Back in 2013, merely weeks into having moved from Melbourne to the United States, I was accepted onto the FIPRESCI jury for the San Francisco International Film Festival. I had briefly spent some time there with an old friend while on a week-long stopover from Australia to my final
Sometimes the conversations at film festivals are awfully highfalutin. Lots of discussion that runs into the academic or the high brow. Which, don’t get me wrong, is often part of the fun about film festivals; being able to navigate a story or a character or an image with others
I once read that Michael Haneke made The White Ribbon (Das weiße band) in black and white because that is how contemporary eyes have always viewed that period of time. Whether through photography, the silent cinema of its age or even the black and white of ink on paper, the
Some years ago, Michael Moore was on one of those award season roundtables and spoke, as he is want to do, about how documentaries don’t always need to be the vegetables of cinema. Sometimes, people would like to go and see a documentary on a Friday night and not
I recently (well, nearly a year ago now!) turned 40. I told myself, “I don’t want to be 80 kilos when I turn 40.” So, I put in some hustle and made it work. It felt good. I’ve never really thought my body was all that impressive in
I will be honest and say I was not all that familiar with the Chicano culture at the heart of American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez. I went into David Alvarado’s biography documentary of the titular Luis Valdez—a man whose political and artistic achievements are synonymous with
It can always throw me a little to see a major studio’s ident at the start of a festival film. Especially a documentary. And especially the Universal logo, with its bravura fanfare and grand scale vision of a twirling globe. It made much more sense rather quickly with Mohammed
Like the best house gathering, Once Upon a Time in Harlem evolves and shifts throughout the affair. Guests effortlessly veer from one subject to another—before you even realise you’re no longer listening to a conversation about one thing, you’re engrossed in another one altogether. Some of the
Recently on the Strictly Soundtracks show on Joy 94.9, we discussed the buzzy three-part documentary series Kylie. I mean, can you blame us? Kylie Minogue doesn't lend her music to too many projects so we don't often get to play her—"This Wheel&
There is a certain bit of magic that occurs with a film like Brydie O’Connor’s Barbara Forever. This is a biography, fairly standard in its conception, I suppose, that nonetheless takes on the form of an essential queer text much like the very works of its subject, Barbara
Trading fire for ice, director Sara Dosa returns with a documentary that once again merges the personal with the natural. Here, she lays one family’s experiences of life across generations in Iceland with that of the melting glaciers that have come to define that country in these times of
The plight of First Nations people across the globe is a sadly all too familiar. Colonialism is hardly original, and the way indigenous populations have suffered at the hand of those who sought to use them as human guinea pigs even after death has been seen in just about every