The Sydney Film Festival is returning to its traditional early-winter dates in 2022, having, like all of us, endured the disruption of you-know-what these past two years. To celebrate the , we have partnered with SFF Director Nashen Moodley, and invited him to cast his mind back to festivals past, and curate a special collection of his recent festival favourites at SBS On Demand.
Of his choices Moodley says, "I wanted to focus on more recent festivals, on films that have made an impact. There are a few winners of the Sydney Film Prize, and there are others that are related to films that we have in this year's festival. There are films by filmmakers who have new films coming up that hopefully viewers will be able to to enjoy their new works, and it might be useful to to have a look at their previous work.
"So that's how I came up with the selection. But it was very, very difficult!"
Bait
United Kingdom, 2019
Genre: Drama
Language: English
Genre: Drama
Language: English
Director: Mark Jenkin
"Bait is a remarkable film in every way; it's very experimental in its form. It goes back many, many decades, in the way it is made, by using a hand-cranked camera. So it looks like a very old film. And although it's made with technology that's very old, the story is completely contemporary.
"It takes us into a fishing village in the UK that has experienced such an incredible change, but there are still people who who wish to pursue their way of life but have to face gentrification. They have to face the fact that their homes, their homes for generations, are now becoming holiday homes for the rich.
"I think it's it's an incredible film, not just technically, not just formally, but also emotionally."
Blinded by the Light
PG
United Kingdom, 2019
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Language: English
Director: Gurinder Chadha
"I saw Blinded By The Light at the Sundance Film Festival and I just thought it was absolutely incredible. People were cheering and screaming. There were so many Bruce Springsteen fans in the audience. I'm a big fan of Gurinder Chadha's work. And I just think this is such a lovely lovely story of the power of art, of a young man in England, really having very little chance to explore the part in life that he really wants to. There's an expectation in family that he takes a more conventional job, but he's in love with art and with writing and Bruce Springsteen. The music of Bruce Springsteen, so far away from this young man's life, really inspires him and changes his life.
"There's a great story, too, of how Gurinder Chadha spoke to Bruce Springsteen on the red carpet somewhere and said, 'Can we have all your music for the film?' And he said, 'Yeah, you can', which is really great. I love the film. I think it's so heart-warming and inspirational."
God's Own Country
MA 15+
United Kingdom, 2017
Genre: Romance, Drama
Language: English, Romanian
Director: Francis Lee
"God's Own Country is a film again that I first saw at Sundance and immediately invited for the festival. I think it's a beautiful, queer love story with such emotion made with such beauty. It's a film that is in some ways explicit and also tender, and so beautiful. This relationship, as depicted, made it, for me, the best queer film of that year and essential to have at the festival. And I'm so glad that we did.
In Fabric
MA 15+
United Kingdom, 2017
Genre: Horror, Comedy
Language: English
Director: Peter Strickland
"Peter Strickland's In Fabric is a a very bizarre film about a killer red dress. Literally a killer red dress. And it takes you to some very weird and wonderful places. I'm a big fan of Strickland's work. We've seen his films before at the festival, and in this year's edition of the festival we have his new film, Flux Gourmet. That goes even weirder and wilder. In Fabric is something very difficult to describe: It's set in a sort of culinary art performance institute, and is about competing collectives. It makes fun of everything and the art world.
"I think it's just a joy to behold, visually. It's so, so inventive, so incredibly funny, and it has a great cast. He's doing something in cinema that I think is unique and so distinctive, and he's a filmmaker whose work I love to present to people."
Memoria
PG
Columbia, Thailand, France, Germany, 2021
Genre: Drama
Language: English
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Genre: Drama
Language: English
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
"Memoria is in the selection because it was in our most recent edition of the festival in November. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the great filmmakers working today. To my mind, again, he's someone who makes such distinctive films and here, he explores memory. He's shooting for the first time outside Thailand. It's made in Colombia, and he's working with Tilda Swinton. I think it's an incredible collaboration. They've been friends for a very long time, and this film has taken a long time to emerge. It's a very unusual film. Of course it takes time to get into its rhythms, like all of his films.
"Like all of Apichatpong's films, it's very difficult to describe in the sense of saying, 'Well, this is what Memoria is about'. It's a film about memory, yes, but it's about many more things. It's a film that also looks at -if you watch it closely enough- the connections between Colombia and Thailand and their political histories. It's a film of great beauty with with every image so carefully thought about, and the sound design, so carefully thought about. It has a truly special, incredible surprise at the end of the film that really no one could see coming.
"I think it's a masterpiece. He's one of the great filmmakers working today. And it's a delight to present in this selection.'
Parasite
MA15+
South Korea, 2019
Genre: Comedy, Thriller, Drama
Language: Korean
Director: Bong Joon-ho
"Parasite, of course, won the Sydney film Prize in 2019 and it was a fantastic, fantastic year for the festival. Bong Joon-ho was here with us at the festival to talk about the film just after winning the Palme d'Or in Cannes, but before winning the several Oscars, he's been one of my favourite filmmakers for for the longest time. He's come to the festival twice, with Okja and then with Parasite.
"I love all of his films, beginning with Barking Dogs Don't Bite and I think with Parasite he reached the pinnacle of what he tries to do. He makes super entertaining films that have all the conventions of whatever he's trying to try to make: a murder mystery, sci-fi film, thriller. And with Parasite, he does just that. It's so heightened. But at the same time, he's always being a very political filmmaker; he's always saying really profound things, Not just about Korean society, but about what's going on in the world. And when we look at Parasite, it's this really fantastic, completely engaging and compelling film, but it's also making such important points about income disparity, about wealth, what's conspicuous wealth and what it feels to be outside that. There's this tremendous, explosive clash between between people because of this disparity.
"It's a pretty perfect film."
LISTEN: BONG JOON-HO TALKS PARASITE
Shoplifters
M
Japan, 2018
Genre: Drama, Crime
Language: Japanese
Director: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
"Kore-Eda Hirokazu is a great Japanese filmmaker. I adore his films and I adore his films about about families. I think he does something so profound. One of my favourite films ever is Nobody Knows. It's about young people in in Tokyo in terrible circumstances and in Shoplifters he creates a very different kind of family. A family living on the edge. A makeshift family. People who are not biologically connected, but are connected in different ways. And it's not a simple connection. But the film is so beautifully made, the direction of of these actors. They're all fantastic actors and you fall in love with them. I think, again, it's such a deserving winner of the Palme d'Or and was so great for us to have the film that year at the festival.
"Kore-Eda has has a new film, of course, that will appear in Cannes in the coming days, working in the Korean language for the first time. So I think that's sure to be something very exciting. I can't wait to see it."
The cast of 'Shoplifters', written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda Source: SBS Movies
There Is No Evil
MA 15+, 2020
Genre: Drama
Country: Iran
Language: Persian
Director: Mohammad Rasoulof
"There Is No Evil won the Sydney Film Prize in 2021. It won the Golden Bear in 2020. So it's a film we we waited a long time to premiere at the festival. And Mohammad Rasoulof is one of the great Iranian filmmakers. He is so courageous, so daring, to continue to make films, even though he's been banned from filmmaking for a long time now. He continues to live in Iran, even though he didn't have to, and continues to be very brave and face persecution and continue with his art. It seems to me that, the greater the level of repression, the more daring and outspoken he becomes.
"With There Is No Evil, which to avoid scrutiny he shot us four separate short films and then brought them together. These are all films that look at people having to deal with the consequences, the moral consequences in some ways of living in a system that calls upon them to do. Some quite terrible things. And here he looks in particular at Capital Punishment and the repercussions on a range of different people involved in executions. Sometimes not directly involved but it's quite a tremendous film. He was inspired by a trip to the bank: He went to the bank one day and saw in the bank one of his interrogators, one of his police interrogators, just going about his business. And he started following the guy around. And he was very angry and then realised, well, this is just a normal guy, just an ordinary person like anyone else. And he's going about his life. And this is his job. It was his job to interrogate me. And he did his job. But what are the what are the repercussions of this? What how does it affect this person? So it's an incredible starting point for a film that he made. An incredible film."
Wolf And Sheep
M
Afghanistan, 2016
Genre: Drama
Language: Dari
Director: Shahrbanoo Sadat
"I include Wolf And Sheep in this selection, because Shahrbanoo Sadat is a wonderful filmmaker, she was here with us at the festival, when we played the film in competition, and when when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan recently, we were very concerned for her. She was still in Afghanistan at the time [see interview below]. Now she is not. And she's she made up I think what is what I think is a very brave film in Wolf and Sheep, We've shown films from Afghanistan before at the festival. There are many Iranian filmmakers who have made films in Afghanistan. There is not a great deal of cinema coming out of Afghanistan for obvious reasons, but she made a film that was so surprising. I think it was so, so utterly surprising. The language was so rude! It's so funny and I think she's a special filmmaker. And she continues to want to make stories set in Afghanistan. She's someone who I think has a really bright future, has has a sensibility that's very different from everything else I've seen from the region. I hope she'll make many more films to come.
We Zoomed with Shahrbanoo Sadat just days after she fled Afghanistan in 2021. Here, she reflects upon the personal cost of leaving her beloved Kabul, after watching it fall to the Taliban.
- As told to Fiona Williams, SBS On Demand Head of Curation
Stream the full collection of the . The 69th Sydney Film Festival opens Wednesday 8 June. Browse the full program .
