Following on from his brutal and uncompromising feature debut Snowtown, Justin Kurzel has cemented himself as an auteur director, bringing Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang to the screen in a raw, unfiltered telling of the rise of Ned Kelly from young petty thief to fearsome outlaw bushranger. A young …
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“A powerful punch to the solar plexus … notices things that others would rather just skim over, like the kind of racism that blends right in with everyday life, so well that you hardly notice it anymore.” – Cineuropa. Armeena Bakri (Danielle Horvat) delivers a powerful, cutting monologue into the microphone. Her gaze holds her …
In 2018 director Ben Lawrence delivered the multi-award winning documentary, Ghosthunter (SWIFF’19), where long hidden family secrets convergered with true crime. In 2019 Lawrence peers into troubled hearts and minds with a tense, intelligent dramatic debut feature, following war photographer Daniel Fischer (Hugo Weaving in a career-best performance), grappling with a perspective shift on his …
Winner · Special Jury Prize · Venice Film Festival. Following her massively successful directorial debut The Babadook, Australian powerhouse Jennifer Kent turns her attention to colonial Australia with the feminist revisionist Western, The Nightingale, a tale of violence and retribution set against a wildly untameable backdrop of gothic Tasmania. 1820s Tasmania, young Irish convict, Clare …
Some life events are so powerful they are defined by “then” and “now”. For Mathew (Tyriel Mora, The Castle, Book Week SWIFF’19), a sensitive near-retiring real estate caring for his mentally incapacitated wife, it’s the car crash that killed his daughter Sarah (Georgia Adamson) and Indigenous son-in-law Jayden (Damion Hunter). The crash spared his grandson, …
“Our motivation for making the film was to release more wicked and wonderful stories by women into the world, much as our protagonist unleashes powerful ideas with each page she turns. It’s a metaphor for the darkness that lurks within us all” – Megan Riakos, creator. Showcasing the works of eleven female directors from six …
WORLD PREMIERE. SWIFF provides audiences a rare opportunity to see inside the filmmaking process, presenting a WIP (work-in-progress) screening of local Bellingen filmmaker Ryan Jasper’s directorial debut feature documentary, Monks of the Sacred Valley. A breathtaking, cinematic portrait of a hidden world of Tibetan Buddhism that has survived and thrived inside modern China – until …
Winner · Panorama Jury Award · Berlinale Film Festival. Tired of toiling in the rice fields, 14-year-old Chakra (a magnetic Sarm Heng) leaves Cambodia in search of a Bangkok factory job. After paying smugglers to ferry him over the border, Chakra is instead traded to a violent seafood trawler, captive at sea, under the watch …
Winner · Grand Jury Prize · SXSW Film Festival. “The opening minutes of Alice make the case for Emilie Piponnier to be a movie star, and the rest of the movie keeps it up … [she] dominates every frame, with a mesmerizing screen presence” – Indiewire. Alice (breakout star Emilie Piponnier) has what seems like …
In 2008, raw, observational documentary The Oasis spotlighted the lives of a group of vulnerable teens living in a Sydney youth refuge – starting a nationwide conversation around youth homelessness. There were televised forums and nationwide media coverage, with the film distributed to every high school in Australia. Then prime minister Kevin Rudd pledged to …
