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DVDfever.co.uk – The 16th London Australian Film Festival 2010 reviewHelen M Jerome reviews
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The 16th London Australian Film Festival at the Barbican Centre has become one of the highlights in the London cinemagoers diary and with good reason, as Helen M Jerome discovered.
Its hard to argue with a festival revolving around the ambition of the Cannes-award winning film, Samson And Delilah (right), which shows the brutal reality of life for Aboriginal people eking out a meagre existence in the middle of nowhere, leavened by a potent romance between the title characters. Its not a film for the fainthearted, with addiction, violence and desperation seeping out of its every pore but if you stick with it, its highly rewarding.
But this wasnt the only award-winner on show this year. Far from it.
Blessed (right) has already won an AFI award, and boasts the performance of the festival from Frances OConnor. The film itself is a remarkable work of two halves from director Ana Kokkinos, set across one 24 hour period. The first section explores the lives of six teenagers adrift in Melbourne, with hope just beyond the grasp of some of them. And in the second section we immerse ourselves in the lives of their respective mothers, played by Miranda Otto, Deborah Lee-Furness and OConnor. Everyone is damaged, and everyone seems connected, but its the mesmerising OConnor who grabs her role by the throat. Highly recommended.
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, directed by Scott (Shine) Hicks, deservedly won the 2009 AFI award for Best Documentary with a movie that perfectly reflects the composers measured, minimalist approach to his music and life. Another AFI winning documentary, The Choir, also looks at the effect of music but this time its redemptive, uplifting, transformative power. Set in South Africas Leeukwop Prison, it follows the progress of its choir, and particularly the fortunes of new choir-member, Jabulani, whose anger threatens to defeat him.
Winner of the Best Documentary Award at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival, A Good Man certainly wears its controversy on its sleeve. Director Safina Uberoi has made an incredibly moving, but never maudlin film out of the unlikeliest subject matter. Young farmer Chris (the good man) has to care for his quadriplegic wife Rachel and their two sons, and he believes that their only way to make enough money to survive is to set up and run a brothel, slapbang in the heart of smalltown Australia. And its a journey with numerous setbacks, but it never judges or moralises.
Cedar Boys (right) won the Audience Award at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival, and is a gritty drama centred around a couple of young Lebanese-Australian brothers one in jail and one who fancies his chances of getting-rich-quick in the sleazy, drug-fuelled glamour of the clubs. Thankfully, director Serhat Caradee ensures theres bags of humour to lighten the dark story but are they in too deep?
Also set in the milieu of young Lebanese Australians, The Combination also centres on two brothers, the older one making a fresh start after leaving jail, and taking up boxing again and falling in love, and seeing his chance of redemption. Meanwhile his younger brother, who is still at school, is falling into the trap of gang life, and we see how race and class fuel hatred and divide loyalties. Its an uneven film with a rather cheesy beginning, but its worth sticking with it especially for its High Noon-style climax.
Contact is a bold, beautiful documentary, directed by Martin Butler and Bentley Dean, that focuses on a shocking true story from 1964. This is when a group of patrol officers from Australias Weapons Research Establishment cleared the remote Woomera by uprooting its Martu tribe, without so much as a backwards glance, in order to start rocket testing. Seen through the eyes of the officers and tribespeople, who recount their experiences, as they revisit that time and that place, this is affecting film-making and a poignant study of a tribe who seem to come from another millennia. The most telling line comes from one of the Martu people, who says: We left our hearts back in our country.
Another remarkable documentary, My Asian Heart, focuses on the chaotic life of Australian photojournalist Philip Blenkinsop, who believes that a tidy desk denotes an empty mind. So we get a generous dollop of his excellent photographic work throughout the film, occasionally smeared with blood for added effect, recording his travels to China, Nepal and even Laos. Alternately appalled and uplifted by his fellow men, Blenkinsop himself is a man worth getting to know.
Also exploring the relationship between Australia and its neighbours in the far east, The Waiting City, directed by Claire McCarthy, asks a lot of questions of the strength of the couple who wish to adopt an Indian child. The would-be parents are superbly played by Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton, who see the cracks appear in their own troubled relationship as they wait for the endless red tape to be sorted out in Calcutta. But will an addition to their family bring them together, or are they fooling themselves?
Dominated by the violent, dysfunctional, deeply unpleasant and frankly unlikeable character of Kev, played by Hugo Weaving, Last Ride is a road trip for this ex-con and his young son Chook, on the run from their past and the law. Every extraordinary landscape they pass through holds a memory and every remote store they see invites a robbery.
Black comedy Accidents Happen (right) is basically Geena Davis movie, which allows her to play the larger-than-life, potty-mouthed matriarch heading up the Conway family, to whom terrible, often catastrophic, accidents happen. With an Aussie director, Andrew Lancaster making his feature debut, this may have been filmed in New South Wales, but it is most definitely set in smalltown US in the 1980s and boasts a terrific soundtrack.
All in all a fascinating festival, which goes to show that Australia is still making unique, beautifully crafted films, encouraging new talent, and exploring raw bits of its past and present. So if you still havent sought out an Aussie movie, where the bloody hell are you?
Check out the official Film Festival website at: Barbican.org.uk/AustralianFilm
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.