Sydney Film Festival

Entries are now open for the 62nd Sydney Film Festival, set to run from 3-14th June 2015. Last year, out of 2,500 films 192 were invited to the Festival, and was viewed by 156,000 audience members. Two new award categories were also introduced: the Documentary Australia Foundation Award for Australian Documentary and the Event Cinemas…

The Travelling Film Festival, an inititative of Sydney Film Festival, is returning in August. The Festival will be held in the town of Casula in NSW from August 1st until August 3rd and will bring with it five diverse feature films from around the globe, as well as two short films. The program will take…

The Iris’ Larry Heath sat down with Director Christopher Houghton, Producer Julie Byrne and Actors Matt Day and Leeanna Walsman of the 2014 Australian film Touch ahead of its Sydney Film Festival Premiere.. In the first part of our interview with the cast and crew of the film, we discuss how the SA FilmLab made…

Documentary Keep On Keepin’ On is rather naive in the way it was made. Director Alan Hicks and his cinematographer Adam Hart had never really worked on any similar projects before, so they just kept on shooting until they could piece together a film. It took five years for them to make Keep On Keepin’…

Hossein Amini, writer and director of the new film adaptation The Two Faces of January (in Cinemas now) sits down with The Iris’ Larry Heath to talk about the film’s Sydney Film Festival Premiere, his feature film debut, taking on the adaptation of the much loved book, bringing together the amazing cast and they reflect…

For all the sadness and terrifying places that Ester Martin Bergsmark’s latest film takes us there is so much triumph and disclosure on the journey. After all the suffering we feel for the characters in this film it tears you apart. If Something Must Break doesn’t break you, you are either an incredible, strong soul…

An incredibly insightful and deep look into something so very positive and important. This is how I would describe my chat with Alan Hicks, an Australian drummer and surfer who moved to New York at the age of 18 before happening to fall under the wing of one of the most prominent figures in jazz…

The Iris meets the Director and Producer of the Sydney Film Festival 2014 premiere Australian Documentary Tender – Lynette Wallworth and Kath Shelper, respectively. We discuss the film, its future screening on ABC TV, the subject matter (the community of Port Kembla coming together to set up a non-profit funeral business) and the music of…

As glowing reviews continue to pour in for Locke – and in particular, Tom Hardy’s stunning performance – The Iris caught up with the film’s co-producer Guy Heeley for some more insight into the unique process from which this film was made. The entire thing took a little over a week to shoot, a set…

Director Brendan Muldowney has crafted something both beguiling and disturbing with film Love Eternal; he has done so in a way that adds a layer of beauty on top of something which would unnerve a lot of viewers. Muldowney loosely based this film on the novel Loving the Dead by Japanese author Kei Oishi, who…

Peedu Ojamaa once had the world’s greatest job. He was the founder and boss of the only commercial film studio in the Soviet Union at a time when the iron curtain ruled and there was a strictly planned economy. Advertisements were unnecessary as there was a shortage of goods due to government controls, but these…

The Iris’ Larry Heath talks to Michael Altman about the career of his father, director Robert Altman, as well as his own. Filmed during Sydney Film Festival in June 2014, where Michael presented a retrospective of his father’s illustrious career. ———- This content has recently been ported from its original home on The Iris and…

Indie film and TV darling Zach Braff has taken a decade as well as a controversial Kickstarter crowd funding campaign to finally have his second feature brought to life on the big screen. Wish I Was Here examines the struggles of the thirty-somethings of our generation, including unemployment, marriage, raising kids and the inevitability of…

Last night saw the end of the 61st Sydney Film Festival, with the festival’s prestigious awards handed out at the Closing Night Gala at the State Theatre. Of the 12 films competing in the Official Competition, the Sydney Film Prize was awarded to the French film Two Days, One Night, directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc…

La Petite Mort translated as The Little Death, is a French euphemism for orgasm, referring to the post-orgasmic state of consciousness some people go through after a sexual experience. Josh Lawson’s (Any Questions for Ben?, Anchorman 2) low budget directorial debut based on this intriguing concept, is an extension of a short film he’d put…

The Iris talks to Peter O’Donoghue, the editor and co-writer of Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets about the film while in Sydney for the Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival – June 2014. ———- This content has recently been ported from its original home on The Iris and may have formatting errors…

When we see those pre-empting words of ‘based on a true story’ at the beginning of a film, we are usually left thinking about how much of what we see is fiction, and how much is fact. In the case of Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, the latest offering from the Zellner Brothers, the protagonist is…

It’s 1997 and the Asian Financial Crisis is in full swing. Companies are downsizing, people are feeling the pinch and the burden of providing for one’s family is high. It’s in this pressure-cooker environment that first-time Singaporean director Anthony Chen brings Ilo Ilo. For many, Ilo Ilo is not just about class systems but also…

Awarded the Special Jury Award winner at the Sundance Film Festival, Love.Love.Love is a charming short documentary film about the notion of love as seen through the eyes of a group of woman ranging from young girls to elderly women. Love.Love.Love was developed via the Cinetrain initiative, a cinema event that takes place in Russia…

Dior & I could be renamed “Dior & Co.” or “Dior & Us”. The documentary film goes behind the scenes at the French fashion house as the new creative director for Dior Haute Couture, Raf Simons prepares his debut collection. After John Galliano was unceremoniously fired amid controversy (he’d made anti-Semitic comments at a Parisian…

  Of all of the films screened at the 2014 Sydney Film Festival, At Berkeley is perhaps the timeliest, considering the recent reveal that the budget here in Australia could see considerable changes to the tertiary education landscape. At Berkeley acts as a peek into how the University of California, Berkeley, is run in the…

Abuse of Weakness, the latest offering by French filmmaker Catherine Breillat, is an intriguing and compelling film that unflinchingly portrays Breillat’s own curious story. The autobiographical film is based upon Breillat’s experiences, beginning with her suffering a stroke in 2004 and following her through the long recovery process and adapting to life partly crippled. During…

The theme of two lovers kept apart from their families or individual circumstances is hardly anything new. But Gabrielle is a film that deals with another rarely discussed subject and one that is infrequently depicted in cinemas. It is the love lives of the disabled and this film shows this with dignity and for the…

Fish & Cat feels like a dream that’s forever threatening to turn into a nightmare. This bizarre and unsettling film, by Iranian director Shahram Mokri, is supposedly based on true events where a restaurant served human flesh, and its roughly two hours of runtime is filmed entirely in one shot. Imagine a re-enactment of a…

The Queen is a gritty and dazzling short presented by Argentinean director Manuel Abramovic. I’ve called this one gritty and dazzling because it is full of sequins, incredible glittering costumes but also suffering. This film is a short 15-minute vignette of Memi’s life. Memi is only 11 years old and she is going to be…

The 61st Sydney Film Festival comes to a close this Sunday, but you still have a chance to see some incredible films before the festival ends. Particularly exciting is the terrifying program that the Festival has in store for tomorrow, which just happens to be Friday the 13th! The Festival presents a packed program of…

Is it too much of a stretch to imagine a crowd of rabid soccer fans turning into a mob of hyper-violent, destruction-hungry rioters? Such is the question when gearing up to watch a two-part French horror film which quite proudly displays it’s mixed-genre glory in it’s trailer. It isn’t hard too understand what’s going on…

Not everything or everyone is quite what it seems in this gripping thriller that brings a wealthy American couple and a young shady tour guide together on an increasingly tense journey across the Mediterranean as they try to evade the law. Chester MacFarland (Viggo Mortensen) and his gorgeous young wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) are holidaying…

In Lake August, screening as part of the Sydney Film Festival, what little drama occurs is almost completely subsumed by the landscapes of the film. A young man, Ah Li, drifts across a remote corner of rural China, smoking and drinking beer, but mostly just standing there, for almost two hours in a film comprised…

Since premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Lenny Abrahamson’s new film Frank has become one of the most talked about films of the festival circuit, lighting up cinemas with its iconic papier-mâché head from SXSW all the way to Sydney Film Festival, where it had its Australian premiere this weekend; the place where Abrahamson’s What…