The 69th annual Sydney Film Festival has announced a sneak peak look at 22 film titles that will be featured during this year’s event, running 8th-19th June, 2022.
Ahead of its full program announcement on 11th May, this first taste of of programming “gives audiences a snapshot of the selection and flavour of films featured in our first full-scale Festival since the pandemic began,” stated Sydney Film Festival Director Nashen Moodley.
“The past few years have been tough for the film industry, with many films halting production across the globe. Now the world is starting to open back up again, we’re seeing a resurgence of gutsy, innovative and compelling storytelling. It’s an exciting time to be programming a film festival when there is such a wealth of ground-breaking films, giving audiences an opportunity to discover unique and timely stories from home, and across the world.”
“The 22 films revealed today take us on a kaleidoscopic odyssey of the human experience. Travel across space and time with features about lovers bonding in virtual reality through the COVID-19 lockdowns, to rich Westerners behaving badly in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco, to a single mother liberated from her husband in 1980s Paris. And land back in Australia for tales of a millennial’s Instagram-obsessed hen’s weekend that goes very badly.”
“From an insightful documentary uncovering the struggles of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people to protect their Amazonian homeland to a real-life narrative following female street dancers training for Australia’s biggest dance competition, these films are indicative of the incredible local and international titles in this year’s program.”
Some of the exciting titles announced this year include Sissy, the Australian horror film that looks at the violent dangers of being an influencer. A success out of this year’s SXSW Film Festival, the Aisha Dee-starring chiller is sure to be a hit with the social media crowd.
Fresh from her Oscar win, Jessica Chastain headlines the blackly comic drama The Forgiven alongside Ralph Fiennes. Directed by John Michael McDonagh, the film depicts the entitlement of Westerners juxtaposed with the lives of ordinary Moroccans in a merciless neo-colonial society.
After proving a crowd favourite at the 2019 festival with In Fabric, director Peter Strickland and star Gwendoline Christie reunite for Flux Gourmet, a deliciously deadpan comedy about the residency of a ‘culinary collective’ that turns cooking sounds and supermarket shopping into performance art. Sounds perfectly on brand for a director that delivered a horror film about a dress that killed people!
The weird and wonderful doesn’t cease there either, with Andrea Riseborough and Demi Moore starring in Please Baby Please, a genderqueer musical about a 1950’s Manhattan couple who unlock a sexual awakening within themselves after witnessing a violent incident.
Some of the International festival favourites arriving this year include A House Made of Splinters, a Sundance award winning documentary filmed in pre-invasion Ukraine chronicling a small group of indefatigable social workers who run a temporary refuge for neglected children, and Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini‘s Yuni, a Toronto Film Festival Platform Prize winner about a bright Indonesian student, exploring her ambitions in contrast to the societal pressures she faces in her conservative Indonesian community.
European cinema will have a strong presence throughout the festival this year too, with such tales as Hinterland, a visually stunning thriller set in the underbelly of post-WWI Vienna, about a returned prisoner-of-war’s quest to catch a serial killer, and Quentin Dupieux’s follow-up to his acclaimed Deerskin, Incredible But True, a goofy time-travel romp about an average suburban couple who move into their dream home only to become victims of strange bouts of topsy-turvy time travel as a result of their mystical basement.
A joyous return to cinemas after the last two years of uncertainty, this year’s program promises to showcase the greatest, strangest, and most exciting works that films on the big screen can offer.
For more information on the sneak peak titles, ticketing prices, and programming (the full schedule released on May 11th), please head to the Sydney Film Festival official page.
