Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 193 i Metro

This article refers to the original Japanese-language releases. A host of Japanese animators have been feted for the mantle of ‘next Miyazaki’, but Mamoru Hosoda once came close: he was initially commissioned by Studio Ghibli to direct Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyakazi, 2004),1 before withdrawing from the project. Hosoda never helmed a film for Ghibli, but the four features he made after graduating into the realm of anime auteur – The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), Summer Wars (2009), Wolf Children (2012) and The Boy and the Beast (2015) – have been some of the most artful animated pictures of this century. Born in 1967 in Kamiichi, Hosoda was, like so many animators, inspired by Miyazaki, after seeing the great master’s debut, The Castle of Cagliostro, on its release…

Guo’s ‘road to Mandalay’ is one that will lead him back to his homeland, with hard-earned money and, he hopes, a wife in tow; Lianqing’s ‘road’ leads as far away from home as possible, with a new identity and nationality. Taiwan-based Burmese director Midi Z’s fourth fiction feature, The Road to Mandalay, made its debut at the 2016 Venice Film Festival and continued on the film-festival circuit, earning the Fedeora Award for Best Film at Venice and nominations in major categories at the 2016 Golden Horse Film Festival, where the director was also conferred the Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker of the Year accolade. Introducing the film at last year’s Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival, head programmer Kiki Fung described it as ‘quiet and detached, but with heart’, and noted that the…

As a means of ‘mesmeriz[ing] the audience’, Weir deploys a range of sound effects that transcend typical expectations of what a soundtrack should accomplish and amplify – that is, beyond the already heard and already familiar. Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) has been described as among the most influential Australian films of all time.1 In 2015, when the film celebrated the forty-year anniversary of its release, David Stratton noted that it was the ‘industry’s first really major success for a “serious” film, a film that subsequently played in art house cinemas the world over’.2 Similarly, ABC film critic Karen Percy commented that ‘[t]he movie set a new bar for filmmaking in Australia, using evocative lighting and camera moves to set an eerie mood.’3 Audiences have also recognised the…

 Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) was released throughout Australia in February 2002. Its three young protagonists – Molly (Everlyn Sampi), Gracie (Laura Monaghan) and Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), aged fourteen, ten and eight, respectively – captivated hearts across the nation and beyond through their bravery, tenacity and strength. Forcibly removed from their families in 1931 and sent to the Moore River Native Settlement 135 kilometres north of Perth to be trained as domestic servants and ‘re-educated’ into white society, the girls escape and walk 2400 kilometres across some of the harshest Australian desert to find their way back home. A highly strategic marketing campaign tapped into this emotional impact and ensured the film’s universal story about reconnecting with one’s home transcended cultural barriers, thereby reaching national and international audiences, regardless of…

Although often unknown or dismissed as marginal, webdocs can, in fact, facilitate unique ways to achieve documentary’s traditional functions of framing the world, engaging in discussions and debates around matters of concern, and making the unseen visible. Technological advancement continues to drive documentary forms into new areas of possibility. From the emergence of sync sound as a capability for portable cameras in the 1960s to digital video cameras enabling personal and reflective documentary-making, documentary production, forms and distribution have expanded. But to what end? The recent hype surrounding virtual reality (VR) promises a new world of immersive engagement with alternative reality (AR) in near pursuits. At the same time, recent funding and industry support for web series have allowed shorter, ‘edgier’ content with slicker production values to reach broader audiences…

It’s hard to imagine a stronger reception for Australian director Ben Young’s feature debut, Hounds of Love (2016), a period piece about a pair of suburban serial killers. Its premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival prompted rave reviews: Variety described it as a ‘bold film’ and a ‘calling card not soon forgotten’,1 while both The Hollywood Reporter2 and ScreenDaily3 identified Young as a director ‘to watch’. Indeed, Young has since used the success of the film to springboard his career, signing with United Talent Agency (UTA) and setting himself up to direct upcoming sci-fi film Extinction.4 Despite such success, Hounds of Love is not necessarily geared towards the mainstream. It’s a tough watch. The film’s disturbing subject matter prompted walkouts at its Venice premiere,5 and even those aforementioned reviews…

With the release of Matthew Holmes’ The Legend of Ben Hall (2016), I’m led to wonder: just what is the enduring appeal of bushranger films in Australia? What does it say about a country that makes a legendary (possibly even ‘iconic’, if that weren’t so wildly overused a word) figure of Ned Kelly? Is there some suggestion of these figures acquiring glamour because of their iconoclastic attitudes to authority, an authority still very much that of a colony under imperial rule? Whatever the answers to such questions, the fact is that the bushranger subgenre was so popular in the early years of the twentieth century that action was taken to stall its continuance. In 1911–1912, the governments of New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria placed bans on the further…

At once, the ambitious effort embodies a switch-oriented fish-out-of-water comedy, a teenage rom-com about opposites attracting and a sci-fi flight of fancy that starts with a comet streaking towards Earth. This article refers to the original Japanese-language release. ‘Please make me a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life!’ yells teenager Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi) in Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016). Her request reeks of adolescent malaise, though she knows the source of her unhappiness. She lives in the quiet, scenic locale of Itomori, and her days follow a routine. After sharing breakfast with her younger sister Yotsuha (Kanon Tani) and their grandmother, she trudges through high school with her friends Katsuhiko (Ryō Narita) and Sayaka (Aoi Yūki), then carries out her duties as a kuchikamizake shrine maiden. The last of…

In 1975, Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge regime overthrew Cambodia’s then pro-US Khmer Republic military dictatorship. Until the end of the decade, the Khmer Rouge enacted sweeping reforms, including cultural isolation and the eradication of the class structure through hard labour, torture, and mass executions of anybody who resisted or posed an ideological threat. The Cambodian genocide killed an estimated 2 million people (a quarter of the country’s entire population at the time); as of 2009, 23,745 mass graves have been discovered, with more believed to exist.1 When Pol Pot’s soldiers spread across the country, they forced those from the cities into hard-labour camps inspired by the self-sufficient residents of the nation’s remote northern regions, who had no use for money. He sought to revert the country back to an…

 An intertitle appearing at the beginning of Alireza Ghanie’s Imaginary Border (2016), a documentary that screened at last year’s Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival, portends ‘stories from my journey into Indigenous Australia’, but the opening scenes take place in – indeed, the film seldom strays from – inner Brisbane. The first of those stories is a grim and encapsulating one: in early 2006, the laurelled Indigenous opera singer Delmae Barton suffered a stroke near a major university busway, keeled forward in a pool of her own vomit, and laid there, immobile, for hours while commuters walked on by.1 The wounds created by this episode, Imaginary Border demonstrates, have not healed. Barton – whose profile the camera observes in wells of deep, furrowed thought – is shown reciting poetry that articulates…

Every now and then, a film emerges that reshapes the outlook for a national cinema. In Australia, that film may well be Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971), a movie so renowned that it brings with it its own uniquely unsettling mythology. Upon first release, the film was met with a hostile domestic reception; local audiences reacted with incredulity at the mordant representation of masculinity on display. Jack Thompson, who plays Dick in the film in his first major role, recalls, ‘Australians at the time didn’t want to see it as Australia. People walked away saying, “That’s not us. We don’t behave like that.”’1 Wake in Fright is a brutally visceral film that captures a hallucinogenic waking nightmare. The title suggests ominous portents – the phrase is taken from an…

 Positing a world where body-swap technology has become a reality, Pulse (Stevie Cruz-Martin, 2016) poses a complex question: just because you can dispense with perceived physical problems, should you? Apocryphal cliché or not, ‘be careful what you wish for’ is an apt adage in this circumstance. ‘There have been such huge strides in queer filmmaking, but the thing that I found, and a huge influence in making Pulse, was that I had never seen a film that spoke to what it was actually like to be a young person with disability and to struggle with it.’ DANIEL MONKS A refreshingly candid and, at times, challenging exploration of the intersections between gender, sexuality and disability, Pulse does not shy away from the thornier aspects of its central premise. A deeply personal…

What is the meaning of paradise? ‘Paradise’ is a word with the power to conjure up images of tropical islands shimmering in the sun, of snowfields dusted with untouched powder, of pristine rainforests populated with exotic animals. It’s a word imbued with a sense of the Other, a touch of unfamiliarity; paradise might not be far from our front door, but it’s never in our backyard. Paradise is an escape. An idyll. A place for tourists, for those stepping outside their own day-to-day experiences. In Katsuya Tomita’s Bangkok Nites (2016), paradise is specifically located in Thailand’s thriving hub of sex tourism. The film spends much of its time in and around Bangkok’s Thaniya Road, a red-light district populated by Thai sex workers and the Japanese men they cater for. As…

‘That’s your grandfather making mayonnaise on a hot summer’s day in Melbourne,’ says artist Philippe Mora to his son while mixing pink, yellow and white acrylic paint onto board. ‘I’m in the corner, watching, learning how to make it.’ ‘The comic book I’m making is called Monsieur Mayonnaise,’ he continues, speaking to us, the audience, in voiceover. ‘It’s going to be about my family in World War II. And the story’s going to be very personal.’ Born in Paris in 1949, now based in West Hollywood and completing this graphic novel, Philippe recently embarked on a journey to discover the true nature of his Jewish family’s path from Nazi-occupied France to Australia in the 1950s. His parents went on to achieve art-world fame with their parties, restaurants and paintings in…

Foley was no stranger to the area, having spent time in Brewarrina as a representative of the Aboriginal Legal Service; he wanted to show the rest of the country what conditions were like on the Aboriginal reserves. Backroads (Phillip Noyce, 1977) is a singular Australian film, and an oddity. Released in 1977, it bridges two distinct periods in the nation’s cinematic history: the prestige of the ‘Australian Renaissance’ of the mid 1970s and the industry’s turn to exploitation in the subsequent decade. Backroads also established the careers of its two principal creative figures, director Noyce and activist star Gary Foley. From their unique creative partnership emerged a commitment to exposing the humanitarian plight facing many Indigenous Australians. While Noyce went on to a lengthy career in commercial Hollywood throughout the…

OUT OF THE BOX: THE NINTENDO SWITCH Daniel Golding Nintendo has always done things differently. In 1985, the Japanese company launched the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America. This was just after the great videogame-industry crash of 1983, when alarm bells were sounding about the future of the whole industry – in other words, it was a new games console when absolutely everyone was pulling out of videogames. It was, surprisingly, a massive success, outselling all previously released consoles worldwide by 1990 and essentially kickstarting the videogames industry after its early slump. Two decades later, in 2006, Nintendo threw out the standard logic of videogames again, creating a console with a motion wand instead of a regular controller packed with buttons and analog sticks. The company used this point…