15 unmissable movies at this year's Sydney Film Festival

Sydney Morning Herald

6 days ago

The 72nd Sydney Film Festival has a dizzying number of screenings. Films from 70 countries – all the way from Afghanistan to Zambia – will run in the grand State Theatre and nine other venues around the city.
The opening night will be spicier than expected. Given its success at the Sundance Film Festival, where it sold for a record $26 million after a bidding war, there was already keen interest in Michael Shanks' Australian horror film Together, which stars American couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie.
Then it ran into controversy when a New York production company filed a lawsuit claiming it was a 'blatant rip-off' of a 2023 comic romance - a claim the American agent for the Together team has described as 'frivolous and without merit'.
A jury headed by Australian director Justin Kurzel will judge the 12 films in the $60,000 official competition for 'audacious, courageous and cutting-edge' cinema.
Here's our guide to festival highlights ...
SLANTED
Sydney-raised writer-director Amy Wang has been quietly building a career in Los Angeles. Her first feature film, Slanted, is a body horror satire with a touch of The Substance meets Mean Girls about it. In the winner of the narrative feature competition at South by South West, a Chinese-American teenager (Shirley Chen), who is desperate to be a prom queen, goes through 'ethnic modification' surgery to become white. It promises timely observations about body image, sexism and racism.
BLUE MOON
With Dazed and Confused, the Before Sunrise trilogy, School of Rock, Boyhood and Apollo 10½, director Richard Linklater is a brilliant chronicler of charming American stories. His latest film is what IndieWire calls 'a razor-sharp biopic' about struggling lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) on the night his former writing partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) triumphantly opens Oklahoma! Hart calls a young Yale student (Margaret Qualley) his writing protegee.
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VIDEOHEAVEN
Growing up in Pennsylvania, filmmaker Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip) worked at Suncoast Video. After graduating from New York University, he worked at Kim's Video in Manhattan. So a documentary about the history and culture of video stores that has taken a decade to make is very much a passion project. Narrated by Maya Hawke, it sounds like an entertaining and thoughtful three hours of nostalgia.
IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT
Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi has paid a heavy price for courageously making films. Imprisoned several times, he was officially banned from making films and travelling outside the country until recently. Panahi made this thriller secretly to avoid having the script vetted by Iran's Ministry of Islamic Guidance. An emotional rollercoaster that starts with a family having an accident while driving on a remote road, it won the Palme d'Or, the top prize, in a strong Cannes competition last weekend.
ORWELL: 2 + 2 = 5
Haiti's Raoul Peck is best known for the masterful I Am Not Your Negro, a ferocious, racially charged documentary about American novelist James Baldwin. In this equally political documentary, Peck draws parallels between George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984, where Big Brother dictates every aspect of life, and Trump's America. With Orwell's writing narrated by Homeland star Damian Lewis, it uses archival footage and clips from movies and TV news. Deadline called it 'an urgent, indispensable film for our times'.
Jodie Foster speaks pitch-perfect French as a psychiatrist drawn into a mystery when one of her patients dies suddenly. This upmarket psychological thriller, warmly reviewed overseas, is from French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski. She has surrounded her American star with a strong French cast including Daniel Auteuil as her ex-husband and Mathieu Amalric as the late patient's grieving husband.
ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO
Restored vision of the 1972 One to One charity fundraising concert that John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-ordinated in New York, performing alongside the likes of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, is the centre of a documentary The Hollywood Reporter has called 'a stone-cold brilliant fusion of kinetic and contemplative'. Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald (Touching The Void, The Last King of Scotland) and editor/co-director Sam Rice-Edwards (The Rescue) revisit an eventful time in the couple's post-Beatles life, using audio and video from personal and public archives.
THE PRESIDENT'S CAKE
This comic drama set in Saddam Hussein's Iraq was hailed as a warm-hearted, crowd-pleasing gem when it screened in Cannes. The debut film for Iraqi director Hasan Hadi centres on nine-year-old Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who wins the questionable prize of having to bake a cake for the dictator's birthday. She sets off to Baghdad to find ingredients with her beloved pet rooster Hindi and her grandma, Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).
2000 METRES TO ANDRIIVKA
Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov won an Oscar last year for the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, which was about the first weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This time he follows a Ukrainian platoon attempting to liberate a Russian-occupied village. A jury at a Danish documentary festival called it 'a masterpiece in filmmaking: a haunting, multilayered portrayal of war comparable to All Quiet On The Western Front '.
COME SEE ME IN THE GOOD LIGHT
Director Ryan White, who made the wonderful Mars rover film Good Night Oppy, follows a Colorado couple - spoken word artist Andrea Gibson, who has incurable ovarian cancer, and poet Megan Falley - for a documentary that won a festival favourite award at Sundance. Noting that it is about grief, joy, heartache and love, POV magazine said that calling it 'deeply moving is an understatement'.
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THE LIFE OF CHUCK
Tom Hiddleston stars as the mysterious Charles 'Chuck' Krantz in an emotional end-of-days sci-fi film told in reverse. Adapted from a quirky Stephen King novella and directed by Mike Flanagan (The Haunting Of Hill House), it won the people's choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The strong cast includes Mark Hamill, Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
DANGEROUS ANIMALS
Directed by Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones), this Australian horror film with echoes of Wolf Creek was a surprising Directors' Fortnight selection at Cannes but was warmly reviewed. Jai Courtney plays a shark-obsessed serial killer, Tucker, who abducts a resourceful American surfer, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), in a gory romp screening in the festival's Freak Me Out program.
MY FATHER'S SHADOW
British-Nigerian director Akinola Davies jnr's semi-autobiographical drama follows two young brothers, Akin (Godwin Egbo) and Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo), during a chaotic day in Lagos, Nigeria. Their estranged father Folarin (Sope Dirisu) takes them into the city as an election promises hopeful changes for the country. Deadline described it as 'one of the most moving and universally relevant and emotional films' at Cannes.
MISTRESS DISPELLER
Mistress Wang has a role in Chinese romantic relationships that seems fascinating to outsiders. In Hong Kong filmmaker Elizabeth Lo's documentary, the so-called mistress dispeller is hired by a Chinese woman who wants to break up her husband's affair to save her marriage. IndieWire said the film revealed 'a profound and searching panorama of loneliness and partnership, where everyone gets a chance to be heard'.
Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho, who won the festival competition with Aquarius in 2016, won best director and actor at Cannes for this stylish political thriller set during the country's military dictatorship in 1977. Wagner Moura plays mild-mannered Marcelo, working undercover in a film the BBC said 'bursts with sex and shootouts, sleazy hitmen and vintage cars'. Like the Oscar-winning I'm Still Here, set during the same period, it's about the brutality of political tyranny.