’s mathematically precise script interrogates the very basis of truth and ethics, its imploding narrative movement the perfect metaphor for the social and political discord that plagues contemporary Iran.

 

For the full program, please visit their official website.

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