MIFF 2017 made good on its promise to explore new worlds, with timely films on American civil rights, Indigenous music, and queer activism. Here's our pick of the ones to see.
Louis Theroux: My Scientology Movie is a perceptive and fair-minded exploration.
My Scientology Movie/Red Box Films
My Scientology Movie avoids taking cheap shots at one of America's most mockable religions; instead it is a fair, revealing (and sometimes funny) look at Scientology's methods and leadership.
Viewers can stand, sit, or be positioned in patterns and relations that breach the traditional movie theatre encounter.
Breaching Transmissions/Images courtesy of MIFF
Expanded cinema, a term coined in the mid-1960s by American experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, extends and enriches the way cinema can engage with its viewers. The art form is taken into galleries…
This film conveys a uniquely Australian sensibility, at equal turns calm and intense.
Images courtesy of MIFF
Filmed in 29 days on a shoestring budget, Downriver's bush setting and narrative twists give it an expansive feel. It is a visually stunning piece, with superb performances and an utterly gripping story.
Jonathan Gold has a charming curiosity for food and a willingness to try out weird and wonderful dishes.
Images courtesy of MIFF
Jonathan Gold, the only restaurant critic to have won a Pulitzer Prize, has a charming curiosity for food. Laura Gabbert’s new documentary focuses on Gold’s penchant for seeking out the hidden treasures of LA.
Set in what seems like an eternal dusk, Tangerine is breathtaking in its beauty and garishness.
Images courtesy of MIFF
US director Sean Baker's Tangerine is a film that's queer in both storyline and filmmaking approach. Featuring trans actors and shot on an iPhone 5S, it teases with ideas of authenticity and truth.
Adapting a much-loved text is always a delicate task as the audience can be fiercely protective.
Sydney Film Festival
Holding the Man, the screen adaptation of Timothy Conigrave's much-loved memoir, has seen audiences laughing, then sobbing at its devastating portrayal of AIDS in Australia. It's an important story to tell.
Liv Corfixen’s documentary seems motivated by a fascination and fear of immersion in the creative process.
Images courtesy of MIFF
Liv Corfixen's documentary about her husband captures the creative pressure and mounting doubt following the unexpected success of his most commercially viable film, Drive.
Périot neither condemns nor romanticises extreme ‘resistance’ and ‘revolutionary’ actions, nor the state’s response.
Images courtesy of MIFF
Germany's Red Army Faction evolved from student protest to bombings, kidnappings and shootouts with police. The group transformed dissent into spectacular media event. This documentary picks up the story.
Buzzard is in effect quirky – and quirk belongs on the fringe. Or does it?
MIFF
The Kafkaesque nightmare that underpins Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard might not be just located on the screen. Buzzard, which screened at MIFF 2014 as part of the international panorama program, is an uncomfortable…
This is carnal science fiction cinema.
Sancho McCann/Flickr
I will often say to my film students that if you want to know what aches a culture at a particular historical juncture then you need to visit and spend time with the catastrophic imagination of science…
In a four-hour long film, we have all the time in the world to consider the misogyny, misanthropy and pathos.
MIFF
For an expectant crowd of cinephiles sitting down to see a four-hour film, it is easy enough to identify with Fabian, the main character of Norte, the End of History, that screened at the Melbourne International…
Wiig and Hader are well cast and convincingly play the troubled ‘Skeleton Twins’.
MIFF
As the Melbourne International Film Festival draws to a close for another year, what better way to finish than with a comedy? Well, not quite. Craig Johnson’s latest release, Skeleton Twins, starring Kristen…
Footage shot at German concentration camps at the end of the second world war is the basis for a harrowing documentary screening at MIFF.
ho visto nino volare/Flickr
The experience of watching horrific imagery in both fiction film and documentary cinema sometimes pushes the act of viewing cinema to its limit. It tests the spectator’s ability to keep looking. That’s…
Fans of Canadian film director Xavier Dolan were treated with two of his films at MIFF 2014.
EPA/ETTORE FERRARI
Whether you see him as an enfant terrible or an indie darling, Xavier Dolan is a prodigious filmmaker. At the age of 25 he has five critically acclaimed feature-length films to his name. I am a keen fan…
A screening of Invoking Justice at Mahim Beach, Mumbai, India, 2013.
BMW Guggenheim Lab/Flickr
Deepa Dhanraj is a filmmaker and feminist whose extensive filmography spans issues of gender, labour, education and women’s position in Indian society. In 1980, she founded the Bangalore-based filmmaking…
Blues singer Marlene Cummins is the subject of Rachel Perkins’ latest film, Black Panther Woman.
MIFF
I sing this song. I sing it for my sisters. For I feel the backbone of our struggle in this country, Trying to keep it together. Koori Woman – Marlene Cummins Rachel Perkins’ latest documentary, Black…
Watching Wetlands is an unquestionably visceral experience and is not for the easily repulsed.
MIFF
Wetlands, directed by David Wnendt and based on the best-selling novel by Charlotte Roche, is part of an ever-expanding body of work that gives the lie to the “sugar and spice” conception of women and…
Isabelle Huppert and Kool Shen star in Abuse of Weakness, currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
MIFF
Abuse of Weakness, currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, reflects on French director Catherine Breillat’s experience of being swindled by con-man Christophe Rocancourt. The…
Jodorowsky saw Dune as a chance to bring 1970s avant-garde ideas to mainstream audiences.
MIFF
One of the big attractions at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year is Frank Pavich’s documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013). The film retells the story of cult Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s…
Researcher and Sessional Tutor in Screen and Cultural Studies; Project Coordinator for the Graduate Researcher Peer Networking Program at the Graduate Student Association (GSA), University of Melbourne
