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By Anders Furze
The Czech and Slovak Film Festival kicks off in Melbourne on Thursday. Anders Furze spoke with artistic director Eleanor Colla about its connection with the anniversary of a watershed moment in European history. * In the final weeks of 1989, around 500,000 people took to the streets of Prague to protest 40 years of one-party communist rule.
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By Anders Furze
In volume 2 of his Melbourne International Film Festival diary, critic Anders Furze takes in films including the hot ticket of the festival: French period drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and a restoration of 1990’s Return Home, starring a young Ben Mendelsohn. * Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an
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By Anders Furze
My experience of the Melbourne International Film Festival veers wildly from year to year. One year I’ll focus on retrospectives, the next I’ll see 30 films. The next, two. At a festival this large, it’s impossible to craft a comprehensive survey, at least for somebody who can’t spend two-and-a-half weeks watching four films a day.
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Subtle notes of angst, despair and deep yearning defined a powerful union of the work of musicians Nick Cave and Warren Ellis with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in several shows at Hamer Hall at the weekend. The unique pairing showcased six of Cave and Ellis’s notable film scores as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival,
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The recent ABC TV Four Corners two-;part special Hero or Villain: The prosecution of Julian Assange had many serious fails: here are four of them: (1) In almost an hour of reporting, reporter Michael Brissenden barely mentioned the crucial stories Assange published, which were and still are the reason he’s America’s most-wanted: * exposing US interference in the
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By Raymond Gill
You’ve heard apocryphal stories about people making movies on their maxed-out credit cards, but this remarkable story of bringing a full-length feature film on a shoestring to fruition is not fiction. On a sudden whim, Melbourne visual artist Tom Alberts decided in 2008 to make a film that celebrated the kind of screwball comedies and
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Disney’s new The Lion King remake opens with the sounds of birds chirping and the sight of a golden sun rising into a majestic skyline. Nants, ingonyama! What a scene this is! There are giraffes, zebras, elephants, the whole damn animal kingdom jiggling along to the rhythms of a bright and busy natural world, full
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By Anders Furze
It’s a brave new world at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, the first for new artistic director Al Cossar after the departure of Michelle Carey. Long-time screening venue the Australian Centre for the Moving Image is out of action due to renovations, and the festival’s footprint has expanded to some 20 venues, including Carlton’s
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Monrovia, Indiana Frederick Wiseman returns to MIFF with this portrait of one small town deep inside America. A festival stalwart, Wiseman is keenly aware of the power of editing to create meaning. His observational documentaries gradually but powerfully nudge us to find meaning in juxtaposition, to extremely compelling effect. Words and Silk: the Imaginary and Real
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Confused about what a creative industry is? It’s simple: film, TV, video games and digital culture. That’s what the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) does and it’s why, three years on from the announcement that the Central Victorian city Bendigo was getting a Creative Industries Hub, the state’s Minister for Creative Industries Martin
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