While the glamour of Cannes can feel a world away, the Sydney Film Festival brings local and international films — some 200-plus films from 69 countries — to our shores, most for the very first time, including plenty straight from La Croisette.
Returning from Wednesday for its 71st year, the 12-day program includes big names such as Yorgos Lanthimos, Francis Ford Coppola and Steve McQueen, alongside cinephile favourites Miguel Gomes, Mohammad Rasoulof and Olivier Assayas.
On the local front, documentarian Paul Clarke opens the festival with Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line, one of 12 films in official competition for the $60,000 Sydney Film Prize. Ian Darling (The Final Quarter) and Justin Kurzel (Nitram, Snowtown) also debut new works, while Gracie Otto (Heartbreak High, Under The Volcano) and Sally Aitken (Hot Potato: The Story of the Wiggles) are among the filmmakers competing for the Documentary Australia Award.
2024 also marks the inaugural First Nations Award, with 10 Indigenous filmmakers from across the globe competing for a $35,000 cash prize – the world's largest for global Indigenous filmmaking.
What else? There are child- and not-child-friendly blockbusters (Despicable Me 4, Megalopolis); remastered and live re-scored classics; award-winners from Cannes, Sundance and the Berlin Film Festival; a retrospective on Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, and a smattering of the year's most anticipated releases.
Feeling overwhelmed? We've asked a selection of our regular film critics to offer their top picks, a combination of films they've caught before or can't wait to see. See you at the cinema.
Sydney Film Festival runs from June 5-16.
The Moogai
Just as The Babadook made a monster out of grief, this new Australian horror literalises the ongoing trauma and lingering threat of the Stolen Generations into a bogeyman terrorising a First Nations family.
Directed and written by Jon Bell (Cleverman), The Moogai stars Shari Sebbens and Meyne Wyatt (The Sapphires) as Sarah and Fergus, a couple expecting their second child who have recently come into contact with Ruth (Tessa Rose), Sarah's previously estranged mother.
When baby Jacob arrives, Sarah begins hearing and seeing spirits, including small children with white eyes – figures that Ruth claims are the souls of children stolen by the Moogai. As the shadowy figure makes its moves to claim Jacob (it's worth noting he's fair-skinned, while their darker first child is left ignored), Sarah's visions are discounted and her sanity questioned, before a climactic face-off.
Loaded with layers of trauma, including post-natal depression, medical neglect and dispossession, the Moogai's horrors are barely metaphorical – but given Australia's history of silencing First Nations voices, being overt is understandable.
Expanded out from Bell's haunting 2020 short film of the same name (streaming on SBS On Demand), The Moogai was among Australia's biggest talking points at this year's Sundance and SXSW festivals – maybe it will be here, too. JR.
Pepe
If a hippo could talk, what would it say? Would it spin tales of faraway lands, of being snatched from its home and sold into service as the personal pet of infamous Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar? Might it ponder, in deep, dulcet tones, just how it acquired consciousness, and thus the mysteries of life?
All is revealed in this strange and singular odyssey from Dominican director Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias; surely the only movie about colonialism, conservation and the drug war to be narrated by the disembodied ghost of a hippo.
After Escobar's death in 1993, his private menagerie of hippos was left to roam free on the wilds of his sprawling estate, where they multiplied in number. (There's a 2013 National Geographic documentary on them, called — what else — Cocaine Hippos.) In 2009, one unlucky beast — nicknamed Pepe by the press — was shot and killed by German hunters, becoming something of a national celebrity in the process.
Pepe the movie lets the eponymous pachyderm tell the story in his own (imagined) words, switching between Spanish, Afrikaans and the Namibian dialect Mbukushu as he recounts his journey from Africa to Central America — and the absurd circ*mstances of his demise. The DreamWorks remake should be just around the corner. LG.
Dahomey
In 2019, French Senegalese filmmaker and actor Mati Diop made history as the first black woman to compete at the Cannes Film Festival. There, her totally hypnotic debut feature — the supernatural postcolonial love story Atlantique, now available to stream on Netflix — took out the Grand Prix and established Diop as one to watch.
She returns with Dahomey, a documentary with a speculative twist, which has already taken out the top prize at this year's Berlin Film Festival.
Prompted by Emanuel Macron's announcement that 26 artworks taken by the French from the Kingdom of Dahomey – situated in present-day Benin – would be repatriated, Diop's film gives space to debates around the attendant ethics and practicalities, while documenting every stage of the objects' journey. More than that, however, Dahomey quite literally gives these artefacts a voice: The Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel provides the sonorous voice for a statue of King Ghezo (Dahomey's ruler from 1818 to 1859).
"When statues die, they enter into art," posited the French film essayist Chris Marker in his 1953 anti-colonial short, Statues Also Die. In Dahomey, liberated from the glass cases of their colonisers, the kingdom's statues live again – through Diop's lens, their resurrection is both spooky and thrilling. KY.
A Different Man
Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde told of a man transformed into a nefarious other by a potion's magic; In A Different Man, director Aaron Schimberg posits a man transformed by an experimental medical regimen – with results that prove as darkly revelatory.
Sebastian Stan stars as Edward, a struggling actor with a severe facial disfigurement (the actor's chiselled visage is unrecognisable in remarkable prosthetics). With a dose of sci-fi and a dash of body horror, Edward is rebirthed as the handsome 'Guy'. But his new-found confidence is shaken when he meets Oswald – played by Adam Pearson, a disability advocate with neurofibromatosis – a man whose own facial disfigurement uncannily mirrors the old Edward's, though Oswald is as gregarious as Edward was diffident.
With the two men in competition for the same acting gig and the same girl (Renate Reinsve of The Worst Person in the World), Schimberg's film takes on a twisted, meta dimension. Coming to Sydney Film Festival from the Berlinale Competition, A Different Man is a deadpan black comedy that fearlessly probes the relationship between physical difference and identity. KY.
Problemista
The spectre of Miranda Priestly looms over this sweetly absurdist comedy set in New York's art scene. SNL alum Julio Torres writes, directs, and stars as Alejandro, an aspiring toy designer tasked with navigating America's impenetrable immigration system. His visa status rests in the hands of a volatile has-been critic, Elizabeth, who enlists him to prepare an exhibition dedicated to her cryogenically frozen husband in return for potential sponsorship.
While Tilda Swinton embodies the role with an expected extravagance, her preening entitlement and aggressive delusion hits shockingly close to home for anyone who's endured a nightmare boss. It's no surprise that the film is a semi-autobiographical. As Alejandro's odyssey escalates into untenable chaos, Torres takes aim at the deliberate hostility of the legal system and the precarity of modern gig work.
It's all counterbalanced by a playful surrealism, expressed through picture-book visuals and a lush, emotive score. For all its cruelty, the world never loses its sense of magic. JT.
No Other Land
Coming straight from the Berlin International Film Festival where it won best documentary, this film by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of activists depicts the attempted expulsion – and ongoing resistance – of residents from the Masafer Yatta region in the West Bank. No Other Land provides a decades-long perspective on the Israeli campaign of eradication in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, grounded in the complex relationship shared by co-directors and journalists Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, forged across the dividing lines of military governance.
Its Australian premiere arrives after the killing of over 36,000 civilians in Gaza, witnessed through countless hours of candid footage documenting one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time. Even before the advent of social media, Palestinians have become inured to capturing their own dehumanisation on camera for the world to see. Don't look away. JT.
Black Girl
Known as the 'godfather of African cinema', Ousmane Sembène began making films at a time when depictions of the continent and its people were solely the purview of Hollywood and white ethnographers. In French colonies such as Sembène's native Senegal, Black Africans had been prohibited from making films by law: from 1934 to 1960, when France relinquished its colonial holdings, the Laval Decree ensured that cinema could not be put in the service of any subversive, anti-colonial cause.
Having already made a name for himself as an author, Sembène turned to cinema precisely because of its capacity for mass-scale subversion. His 1966 debut feature, the deceptively slender Black Girl (it's not quite an hour long), relates the story of a young Senegalese woman who travels to the Cote d'Azur to work for a white couple. It's an elegant but brutal allegory for the perils of neocolonialism, and anticipates Get Out in its incisive take-down of 'progressive' white liberals.
The film's merits have only recently begun to be properly recognised in the west, after Sembène's death in 2007. The filmmaker may well not have cared about this belated praise, however: Asked in the 1980s whether he thought European audiences understood his films, he replied, "Why be a sunflower and turn towards the sun? I myself am the sun." KY.
Flathead
Few Australian debut films are as immediately striking and singular as Jaydon Martin's Flathead, a laconic and quietly moving docufiction about Cass Cumerford, a seventy-something battler fond of beer, a ciggie and a laugh. "God loves my clouds," he jokes gleefully, puffing into the sky. "All the angels can have a bit too."
His frail body betrays his larrikin spirit, perhaps why he visits his hometown of Bundaberg, a late-in-life return that features an impromptu baptism from a local fundamentalist.
An actor who is at home in the apocalypse of Mad Max: Fury Road and Talk to Me's flash of a hellscape, Cumerford has a scorched-earth quality. And slowly, we learn his history — one of drugs, boredom and grief barely expressed, but held.
But the film stands out beyond the relentlessly real and storied Cumerford, who it was written around. Shot predominantly in black and white (colour bursts through for footage filmed by Cumerford and others), Flathead eschews the New Wave image of bleeding heat and harsh colours for a quieter, kinder view.
The film's credit dedicates Flathead to the "working class, migrants and indentured workers of Australia", often interspersing Cumerford's scenes with footage of factory workers, fish and chip shop workers and butchers, slowly forming a sense of exhaustion. It is the rare Australian work of art about working class people that doesn't patronise or romanticise them. JR.
Sasquatch Sunset
Yes, that really is indie queen Riley Keough and Oscar-nominee Jesse Eisenberg belching, slobbering and performing various other bodily functions under layers of latex and matted fur in realistic Bigfoot costumes.
Don't expect to recognise either of them by their dialogue, though: this is strictly an all-grunting affair, full of guttural sub-human sounds with not a subtitle in sight. (So, already more intelligible than a session of Australian parliament, then.)
Like a nature documentary if it featured gross-out slapstick and existential longing, Sasquatch Sunset certainly won't be for everyone, but there's no denying it's one of a kind.
Keough is a Bigfoot mama with a child and Eisenberg a callow male, while the film's co-director David Zellner plays the lascivious alpha male who leads the pack with his libido (don't ask). Together they wander the forests of the US Northwest, hunting, cavorting and generally existing in peace — at least until a (very funny) tragedy involving a mountain lion sets them on a course of danger and discovery.
There's much pleasure in watching the cast commit to the bit, even if the movie doesn't quite achieve the poignancy it's obviously been designed for. Freaks, furries and professors of folklore and mythology will be very satisfied. LG.
