S Viswanath

The D-day has arrived. The wait is finally over. Yes, as the 12-day South Australia’s premier Adelaide Film Festival kicks off it’s that time of the year when cinephiles, film buffs, filmmakers and fascinating storytellers of the world gather together to celebrate cinema – the Seventh Art Form.

With film festivals providing “a good excuse to get a little curious and see unique stories on the big screen” and luminous tales light up the screens, nothing matters than catching up, close and personal, some of the marvellous movies from across the globe, and soak in the movie magic as their intimate stories reflect contemporary trends and state of the world but also a part of oneself in them.

Given that film festivals curate and bring over a 200 plus of films to be featured in the various sections that reflect the festival theme and focus and screened across multiple Adelaide cinemas and venues, choosing the film of one’s choice and be surprised and swayed by it is bound to be a bit of a Russian roulette game.

So, in an effort to help fellow film fans and committed and discerning cineastes and make their task a bit easier so that they do not miss out on films that they would have otherwise wanted to watch, this critic, who has made trips to a handful of film festivals prior to Adelaide Film Festival, provides a pen sketch of his choice of films that he caught up with so that one can mark them on their schedule calendar and get to experience and engage in them.

As the film festival team puts it “some of the best festival experiences come from taking a chance on something unexpected. Whether you’ve had your screenings picked out for weeks or you’re still deciding what to see.” Here, it is my sincere hope that in the films that I have listed out “you folks will find something that stays with you long after the credits roll” as it has been so with me to reflect and ruminate and perforce, confer and confabulate on them among friends and family, at leisure as you sup or party as a pub or bistro near you.

While Adelaide Film Festival’s Patron Sophie Hyde sums it all up for us “cinema makes us feel something – joy, an ache, sadness, fear, anger – or it allows us to consider something new, or be deeply challenged and open our hearts and focus our attention on what the filmmakers have dedicated themselves to” and “be guided through a story offered to feel things giving one access to people, worlds and perspectives one doesn’t always get to see(engage in and experience).”

Adelaide Film Festival CEO & Creative Director Mat Kesting inviting one and all to be part of the prestigious Adelaide Film Festival summing up AFF’s tagline as All For Film says “there is something profoundly reassuring about sitting in a dark cinema with a room full of strangers and sharing the same story.”

For, as he further points out, “film remains one of the few art forms capable of bringing us together, encouraging us to see the world through another person’s eyes while reflecting on our own place within it. AFF celebrates that collective experience” helping the cinema diehards “to discover acclaimed films from around the globe and powerful local stories that speak directly to who we are and where we live.”

With the film festival kicking off with the Australian Premiere of Wild Horse Nine at the Capri Theatre as part of the opening day film celebrations of the 12-day rendezvous with the cinemas, without much ado here then are my must watch scroll of cinemas to explore in the course of the next two weeks.

The Myanmar film Fruit Gathering the provocative feature directorial debut of Aung Phyoe which won the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is one to watch. Set in civil strife ravaged Myanmar, the film charts the lugubrious life of a lonely seamstress stuck in a tiresome and thankless job in a textile sweat overcrowded garment factory while harbouring dreams of leaving the city and return to her family’s idyllic home in the leafy upcountry and blissfully engage in the traditional and seasonal fruit gathering ritual. However, the arrival of a much more savvy and scheming co-worker changes the life’s priorities for the young seamstress as the electric charge between the two turns into a parasitic obsession of passion.

Featured as part of Platform Competition of Toronto International Film Festival and had its world premiere at the festival, The Smell of Apples the third feature by Johannesburg born film director John Trengove, and adapted from Mark Behr’s acclaimed novel of the same name, is a coming of age film centring around a sheltered 11-year-old white South African boy, the grandson of the Black domestic work, who, gradually and shockingly, comes to realise the horrors of the apartheid system, which awakens him to the hateful hypocrisy, vengeful violence and abject inequity of the system, when the privileged family’s son accuses him of having stolen his fishing rod, that shatters his idyllic childhood.

Kanagawa, Japan born Oscar winning Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, who wowed the cine audiences with his masterly 2021 feature Drive My Car and equally eclectic 2023 feature Evil Does Not Exist returns with his latest All of a Sudden which saw its lead cast Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto jointly bag the Cannes Best Actress Award.

The forceful drama about friendship, illness, art, mortality individual dignity and responsibilities of attentive care, spotlights on the newly appointed director of a Parisian elderly-care facility who soon forms a bond with the terminally ill Japanese theatre director and how their bonding and relationship blossoms into a profound friendship grounded in curiosity, vulnerability and joy.

The film draws its inspiration from a book of letters between a terminally ill philosopher and a medical anthropologist, show how through humane, generous and genuine caring for others is one of the fullest ways of living.

Featured in the Horizons Section at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and in the Cannes Competition Section A Man of His Time (Notre salut-Our Salvation) by the French filmmaker Emmanuel Marre, set in 1940s France, and based on true historical events, the film, which won the director the Cannes’ Best Screenplay Award, tracks the adventures of an idealistic middle-management (49-year-old engineer) bureaucrat who arrives in Vichy-led France with copies of his self-published manifesto, believes his ideas and administrative experience can help a defeated France rebuilt itself. Does his succeed in his ambitious overarching mission forms the meditative and ruminative film which brings out the chilling, contemporary portrait of opportunism and power.

Bulgarian filmmaking duo Kristina Grozeva & Petar Valchanov’s Black Money for White Nights (Cherni pari za beli noshti) which featured in the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s Crystal Globe Competition, centres around a sexagenarian couple – railway dispatcher Gosha and maternity nurse Marina – whose life’s ambition of dream trip to St Petersburg to witness the White Nights is put paid when Russia invades Ukraine and the scamming travel agency vanishes with all their ill-gotten savings, their trials and tribulations and desperate efforts to recover their savings the two had amassed through years of ‘petty’ corruption.

The film provides a perspective tragicomic portrait of a generation forced to reassess its values as they question everything that is considered black and white in post-Soviet society as lies, family secrets and impossible choices tumble out holding a mirror to the moral compass that shape ordinary citizen’s lives.

Featured in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competitive section, where the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski picked the Best Director Award, and screened as part of the Horizons Section at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Fatherland is a multi-genre film which takes audiences on a thought-provoking probe into post-war society, an intimate family drama, a road movie by portraying a vignette from the life of Germany’s greatest writer Thomas Mann who returns to his home country from exile in America after 16 long years to receive two awards, one in American-occupied Frankfurt, the other in Weimar, controlled by Soviets, accompanied by his daughter. The film provides an elegant and luminous exploration of how the German society could possibly return from the brink of self-destruction.

Winner of the Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, the Philippines film Filipinana, which saw screening in Toronto during TIFF, as also at KVIFF Horizons Section, by Rafael Manuel is a surreal film set at an exclusive luxury golf resort on the outskirts of Manila, where seventeen-year-old Isabel works as a tee-girl. When asked to return a golf club to club’s president and she goes looking for him she learns about the club’s strange rules, forbidden places, and secrets, while the film presents a sinister and metaphorical microcosm of elitist Philippines society, where the class divisions and power structure is divided into the privileged and their subjects, victims of a system of oppression and silent violence.

The famed Russian filmmaker of The Return & Leviathan Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur which featured in the Cannes Competition Section where it won the Grand Prix and Cannes Soundtrack Award, and in the Special Presentations Section at TIFF, based on the 1969 French film The Unfaithful Wife (La femme infidèle) by Claude Chabrol, set against the backdrop of a provincial Russian small town in 2022, against the backdrop of the Russo-Ukrainian war, follows a successful transport company director, who, on the verge of laying off his employees, as pressure mounts on employers to fill draft quotas for the notorious miasorubka (meat grinder) of relentless front-line warfare, discovers his wife is unfaithful and having an affair, shattering the otherwise idyllic picture-perfect family.

Rose, by Austrian film director Markus Schleinzer, which had its world premiere at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, in Competition, where the film’s Sandra Huller won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, won the Firebird Award at the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival, the Jury Prize at Brussels International Film Festival and was featured in the KVIFF’s Horizons Section, is a black and white set in the early 17th Century, wherein a soldier arrives in a remote German village to claim the run-down estate he has supposedly inherited.

The solider, is in fact, a woman passing off as a man seeking a life of her own in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, with a bullet wound on her cheek, arriving in a remote Protestant village, where a claim on a long-abandoned farm offers Rose a life of her own. However, her dreams are short lived where her disguise is discovered.

Austrian film director Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, winner of the Cannes Un Certain Regard Prize, was featured in the Horizons segment at KVIFF and was part of the Centrepiece section at TIFF. The tragic and traumatic psychological drama revolves around a mother, her young daughter and a teen, setting off on a holiday, a year later after the death of the elder daughter following a rave party with her beau, with whom the family had planned the outing to Tenerife and while coming to terms with the tragic loss.
The emotional tale of grief spotlights on how the depressed and devasted trio confront blame and forgive while evoking the memories of the untimely demise of the young teen girl as they go through the ritual of enjoying the sun, sea and surf on the island while be gnawed by guilt and mourn the death.

The other films which one could explore also includes Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar’s Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad), which I felt was not up to the reputed filmmaker’s calibre, which again revolves around two women, a familiar thematic template and narrative texture with the director, which focus on two self-centred film directors as they confront grief, love, and the pitfalls of unchecked artistic license, while both artists seek to rejuvenate their respective avocations that threaten to dismantle their most cherished relationships.

Hey mate have an awesome time deep diving into a marathon of crème la crème of cinemas discovering hidden gems, toasting some of the contemporary cinemas and soaking into the unique festival carnivalesque celebrations that Adelaide FF promises is All For All.