The Sydney Film Festival
Filmmaker Oliver Hermanus discusses Beauty
By Richard Phillips, August 4, 2012
Beauty is about a married middle-aged Afrikaans businessman whose life has become a lie.
Sydney Film Festival 2009—Part 1: Courage and audacity sadly lacking
By Richard Phillips, July 9, 2009
The quality of new work screened at this year’s Sydney Film Festival was patchy and generally undemanding, with critical human issues largely unexplored.
“To encourage people to think more deeply about this social tragedy”
An interview with Olivier Meyrou, director of Beyond Hatred
By Richard Phillips, August 3, 2006
Olivier Meyrou, director of the prizewinning French documentary Beyond Hatred, spoke with the World Socialist Web Siteduring the recent Sydney Film Festival. The film carefully charts the humane response of the Chenu family to the brutal murder of Francois, their 29-year-old homosexual son, by skinheads in 2002. (See review). Meyrou, 40, studied literature and communication before attending film school in Paris and New York’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has worked as an assistant director of operas and made several documentaries, including My Own Little Gay America (1996), Zelda (1998) and Bye Bye Apartheid (2004).
53rd Sydney Film Festival—Part 4
Middle East and North African focus
By Richard Phillips, July 25, 2006
This is the fourth part of a series of articles on the 2006 Sydney Film Festival, held June 9-25. The first part was posted July 17, the second on July 19 and the third on July 22.
53rd Sydney Film Festival--Part 1
Not deep enough
By Richard Phillips, July 17, 2006
This is the first of a series of articles on the 2006 Sydney Film Festival, held June 9-25.
Another sign of popular disgust
Australian film festival audience invites Mamdouh Habib to speak about Guantánamo documentary
By Richard Phillips, July 1, 2006
While the Howard government attempts to claim that “ordinary Australians” support its so-called “war on terror” and associated assault on basic democratic rights, a brief episode at the recent Sydney Film Festival provided yet another sign of the growing popular disgust with Canberra.
Australian government bans Sydney Film Festival movie
By Richard Phillips, June 16, 2003
In a major attack on artistic freedom and democratic rights, Australia’s censor board has banned screenings of the US film Ken Park at the June 6-20 Sydney Film Festival. The decision was made by the government’s Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) and is the first time a movie scheduled for a local festival has been banned in Australia for almost a quarter of a century.
Sydney Film Festival
"The pleasure of seeing should be the moving force"
A selection of Max Ophuls films
By Richard Phillips, August 15, 2000
One of the highlights of the Sydney Film Festival was the screening of five classic films— La Signora di Tutti (1934), The Reckless Moment (1949), Le Plaisir (1951), Madame de... (1953) and Lola Montès (1955)—by German born director Max Ophuls, one of the more significant European filmmakers of his era.
Sydney Film Festival
Teaching stories and empty posturing
Dora Heita and Beau Travail
By Mustafa Rashid, August 9, 2000
The experience of seeing a film can be loosely categorised as internal and external. The internal experience is the one that most filmmakers aim for. This refers to what we experience when a film takes us deeper into ourselves, so to speak. To a varying extent we identify with the protagonist or some other character. We know, understand and even feel the character's state. We want something similar to what the character wants, and, as the plot thickens, we anticipate whether or not they will get it. This is the proper plot structure for a drama as set out in Aristotle's Poetics and in the 20th century has been adopted as the standard by which most people measure films. Beau Travail, the new film by Claire Denis falls into this category, as do most films of the Hollywood model.
Sydney Film Festival
Two young Czech filmmakers investigating real human experiences
By Mustafa Rashid, July 29, 2000
The Czech title of Jan Hrebejk's new film Cosy Dens, one of the two Czech films screened at the Sydney Film Festival, is simply “Pelisky” (pronounced Pelishki). There is no “cosy” in the title; the word itself already sounds cosy. In the case of this film, one's cosy den is one's home—a place where, by definition, one must feel belonging, where one must be accepted unconditionally.
Sydney Film Festival
A sympathetic look at the complexities of old age
Innocence, written and directed by Paul Cox
By Richard Phillips, July 11, 2000
Paul Cox, who has written and directed more than 25 documentaries and features over the past three and a half decades, is one of Australia's few genuinely independent filmmakers. Unlike Bruce Beresford ( Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy, Black Robe) and Peter Weir ( Gallipoli, Dead Poet's Society, The Truman Show), two well-known Australian filmmakers of his generation, Cox has doggedly refused to be lured to Hollywood or elsewhere by promises of financial success.
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