Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 197 i Metro

The last sucking bubble of consciousness. The rising gorge of panic. Yes, a delicious ricochet of sparks. I suppose I knew well enough what it felt like. It was intense, consuming, and it could be beautiful. That far out at the edge of things you get to a point where all that stands between you and oblivion is the roulette of body-memory, the last desperate jerks of your system trying to restart itself. You feel exalted, invincible, angelic because you’re totally fucking poisoned. Inside it’s great, feels brilliant. But on the outside it’s squalid beyond imagining.1 The above excerpt, from Tim Winton’s 2008 novel Breath, describes the imagined sensations associated with erotic asphyxiation: the feeling of ‘respiratory acidosis’,2 whereby one’s blood turns acidic as one’s lungs cry out for air.…

It’s always tempting to read the last work of an artist as a cap on their career, a final summation of the obsessions and interests that have marked their oeuvre. That temptation is only heightened when the artist is of such stature and significance as Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who died in July 2016. Kiarostami emerged into the international spotlight in the 1980s and 1990s, after a career as a maker of educational short films in Iran, with a series of warmly humanist features that played on the slippage between film and documentary, reality and fiction. His Koker trilogy – consisting of Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), Life, and Nothing More … (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994) – makes for a dizzyingly metafictional sequence. In the first,…

Seeing and, perhaps more importantly, hearing Paul Damien Williams’ documentary Gurrumul (2017) in the wake of internationally renowned singer/songwriter Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s death in July last year was a strangely surreal experience. I recall sitting in the Forum Theatre towards the end of the Melbourne International Film Festival and listening to the distinct texture of his voice as it reverberated out into the expansive theatre. It was as if his voice was able to move into these spaces, these bodies, in the theatre and echo within them. The film was screened in three theatres across Melbourne that night, with introductions by members of Yunupingu’s family as well as speeches by Mark Grose (his manager) and Michael Hohnen (a long-time musical collaborator and close friend), both from Skinnyfish Music. These heartfelt…

Australian directors Les McLaren and Annie Stiven don’t consider Frédéric Duvelle particularly extraordinary. Yet it is the bizarre, entertaining, sad and enlightening twists and turns of the eccentric Frenchman’s life that fill the frames of their intimate documentary Life Is a Very Strange Thing (2017). The film crackles with energy, fuelled by Duvelle’s irresistible charm and intelligence; as a character, he’s every director’s dream: irascible and an oddball; cuddly, endearing and benevolent. A complex man encapsulated in a film that’s impressive in scope yet full of heart as an intimate study of a storied, colourful individual. Premiering at the Brisbane International Film Festival, Life Is a Very Strange Thing takes us through the French city of Bordeaux, on the banks of the river Garonne. We move down alleyways lined with…

The rolling hills, picturesque scenery and breathtaking topography of New Zealand have provided a majestic backdrop for many a cinematic triumph. From the representations of Middle Earth in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) to Maori tradition and symbolism in Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002), the landscape is an important part of filmmaking in New Zealand cinema. The otherworldly beauty of these expansive spaces can evoke awe in viewers – so much so that these natural settings often come across as characters in their own right. Yet this very landscape, in all its raw and rugged beauty, plays a starkly different role in the New Zealand Film Commission–funded films The Locals (Greg Page, 2003) and Black Sheep (Jonathan King, 2006). Both employ elements of schlocky, comedic horror…

The ‘strange’ colours flagged in the title of Alena Lodkina’s remarkable debut feature are first glimpsed in a banal, everyday setting: a shop window. Opals are on sale inside, which cues us in to the fact that opal mining is the main activity in the remote place to which young adult Milena (Kate Cheel) has travelled by bus: Lightning Ridge in northern New South Wales. The immediate motivation for Milena’s trip is the heart attack recently suffered by her now-hospitalised father, Max (Daniel P Jones). But the looming issue of how Milena and Max will come to terms with each other emotionally is sidelined for almost half the film; meanwhile, Milena will wander around this place, encounter its people and spend some reflective time alone. Lightning Ridge, as we see…

The majority of storylines about illness and disability on our screens go something like this: a healthy person gets sick or injured, that person grapples with the sickness or injury, then they either lose the battle or get better and return to their previous life with nothing but a renewed vigour and perhaps a small scar. A nice, neat storyline that boosts ratings and adds drama. But, in real life, rarely are things so neatly wrapped. SBS On Demand’s seven-part series Homecoming Queens looks at the reality of chronic illness that such storylines often shy away from. Co-created and co-written by Michelle Law and Chloë Reeson, the show is inspired by the pair’s own experiences with health and how it has informed their friendship. Each short episode centres on the…

Since 2009, the annual Mr Gay World competition has been celebrating the diverse experiences of gay men around the globe. In order to be successful, entrants must first prove their chops by winning their respective national titles before progressing to the international stages of the contest. There, the unsurprisingly handsome entrants pose – with bare chests on display – for their official photographs. But, beyond the allure of sexy men preening themselves for a gay-male gaze, there is a professed political impetus here, too: according to the competition website, the organisers want to raise awareness that ‘in many regions on our planet being gay is a challenge and a fight for basic human rights’.1 Human rights were certainly foregrounded in 2016 when one delegate was notably absent. Husein Sabat was…

AS ONE WHO WAS LESS THAN ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT HENRI SAFRAN’S STORM BOY WHEN I FIRST SAW IT FORTY YEARS AGO, UPON READING TERRY HAYES’ DIVERTING, ERUDITE AND SPLENDIDLY RESEARCHED ACCOUNT, I NOW FEEL IMPELLED TO WATCH IT AGAIN. THE FILM WAS HUGELY POPULAR AT THE TIME, AND HAYES HELPS US TO SEE WHY THIS WAS SO. NOT MANY PELICANS HAVE ACQUIRED STAR STATUS AS MR PERCIVAL HAS DONE, AND HAYES’ ACCOUNT PAYS CAREFUL ATTENTION TO THOSE COLLABORATORS – APART FROM THE FEATHERED ICON – RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FILM’S CRITICAL AND COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. IT MAY HAVE DELIGHTED CHILDREN, BUT ADULTS WERE CATERED FOR AS WELL.Brian McFarlane, Series Editor Substitute ‘film’ for ‘book’ and ‘pelican’ for ‘whale’, and you have something of both the media hype at the time of the making…

With the growth of streaming services, the prevalence of VOD and Australia’s shocking piracy record, it can seem like more people are cutting the cord and choosing to plug in elsewhere. According to the latest iteration of the 2017 Australian Video Viewing Report, however, Australians are still averaging two hours and twenty-seven minutes each day watching free-to-air (FTA) and/or subscription channels on in-home televisions – merely a drop of forty-three minutes (or 23 per cent) since 2010.1 Fewer people may be watching FTA, but that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in what’s on offer. OzTAM estimates that, in a month, 347 million minutes of Australian broadcasters’ online content is viewed on connected devices, comprising 258 million minutes of catch-up and on-demand material as well as 89 million minutes of live-streaming.2…

Last year, the BBC launched ‘Gay Britannia’, a series of programs marking the fiftieth anniversary of the UK’s Sexual Offences Act 1967, which saw the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality. The series brought audiences a suite of LGBTQIA+ content, including the flagship drama miniseries Man in an Orange Shirt; based-on-true-events telemovie Against the Law (Fergus O’Brien, 2017), about journalist Peter Wildeblood; archival patchwork Queerama; documentaries including Olly Alexander: Growing Up Gay (Vicki Cooper, 2017) and Gluck: Who Did She Think He Was? (Clare Beavan, 2017); and a collection of podcasts as well as radio and TV specials. Compared to the commemorated moment in UK history, it would take eight additional years for the first Australian state to decriminalise homosexuality: South Australia, in 1975. The rest of the states and territories would…

At the Ophir Awards – the Israeli counterpart of the Oscars – in September, Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot (2017) won eight statues, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and a Best Actor award for lead Lior Ashkenazi. It also won the Silver Lion (Grand Jury Prize) at the Venice Film Festival, and was shortlisted for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, though it didn’t make the final five nominees. In spite of all this acclaim – or, if you’re feeling cynical, because of – Foxtrot was hugely controversial in its homeland. Due to its critical depiction of life in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), it became a magnet for criticism from right-wing politicians. Israeli minister of culture Miri Regev – a former IDF spokesperson – decreed Foxtrot a work ‘of self-flagellation…

When searching for the possibility of life in space, astronomers and astrobiologists look for planets within a star’s circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ): the area where a planet is ‘just right’ – neither too close to nor too far from its star – to allow liquid water to exist on its surface. Because of this, the CHZ has earned the popular moniker ‘Goldilocks zone’.1 Beyond its scientific origins, the Goldilocks zone can serve as a metaphor in many areas of life – we all learn to create and exist in our own sorts of Goldilocks zones. Most of us are driven to change only when our comfort zones are disturbed – when a spouse is consistently too overbearing or distant, we may end a marriage; when a job is too stressful,…

In a film filled with memorable visuals, the most powerful images in Guilty (Matthew Sleeth, 2017) have actually already been seen before. They aren’t the product of the film’s director, but rather of its subject: the now-executed convicted drug smuggler Myuran Sukumaran. Discovering his passion for painting during his incarceration, he made his mark on hundreds of canvases, crafting an array of self-portraits, representations of others and more abstract works. In the documentary, three stand out, all painted in the last hours before his death. One, Time Is Ticking, depicts his own likeness, with a concerned expression on his face and a gaping hole where his heart should be. Another, One Heart, One Feeling in Love, shows a bloody heart painted large in shades of crimson. A third re-creates the…

In the years since his internationally successful feature debut, Samson & Delilah (2009), Warwick Thornton has not been unproductive. He has made documentaries, written other films, and produced art and video installations, including the immersive Mother Courage; as Thornton has explained in an earlier issue of Metro, ‘Not all stories are feature films.’1 Yet his fiction features – especially his more recent, Sweet Country (2017) – can be considered key pieces in his catalogue of art. While many things make his oeuvre significant, it is particularly noteworthy for its affective sound design, which is both specific in the context of Australian cinema and striking for the way it encourages the audience to participate. As academic Isabelle Delmotte has written, ‘To an audience, cinema sound designers are the mediators of a…