Tagged MIFF

After the opening night choice of Los amantes pasajeros (I’m so Excited!), which enthusiastically promised the complexities of a Pedro Almodóvar script and direction but instead relied on bland character conven...

To coincide with the 2013 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), Senses of Cinema has commissioned a series of articles that cover two particularly important and vibrant strands of its vast program: a sm...

“Swimming”, he told her. “He wants to have a swim.” “Sailing? There’s a race on Saturday.” “I didn’t ask him. I should think he sails. He’s the sort of man who would.” She took a drink of beer. “We could tak...

In the early eighties, The Sunnyboys were the greatest band on the planet… - Stuart Coupe, Music Journalist (interviewed in The Sunnyboy) Kaye Harrison’s new documentary The Sunnyboy (2013) opens with the d...

After graduating from the Italian National Film School in the immediate postwar period Flavio Mogherini became one of the most esteemed and sought-after production designers and art directors of the reborn Ital...

Between 1961 and 1968, Elio Petri established himself as one of the most distinctive voices of Italian post-neo-realist cinema. His 1961 feature debut L’Assassino is an often-overlooked example of the filmic gi...

June 2013: It’s not often that you find yourself in another world, a parallel universe that’s real, has sentient beings passing through it and you quietly observing. But it’s happening to me more and more. T...

In Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008), the writer/director explores a substantial group of underappreciated Australian genre films produced in the 1970s and 1980s. The genteel historicity o...

Argento’s World of Giallo Dario Argento (b. 1940-) has been making gialli for a long time. His first three features – L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970), Il gatto a no...

In the final shot of Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (Deep Red, 1975), the amateur detective/jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) stares icily at his own reflection in a pool of still-warm blood. The killer...

At first blush, it seems difficult to pin-down what this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) was trying to be: with an international programme borrowing heavily from Cannes and Venice, a good po...

To coincide with the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), Senses of Cinema has commissioned a series of articles that cover many different aspects of the program ranging from new Iranian cinema an...

The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has showcased the New Iranian Cinema since a special focus in 1993 called “Spotlight Iran”. It has routinely highlighted particular peaks and trends, and has con...

Commemorating Nicholas Ray in his centenary year, in 2011 his last feature-length motion picture, We Can’t Go Home Again (1973-), started doing laps around the festival circuit, sometimes accompanied by Don’t E...

“The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted.” - Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) in Beasts of the Southe...

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...

The Sapphires (Wayne Blair, 2012) opens in an idyllic rural setting. A group of young Aboriginal girls run home across the paddocks in the fading evening light to sing for a gathering of family and friends. But...

In 2001, to national jubilation, Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics. In the seven years that followed, the city underwent a makeover on a scale unparalleled since the aftermath of the 1949 revolution. While ...

I just want to say this: you have to love it and hate it at the same time – and love it as much as you hate it. This fact alone proves that the cinema is an art with a very well-defined personality of its own. ...

Garin Nugroho’s Rindu kami padamu (Of Love and Eggs, 2004) is a warmly utopian picture of Indonesian village life that stresses a supportive community with the mosque – literally and figuratively – at its centr...

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...

About halfway between Japan and the East Coast of North America lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an immense swirl of plastic fragments estimated to be at least twice the size of France. A morning’s researc...

Renewal, when generational change finally occurs, may well unleash an explosion of energy that will burst the log jam and permit the nation to resume its interrupted progress toward the vision of a tolerant, fa...

25 July – 10 August 2008 For the past few years, whispers have circulated of the Melbourne International Film Festival’s (MIFF) intention to cull its juggernaut-sized cinema choices down to something a l...