SWIFF 20
Winner · Special Jury Award (Cinematography) · Sundance Film Festival Winner · Best Documentary · Hong Kong Film Festival. In Mexico City, 9 million people are serviced by 45 government ambulances. This lack of available services has super-charged the privatised ambulance industry, with fleets of opportunists, mavericks, and cowboys literally racing each other to be …
In Extra Ordinary, the debut from Irish rising-star duo Enda Loughman and Mike Ahern, when you need an exorcism for your haunted recycling bin, you call the local ghost whisperer/driving instructor, Rose. But alas, Rose has turned her back on her supernatural sensibilities after an accident involving a possessed pothole. But when charming local widow …
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 …
NSW Premiere. Winner · Best Picture · Fantastic Fest. Winner · Best Motion Picture · Sitges International Film Festival. A heartbroken heart surgeon seeks therapeutic benefits from a demanding dominatrix in this audacious and darkly comic study of the knife edge between pleasure and pain. Juha (a riveting performance by Pekka Strang, Tom of Finland), …
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 …
60 years ago, Federico Fellini‘s masterpiece La Dolce Vita cemented its place on the world cinema stage, opening a new flourishing Italian cinema movement known worldwide as ‘Italian neorealism’. The film proved a phenomenon; its banning by the Catholic Church as ‘atheist, Communist and treasonable filth’ made it a cause célèbrea. It went on to …
The most important super hero movie you’ll see this summer. Nine year old Kenyan, Jo, is obsessed with superheroes. Despite receiving a cancer diagnosis, Jo refuses to feel sorry for herself. Her passion for superhero movies draws her rural community close, and together they set out to make her the star of her village’s very …
Actions speak louder than words in Bellbird, a heart-warming dramedy about loss and community spirit that just goes to show that sometimes it really does take a village. Ross (Marshall Napier, McLeods Daughters) is a dairy farmer in the Northland region of New Zealand, quite content with his lot. This quiet and unassuming snapshot of …
Winner · Best Film In Competition · Venice Film Festival. Sweeping across three eras of German history, lauded director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (Oscar-winning The Lives of Others) follows the life of a visionary artist through love and loss, inspired (perhaps controversially) by the revered artist Gerhard Richter. In post-war East Germany, artist Kurt Barnert …
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 …