Who has the right to tell you how and when to give birth? Of course, it is a deeply personal issue, but one that, over generations, has been dictated by rules and regulations. Further, familial influences can be enormous. What happens if you push back … if you want to do things your own way?…
It is the summer of 1967. Young Australians are being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. Back home, life continues. Tom (Patrick Leong) and Meg (Grace Jackson) are in a high school production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tom takes a fancy to Meg and engages her in awkward conversation. When their respective…
An Australian-based psychologically thriller with Nicholas Cage in the lead role, it is about a man on the outer trying to reclaim his past. Cage plays The Surfer. Estranged from his wife, who we never meet, and down on his luck, The Surfer is determined to buy the clifftop home where he grew up. He…
The past and the present collide in a story that involves reframing a tainted history. We are in Gippsland in the 1840s and a white woman is discovered near death, washed up on a beach. Just what happened to her remains the stuff of myths, but she is said to have been rescued by and…
Personal and societal catastrophic incidents shape a pre-get together, ahead of a 20th anniversary high school reunion in Washington DC in 2022. They form the basis of the conceit, which sees combatants take pot shots at one another in The Comeuppance, which is both dramatic and comedic. Emilio (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor), who used to be a…
Highly regarded Australian journalist Peter Greste was arrested by Egyptian authorities in Cairo on 29th December, 2013. He was working there for Al Jazeera as a two-to-three week Christmas cover for another journo. Greste was taken into custody alongside two other Al Jazeera reporters, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed. Written by Peter Duncan, The Correspondent…
Shocking, racially motivated fires – arson – in Germany in 1993 resulted in the death of five Turks. More than 30 years later, Mehmet Akif Buyukatalay’s clever satire Hysteria – the centrepiece of the German Film Festival – fans the flames of discontent. Buyukatalay’s second film focuses on a movie being made about those real-life…
Set in Tehran, this Oscar nominated film for Best International Feature is a distressing, but compelling watch. For the past 20 years, lawyer Iman (Missagh Zareh) has worked for the authoritarian regime in Iran. Now, to the delight of his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), he has been rewarded with an upgraded position as an investigator…
A young employee, Eli (Oliver Tapp), is sacked from his sales job for his intimidatory social media posts outside work to ex-girlfriend Carina. She subsequently reported him to his employer. He is angry and aggrieved and seeks her out for an explanation, but she keeps blocking him. Short of rent money and in a dark…
Oh, Canada is a confessional … a reckoning for a dying man. Writer and director Paul Schrader collaborated with actor Richard Gere 45 years ago on American Gigolo and it has taken them this long to reunite. Gere plays feted Canadian documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife at the end of his life, while Jacob Elordi is…
