Phil Grabsky’s widely acclaimed doco In Search of Mozart (2006) was broadcast in over 25 countries, screened theatrically at cinemas around the world, and, in Australia and New Zealand, made it into the top 50 list of all-time highest grossing documentaries (excluding IMAX). The veteran UK filmmaker’s latest feature, In Search of Beethoven, may well [...]
Director Jonathan auf der Heide’s feature film debut, Van Diemen’s Land, is one of the most realistic cannibal movies ever made. Retelling the woebegone true story of Alexander Pearce and seven other convicts who escaped into the Tasmanian wilderness in 1822 and started eating each other in order to survive, auf der Heide deliberately avoided [...]
Ana Kokkinos doesn’t “do” happy. The celebrated Australian indie director has made a trio of bold and provocative don’t-dare-look-away pics: Head On (1998), The Book of Revelation (2006) and now her new feature, Blessed, an ensemble drama with a narrative twist. The film follows 24 calamitous hours in the lives of a group of disenfranchised [...]
Movie posters are almost as old as the movies themselves. Sandwich boards and painted crates were among the earliest forms of movie advertising, but posters – with their capacity for dynamic designs and the ease with which they can be printed, hung and replaced – quickly proved a more effective means of advertising to the [...]
Balibo is writer/director Robert Connolly’s tight-as-a-snare-drum political sizzler that recreates events surrounding the murder of five Australian journalists in East Timor in 1975. Taut, gripping and intensely acted (read my review here) the film, which opened last month’s Melbourne International Film Festival, is a knocks-ya-socks-off wartime exposé rich with realism and technical savvy. Connolly and I sat [...]
The gritty and powerful crime-don’t-pay multicultural drama Cedar Boys (now playing in cinemas) will go down as one of the most explosive Australian films of ‘09, which is continuing to be a mighty good stars-are-aligned year for local cinema. The film is the feature debut of writer/director Serhat Caradee and follows a trio of Australian-Lebanese [...]
Period films about desperate omnivorous men chowing down on each other’s flesh have felt rather underwhelming ever since Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle gate-crashed the genre in Ravenous (1999), Antonia Bird’s spectacularly shuddersome tale of U.S. soldiers in the American-Mexican war who devour the bodies and possess the strength of their slain-and-simmered, beaten-and-boiled comrades. Van [...]
2009 shall henceforth be known as the year in which forgotten Australian classics were resurrected from the brink of obscurity. In ‘09 Ted Kotcheff’s dusty outback thriller Wake in Fright finally gets a cinema and DVD release along with director Bert Deling’s slighter but nonetheless notable Pure Shit, a racy drug drama about heroin addicts [...]
Few first-time feature filmmakers are greeted with the kind of accolades bestowed upon Australian director Warwick Thornton, whose triumphant Cannes-selected indigenous drama Samson & Delilah has prompted a gushing response from critics the country over. The film tells an at times heart wrenching story following the two titular characters, who live in an impoverished rural [...]
Russian filmmaker Sergei Dvortsevoy’s acclaimed drama Tulpan was shot on location in the Betpak Dala in southern Kazakhstan. The film (read my review) follows the plight of Asa (Askhat Kuchencherekov), a young man who dreams of finding a wife and one day owning his own herd. Shortly after Tulpan was completed it premiered in Cannes [...]
Monkey Puzzle is one in a recent slew of technically adept Australian features made completely independently, without a shred of assistance from film financing bodies. It follows the story of a group of young adults who go camping in the Blue Mountains in search of a rare tree but their plans go badly awry, paving [...]
Adam Elliot’s animated short films Uncle, Cousin, Brother and Harvie Krumpet have participated in over five hundred film festivals and garnered countless accolades. In 2004 his name shot to international recognition when Harvey Krumpet won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. Elliot’s follow-up project is his full length feature debut Mary and Max, a [...]
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The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
In Search of Beethoven
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Phil Grabsky - director of In Search of Beethoven
Jonathan auf der Heide - director of Van Diemen's Land
Ana Kokkinos - director of Blessed
Jeremy Saunders - key art designer
Robert Connolly - writer/director of Balibo
Les Chantery - star of Cedar Boys
Bert Deling - director of Pure Shit
Warwick Thornton - writer/director of Samson & Delilah
Sergei Dvortsevoy - writer/director of Tulpan
Adam Elliot - writer/director of Mary and Max
Mark Forstmann - writer/director of Monkey Puzzle
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