300 million clicks: Under the Dome and the Chinese Documentary Context Dan Edwards September 2015 Documentary in Asia Feature image: Chai Jing in Under the Dome Few documentary makers anywhere the world would dare dream of attracting 300 million viewers – especially for an exclusive online release. Fewer still would imagine r...
We’re in Another Country – but David Gulpilil is Here to Help Dan Edwards July 2015 Special Dossier: Focus on David Gulpilil at MIFF 2015 Another Country is a film that takes time. As the narrator, co-writer and Australian screen star David Gulpilil notes at one point, “There’s never enough time in white fella culture.” Especially, he could have ...
Framing the Heavy Weight of History: Yellow Earth Dan Edwards May 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film It may be hard for contemporary audiences, even in China, to comprehend why Cheng Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984) made such a mark on the development of Chinese cinema. The film is a curious hybrid of h...
Looking at / Looking in Antonioni’s Chung Kuo, Cina: A Critical Reflection Across Three Viewings Dan Edwards March 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Plate spinners at work in Shanghai, 1972, in Antonioni’s Chung kuo, Cina (1972). I want to be there, in that audience in 1972, watching those plate spinners and their amazing feats of derring-do...
Cinematic Scar Tissue: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer on The Act of Killing Dan Edwards September 2013 Feature Articles Surreal, sickening and profoundly disturbing – The Act of Killing (2012) may not be easy to watch, but it has turned the documentary form on its head. The film explodes documentary conventions firstly by examin...
A Culture Cleft in Two – The Documentaries of Scott Millwood Dan Edwards November 2012 Tasmania and the Cinema “I want to talk about epic poetry.” I still remember the shock when Scott Millwood opened a documentary masterclass in the bowels of the Bondi Pavilion with these words back in 2004. I was covering the class fo...
“Every Official Knows What the Problems Are”: Interview with Chinese Documentarian Zhao Liang Dan Edwards July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier Zhao Liang’s Shang fang (Petition, 2009) is one of the most celebrated – and grueling – works of the independent Chinese documentary movement. Filmed over more than a decade spent among some of the most disadva...
Street Level Visions: China’s Digital Documentary Movement Dan Edwards July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier In 2012, the 61st Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) will feature “Street Level Visions: Indie Docs from China”, a retrospective of seven digital documentaries produced over the past eight years by in...
Skimming the Surface: Walkabout by Louis Nowra Dan Edwards July 2004 Book Reviews The Australian Screen Classics series provides an invaluable space for the examination, celebration and critique of our national film heritage. Like the best of the British Film Institute's Film Classics books,...
Leone, Sergio Dan Edwards October 2002 Great Directors b. January 3, 1929, Rome, Italy d. April 30, 1989, Rome, Italy filmography bibliography web resources Sergio Leone is a filmmaker who sits uneasily in the canon of 'great' directors. As an Italian ...
The Willing Embrace of Destruction: Takeshi Kitano’s Brother Dan Edwards November 2001 Essays/on/Films Weighing up Kitano's latest stab at the gangster genre, this time transposed to L.A.
Never Yielding Entirely into Art: Performance and Self-Obsession in Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-Bi Dan Edwards November 2000 Takeshi Kitano Distraction or contemplation: Edwards untangles the wider theoretical implications of Kitano's performance in Hana-Bi.
