Making it’s European debut at the UK’s stalwart celebration of independent cinema, Raindance Film Festival, indie comedy That’s Not Me is the feature debut for writer/director Gregory Erdstein and co-writer/lead Alice Foulcher. But is it any good?
Festivals
If you don’t laugh, you’ll scream: Sept/Oct screenings
Above and beyond the annual flurry of Australian features offered up at the London Film Festival, there are a bunch of festivals and one-off screenings across Britain throughout September and October that will cater for all Aussie film tastes, from cult to comedy, horror to haute couture.
Out back and over seas: Australia at LFF 2017
Revised views of harsh interiors and fresh perspectives on global interactions mark Australia’s contribution to the 61st BFI London Film Festival, with two features in official competition and a bevy of other titles joining the festival’s usual array of art cinema and genre fare from across the globe.
Australia at LFF 2016
The line-up for the 60th BFI London Film Festival was officially announced this morning, with a handful of Australian films amidst the festival’s usual array of art cinema and genre fare from across the globe.
Indigenous Australia in the Frame
Rolf de Heer and David Gulpilil on the set of Charlie’s Country
In late April, the British Museum opened its major summer exhibition Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation (23 April – 2 August 2015), the first major UK survey of the history of indigenous Australia through objects. Drawing together art and artefacts from the museum’s own collection as well as those in Australia, alongside specially commissioned works, the exhibition is dedicated to celebrating the cultural strength and resistance of the world’s oldest continuing culture.
A swathe of festival and one-off screenings in the coming weeks will ensure that indigenous filmmaking is also firmly in the spotlight this summer, offering everything from popular features to documentaries, short films and anthropological studies.
Films at Aus & NZ Festival 2015
Following the success of the inaugural Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts in 2014, the ANZ Fest gang return to London later this month. This year’s line-up is bigger and better than 2014, and the film strand is no exception. Boosted by the recruitment of Film Coordinator Neil Mitchell, it too has expanded in both scope and volume, with this year’s festival serving up a veritable feast of Antipodean films, old and new, playing across two weekends at Hackney Picturehouse (HPH) and the Strand campus of King’s College London (KCL).
A World First
Often billed as the world’s first feature-length dramatic film, much of The Story of the Kelly Gang (d. Tait, 1906) [30 May – 4pm – KCL] has been lost to the ravages to time. To celebrate the film’s centenary, however, Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) pieced together the remaining fragments from collections and archives (and rubbish dumps!) in Australia and Britain.
Those seventeen or so minutes (plus additional stills and contextual information) will be screened at a very special ANZ Fest event, followed by an extended discussion with Angus Forbes, the grandson of Charles Tait, who is often credited as the film’s director. To discuss the film’s production, exhibition, disappearance and rediscovery, Forbes will be joined on stage by Dr Ian Henderson, director of the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies and Stephen Morgan (that’ll be me!), PhD candidate at King’s College London.
The Last New Wave/s
A firmly established classic and a (somewhat) neglected masterpiece constitute ANZ Fest’s mini-tribute to one of Australia’s finest filmmakers, Peter Weir. Celebrating its 40th birthday in 2015, Weir’s breakthrough classic Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) [31 May – 5:45pm – KCL] – the hauntingly picturesque mystery of disappearing schoolgirls set on St Valentine’s Day 1900 – is shown here in an anniversary screening authorised by Weir himself. Another masterwork of the Australian film renaissance, released two years after Picnic, The Last Wave (1977) [24 May – 4pm – HPH] sees Weir turn his attention to a contemporary mystery, as a Sydney lawyer is drawn deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of indigenous mysticism and apocalyptic visions.
Looking back at New Zealand’s own post-1970 film renaissance, ANZ Fest will also screen Geoff Murphy’s anarchic road movie classic, Goodbye Pork Pie (1981) [24 May – 1pm – HPH], one of the first Kiwi features to get a UK-wide release in the early 1980s.
Antipodean Stories
Recently released in the UK by Soda Pictures, the epic Rob Connolly-produced portmanteau film The Turning (d. Various, 2013) [29 May – 5:45pm – KCL], brings seventeen filmmakers – experienced hands and newcomers alike – together to adapt a collection of loosely connected short stories by Tim Winton. With on-screen appearances from Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham, Rose Byrne and many more, and segments directed by the likes of Warwick Thornton, Justin Kurzel, Mia Wasikowska and Shaun Gladwell.
Also released in Britain last year, breathtaking skateboarding/brotherhood documentary All This Mayhem (d. Martin, 2013) [23 May – 1pm – HPH] relates the meteoric rise and tragic fall of Tas and Ben Pappas, the Melbourne brothers who escaped the city’s rough western suburbs to rank amongst the best skateboarders in the world. This screening of one of the standout documentaries from 2014 also features a Skype Q&A with Tas Pappas.
Meanwhile, commemorating the centenary of ANZAC involvement in the First World War, The Waler: Australia’s Great War Horse (d. Vines, 2015) [31 May – 1:30pm – KCL] shows that there was far more to equine involvement in the Allied effort than the war horse of Michael Morpurgo’s book (or the subsequent stage and feature film productions). Over 130,000 Australian horses served during the Great War, and this documentary traces their origins, their feats and what became of the 50,000 or so that survived the battlefields.
From the past to the very present, and a last minute confirmation in Frackman (d. Todd/Stack, 2015) [30 May – 6:30pm – KCL], an observational documentary – and antipodean companion to Josh Fox’s fracking expose Gasland (2010) – which follows the story of pig-farmer and accidental activist Dayne ‘Frackman’ Pratzky, as he fights multinational corporations seeking a quick buck in the global race for coal seam gas.
Tales of Aotearoa
Stories from indigenous Australia will feature prominently elsewhere in Britain in the coming months, allowing ANZ Fest to focus on tales of Maori life from across the pond. Hard-hitting family drama Once Were Warriors (d. Tamahori, 1994) [30 May – 1:30pm – KCL] is already a well established Kiwi classic, as is New Zealand’s highest grossing hit, 1980s-set comedy Boy (d. Waititi, 2010) [31 May – 3:45pm – KCL] takes a rather more lighthearted approach to growing up Maori. New Zealand also had a relatively healthy share of its homegrown box office in 2014, and ANZ Fest will show the second and third highest grossing Kiwi films of last year, the Cliff Curtis-starring chess and anti-violence drama The Dark Horse (d. Robertson, 2014) [23 May – 4pm – HPH], and pre-Euro blood and thunder actioner The Dead Lands (d. Fraser, 2014) [30 May – 3:45pm – KCL].
Tickets for the 2015 Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts are on sale now. The core festival runs from 28-31 May at King’s College London, with satellite events across London from May 17, including a weekend of film screenings at Hackney Picturehouse on 23-24 May.
Strewth! Old Dogs and New Tricks at Glasgow Film Festival
The wonderful folks over at Glasgow Film Festival have truly delivered on their promise of late last year, programming a veritable cornucopia of Australian cinema for their 2015 installment, which runs 18 February – 1 March.
Strewth! 2015 Glasgow Film Fest to celebrate Oz cinema
After a bumper 2014 edition (which featured a handful of Australian films), the Glasgow Film Festival team have been busy planning the next instalment, which runs 18 February to 1 March 2015. Spreading itself even further across the city and taking in an extra day, the festival will include popular returning strands such as FrightFest, Stranger than Fiction and Best of British. Joining the line-up in 2015 will be a host of new strands celebrating, amongst other things, Ingrid Bergman, Glasgow on film, emerging auteurs and – most excitingly (for us at least) – Australian cinema!
Dubbed ‘Strewth!’, the strand pays homage to Commonwealth ties combining new features with time-honoured classics. Here’s the GFF blurb:
As Glasgow hands over the Commonwealth Games to the Gold Coast, we celebrate Australia’s home-grown film industry, from some old favourites to a showcase of the excellent new films coming up from Down Under. The duality between broad, empty outback and the increasingly sleek metropolis, ever-present racial tensions, particularly as they relate to land ownership, and jet-black humour that occasionally veers into a gritted-teeth sense of camp, are themes that run through the last three decades of Aussie cinema, and come together in the films in this strand. Ripper, mate.
Cliched colloquialisms aside – maybe next year they’ll do a Scottish strand called ‘Och, aye!’ – there’s no doubting that this is fantastic news, and whilst this particular advocate for pre-1970 Australian cinema is fairly sure that era will miss out once again, it is great to see a major British film festival giving Australian cinema the attention it deserves.
The 2015 Glasgow Film Festival runs 18 Feb – 1 March, with the full programme announced in late January.
[TOP IMAGE: Bill Travers and Alastair Sim in Geordie (1955), in which a young Highland Scot travels to Melbourne to compete at the 1956 Olympic Games.]
Australia at the BFI London Film Festival 2014
Five fiction features, four documentaries, four shorts and one omnibus film, exploring life and death – from the outback to the city – with detours into sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll – Australian cinema is set to make a significant contribution to the 58th BFI London Film Festival, which takes place in cinemas across London, 8-19 October 2014.
Film at Aus/NZ Lit & Arts Fest
The inaugural Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts opens tonight in central London with a conversation with celebrated Australian author Tim Winton, ahead of an action-packed weekend of talks, debates, readings, performances and screenings taking place at the Strand campus of King’s College London.
The Far Paradise 