When I first glanced the Sydney Film Festival program, this got my heart pounding. Any serious Woody Allen fan can be in agony sometimes at the limit of Woody resources. No DVD extras. No making-of’s. No commentaries. Whatever we want to know, we just have to wait another 12-15 months for the next film to come out. The documentary moves [...]

Excision is the story of Pauline (AnnaLynn McCord), a troubled teen who believes herself to have either mental illness or a personality disorder. Living in a Christian household with a conservative homemaker mother, a distant and disinterested father and a sister with cystic fibrosis – she regularly escapes into fantasies of mutilation, bloodbaths and sexualised surgery in a private operating [...]

Dr. Heinrich Faust (Johannes Zeiler) is poor and hungry and philosophical physician, spending more time on performing autopsies than helping people in his impoverished village. He visits a money-lender, who is the devil in disguise, and the two embark on a strange existential odyssey, occasionally interrupted by Faust’s lust for a young maiden. I was running a bit late to [...]

The State Theatre was again buzzing with festival-goers on Friday night for the Australian premier of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. An extremely hipster and youthful crowd, I could have sworn I was back in Melbourne, when I looked around. Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) are a pair of pre-teen lovers who run away together into the wilderness on a [...]

There were some very audible sobs at the Dendy Opera Quays theatre yesterday in during the final scenes of Death Of A Japanese Salesman. What had begun as an intimate, comical reflection of a meticulous retired salaryman, this tender documentary, directed by its subject’s youngest daughter (Mami Sunada), became a rare and redemptive portrait of the last joys of a [...]

On day 3 of SFF, Hugo Weaving and I saw two films together (together, in a very large, distant sense) and the first was Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die. It is a documentary style narrative about a group of prison inmates preparing for a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Shot mostly in black and white (the sole performance [...]

On day 2 of SFF I journeyed to Event Cinemas George Street for Paziraie sadeh  or Modest Reception, the fourth film from Iranian director Mani Haghighi and if I see anything greater in the next week and a half, I’ll be very impressed. It is winter in Iran as Kaveh (Haghighi) and Leyla (Taraneh Alidoosti) traverse the mountain roads outside of Tehran giving [...]

On a very wet Sydney evening, 2000 industry types and movie lovers gathered at the State Theatre for the world premier of Peter Templeman’s Not Suitable For Children and to launch the 59th annual Sydney Film Festival. First time SFF director Nashen Moodley gave a delightfully brief introduction, stating he’d “much rather be watching films than talking about them” before [...]

Important announcement!!! Beginning this Wednesday, Film Blerg is heading to Sydney Film Festival! Our roving reporter Jemima Bucknell is hitting the ground, scoping the parties and seeing film after film after film. Keep your eyes out for regular updates on the best, worst and secret happenings going on at this year’s Sydney Film Festival. Jemima will be there for the [...]