MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2019

THE CAPITOL
FORUM MELBOURNE
HOYTS Melbourne Central
KINO CINEMAS
THE PLENARY
SMOCA

Thursday 1st – Sunday 18th August, 2019

Forty-four films seen, and chiefly savoured. A smaller figure than some years (you can’t always sweep enough work aside to make room), but, regardless of which, a good trip and expansion. Here, at a sweep, what was future and present tense rolled into past tense.

And while I’m not one for favourites, if pushed, make it House of Hummingbird, Ghost Tropic, Adam, and Monrovia, Indiana. With honourable mentions to Honeyland, Fire Will Come, Journey to a Mother’s Room, and Talking About Trees. Song Without a Name. Ray & Liz. Enough.

Rewind.

2nd August:
Day 2
Film 01, Honeyland (Ljubomir Stefanov, Tamara Kotevska)
Film 02, Litigante (Franco Lolli)
Film 03, The Biggest Little Farm (John Chester)
Film 04, For Sama (Edward Watts, Waad al-Kateab)

“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”
― Henry David Thoreau

Biting into honeycomb, keeping pace behind beekeeper Hatidze Muratova, in her shirt the colour of sunlight and honey. In Macedonia, in Honeyland, is where our #MIFF2019 began. A dance of intricate cooperation, in the hive, surrounding it, and, pulling back, all things. Warmed by a distinctive buzz, a way to live, in balance, not greed. On a four-film day, we collected nectar in The Biggest Little Farm too. Working with nature (in all readings) not against it, finding or restoring balance is hard work, but it is also the most regenerative, inside and out, and pulling back. It fills you with hope. And in the makeshift hospital wards of Aleppo, Syria, in For Sama, there too, the refusal to give up hope.

“I refused to give up hope that images can’t have an effect. I thought, ‘If people see this, things will change’. And I still believe that people can change.”
— Waad al-Kateab

Ready for day two. You?

3rd August:
Day 3
Film 05, His Lost Name (Nanako Hirose)
Film 06, Flesh Out (Michela Occhipinti)
Film 07, Official Secrets (Gavin Hood)
Film 08, Aquarela (Victor Kossakovsky)

The tinkle of ice. The cannon-fire boom of ice blocks falling. The thrash of heavy metal is the roar of the sea. The splinter-rip crack of ice. The drop down, down, down Venezuela’s Angel Falls. The confusion of icebergs floating one way as my eyes go the other. The rush of waves, when viewed from above, is reminiscent of the feathers of a bird of prey. I remove my glasses to orientate myself. The pinpricks of light beneath the surface. Bubbles like metal, rain drops, a series of rainbows like a peacock’s tail. Beneath the frozen waters of Lake Baikal, in Southern Siberia, in the front row of Hoyts cinema 3, my eyes try to take in all 96 frames-per-second, and fail. And I love every minute of it, bobbing, tossed, sprayed by the sea, the glorious sea. “Destroy the narrative”! This battered penguin, drifting on an ice floe, ready for #MIFF2019 day 4.

4th August:
Walking into the city and out again, either side of our #MIFF2019 sessions, “grasped by what we cannot grasp.... but what we feel is the wind in our faces”. (With a wink to the awkward Emporium Melbourne ad) “the city is [our] underworld, [we] will cross it in [our] favourite shoes”.
(Two lines squeezed together from Rainer Maria Rilke’s A Walk, alongside a Flora Poste worthy line from Emporium Melbourne. Where Stella Gibbons gave us dawns that do not merely rise, but creep “over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns”, it is tempting to follow suit.)

Day 4
Film 09, Les Misérables (Ladj Ly)
Film 10, Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar)
Film 11, Frankie (Ira Sachs)

I felt the need to provide a very introspective look, including into my darkest parts and to mix that with the brightest memories of my childhood.
— Pedro Almodóvar, Dolor y Gloria (Pain and Glory)

A film within a film dipping in and out of memory. A stage within a colour-soaked, devastatingly beautiful dream. The solution to pain is to keep making.
(#Almodóvar, in interview: “The solution is always to make a new movie. When I’m shooting, I’m not conscious of pain.”)
Resting on a velvet sofa, beneath the pine trees, film ten. We’re in double digits now.
[last lines of Splendor in the Grass (1961)]
Wilma Dean (played by Natalie Wood):
[voiceover] “Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower, we will grieve not; rather find strength in what remains behind.”

5th August:
Day 5
Film 12, House of Hummingbird (Bora Kim)
Film 13, Funan (Denis Do)

“Cinema takes me to another world. That world is authentic, real, and welcoming. Cinema doesn’t belong to the winner but to the loser/loner. The blissful loser. I like that world.”
— Bora Kim

The light, amount of moisture, your angle of viewing, and the wear and tear of life determines how bright and colourful the throat of a hummingbird appears. And this feels like this is also true of Bora Kim’s heartbreakingly beautiful film, House of Hummingbird, which I am so glad I saw hovering in all its light, might, and hope. The wings of a hummingbird beat between 50 and 200 flaps per second: this small bird is astounding. It’s name is plucked from the sound of its fast-beating hum-hum-hum wings. And they are the only birds I am aware of that are capable of flying backwards. This small handful of facts about this small and strong bird are also related to how the director felt about her main character: “When I looked up the name in the encyclopaedia, I found out that it symbolised, among other things, love and hope, and that it generally stood for all the good things. This little bird is very much related to my main character Eun-hee. She is tiny, and she tries really hard to find true love through her journey, which I found very reminiscent of hummingbird’s life.” Light and strong, at the one time, qualities for being capable of suspension in the air. Utterly real, and devastating, a highlight of #MIFF2019.

“What’s the right way to live? Some days I feel like I know, but I really don’t know for sure. I just know that when bad things happen, good things happen too.”
(Lines spoken by the character Youngji, who revealed the strength she already had within to Eun-hee, in House of Hummingbird. Line to live by.)

7th August:
“Both narratives and maps are frameworks used for organising knowledge in order to help us better understand the world and our place in it.”
(May Yuan, ‘Mapping Text’ in The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010))

Day 7
With huldufólk, (unknown money-bag) saints, trouble, and a hard-working guard dog with gold teeth. Wednesday, waiting for silence, rain, nightfall, opportunity, reason, and understanding. Find me by the lava rocks, still, until tomorrow’s crop (of films/places/maps).
Film 14, The Unknown Saint (Alaa Eddine Aljem)
Film 15, The Seer and the Unseen (Sara Dosa)
Film 16, Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne)

(Look up! The Capitol (formerly the Capitol Theatre), designed by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin.)

8th August:
“Rachel Poliquin, in her 2012 book, The Breathless Zoo, writes that “taxidermy is deeply marked by human longing,” revealing our hopes and dreams about our place in the natural world. Natural history dioramas present a carefully constructed, perfectly encapsulated and controlled experience of nature, revealing as much about humanity as about the nature depicted.

For my recent series, Broken Models, I negotiated access to photograph dioramas in various stages of being decommissioned. Using these fictional spaces to create imaginary scenes of my own, I introduced a worker wearing a white Hazmat suit, making notes of his observations. While the worker’s tasks are unidentified, the series suggests a scientific method of understanding and quantifying our experience of nature. The white Hazmat suit was an aesthetic choice for these dimly lit interiors; however, it was intentionally chosen to evoke images of advanced technology labs where the environment needs to be protected from the worker. The series title, Broken Models, refers to the deteriorating dioramas I photographed and to our failed construct of the environment as one of inexhaustible resources and the resiliency to accommodate, unchanged to our abuses.”
— Jennifer Steensma Hoag

Our heads are wading through ideas and possible action. Treasuring that tiny, bright spark of hope that we’ve not felt warmed by for a long time.

Day 8
Film 17, Mr Jones (Agnieszka Holland)
Film 18, The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg)

From the pigs in the trough feeding to the ginger cat on the roof reflected in Eric Arthur Blair’s (George Orwell) room as he works on Animal Farm, Agnieszka Holland knows animals, and the use and abuse of power by those in charge. Just as Spoor (a personal #MIFF2017 favourite) gave me “hunters [who] are not [the] only the people who actually kill animals [as a] .... metaphor for the brutal power that doesn’t have any kind of empathy or interest in the lives and feelings of the weakest”, so too does Mr Jones. And like Spoor, “courage” is the most “important message”, delivered through reflected images, fractured by beveled glass, altered time, sped up by music-in-pursuit and furious peddling, and the jaw-break snap of eating tree bark.

“‘Comrades!’ he cried. ‘You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.’”
— George Orwell, Animal Farm

9th August:
Day 9
Film 19, It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman)
Film 20, Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe)
Film 21, Rosie (Paddy Breathnach)

Hands in gloves, and gloved hands in pockets, beanies on, ears tucked in, we walk in and out of the city, either side of our #MIFF2019 film sessions. This quiet reflection gives us a chance to sift through what we have seen, heard, and felt, and what we anticipate lies ahead. To this growing memory harvest, I will place the sparrow from It Must Be Heaven, for their persistence and resourcefulness (finally flying over the hand that kept sweeping it aside), desktop hop-hop charm, and the absurdity of their placement within the neat walls of an apartment in Paris. I will also place the yum-yum hot chips family bond within Rosie, where brief outbursts were permitted when things became too much to bear, before banding together once more. Their care for each other as a whole gave me hope they’d be able to pull through, and find a safe place to live. Alongside this, the beauty and revelation of the opening scene of Fire Will Come. As each narrow ribbon of a tree is felled by a bulldozer to the heartbreaking sound of Vivaldi’s Nisi Dominus, there, as bright as headlights in the night, the illumination that things are not what they seem. Those glorious trees are an introduced species to Galicia, the invasive eucalyptus tree. Let’s also place in our collection, a tender and ordinary scene, warming bread on a hot plate in a kitchen. Walking through the loud green with three dairy cows and a dog named Luna. A horse who survived the fire, for now.

“I don’t want to be a creator, I want to serve. I always say the same thing: I want to serve the viewer — but what’s the best way to do this? Well, being ambiguous. We have a need for clarity (the great stories, common places). But to “reveal” something you need to “cover it with two veils”. Films must transcend their authors; if they remain at the level of the directors then we’re losing the best of cinema.”
— Oliver Laxe

10th August:
Leaving Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff’s Los Reyes with #MIFF2019 orphan Lottie in mind. Be sure to follow her adventures at the Hotel of Bad Habits over on Elaine Haby’s @pasadenamansions. And here’s to you Chola and Fútbol.

“I want them to see how other types of languages and behaviors are possible and enriching, not just those of humans. The human animal is a small portion of what makes up the world, and if we are not able to give space to the other modes of existence, we impoverish our vision of reality. I would like people to access to that truth through the film.”
— Bettina Perut on Los Reyes

Day 10
Film 22, Vision Portraits (@visionportraitsmovie) (Rodney Evans)
Film 23, Dirty God (Sacha Polak)
Filme 24, Los Reyes (Bettina Perut, Iván Osnovikoff

11th August:
Yesterday’s #MIFF2019 films 22–24, Vision Portraits, Dirty God, and Los Reyes, sparked realisations akin to John Dugdale discovering Emily Dickinson’s poetry. “Dickinson flew over her house and observed her life from above before there were airplanes.... I totally identified with that when I was paralyzed. It was very easy to leave my body.” Dickinson’s words inspired ideas for his photographs that “instantly appear as a picture full blown in my mind.... Being blind is not what you think.... it’s not all darkness. My optic nerve still works and shoots a beautiful ball of brightly colored orange and purple and violet light and sparkling flashes all the time. My mother always used to say, ‘John, I would give you my eyes if I could,’ and I always told her that I didn’t really want them because this experience has been so magnificent. I feel like the Cheshire cat”. From finding ways to be free, soar, and be a Cheshire Cat accessing one’s own inner aurora borealis to being comfortable in your own skin (“I’ve hidden my scars for 15 years, and I’ve been called a monster for 15 years.... So doing this [film has] given me another window to look out. I see myself as a human now, and not as a monster. I love my scars. Look, there are different patterns in them”. Vicky Knight speaking about her own burns in ‘Dirty God’), we want to continue making our own new and honest work. We’ve increased urgency.

11th August (continued):
Day 11
Film 25, Talking About Trees (Suhaib Gasmelbari)
Film 26, Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham)
Film 27, The Juniper Tree (Nietzchka Keene)

A little mouse. A fairy tale, Grimm. Singing “what the birds know”. Climbing over lava rocks, overshadowed by Basalt cliffs. Animal shadow-hand puppets that crow and bark, alive on the walls. A figure encased in a glass coffin in the landscape. A wise bird in the juniper tree. Pick me a dandelion.

A camel in a pink kerchief, their strong, long neck resting upon a blue chair back. Chewing, observing, left, centre, right, centre, ready for their close-up. “Alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up”. The comic timing of a projection screen that rolls up and makes its action a part of a Charlie Chaplin scene. The shadows of hands as they tease the screen back in place.

A budgie swinging in a cage, squawking before it is doused in tea. A young dog in a basket fashioned from a box, growling. Flies on the ceiling. A meadow on a printed dress. An orange-glow radiator. Stains on a shirt front. White bread. A shoe as a weapon. A tiger in a jigsaw puzzle, and a giraffe in a zoo. A camel that lost its hump (ZOO series). Enclosed.

Looking through the window. Three beautiful, hard, different films yesterday. Resplendent with animals. Three films, back to back, at the Forum.
“.... animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.... The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man.... The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond….”
— John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’

12th August:
Day 12
Film 28, Ghost Tropic (Bas Devos)
Film 29, Queen of Hearts (May el-Toukhy)
Film 30, Song Without a Name (Melina Léon)

13th August:
On the soft-as-night heels of Ghost Tropic, a film-free day proved a challenge. The world demanded words, responses, and chatter. I could no longer sit and ponder, and draw threads from one film to another, finding the tail to the body to the head: a whole, magical giraffe! The world wanted emails, and now, and conversations required not the reading of subtitles and subtext, but snappiness. Or so it seemed. I longed to climb back into the 4:3 world of somewhere in Brussels. To see the light gently alter according to the slow shift of time. To hear the silvered lament within Song Without a Name. To return to shadows nibbling at outlines. To feel the weight and leap of the Danza de Tijeras (Scissor Dance). I am not yet feeling loquacious. And everything is too bright.

14th August:
Day 14
Film 31, The Swallows of Kabul (Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec, Zabou Breitman)
(Swallows preceded by some rather different birds at Melbourne Museum, as part of National Science Week)
(screened with the short film Son of the Sea (Misagh Zareh, Soniya Sanjari))
Film 32, The Rest (Ai Weiwei)

“How do we store [everything we see in the world] and adjust? Or do we come to really not care at all? Is that possible? What will be the result if we all don’t care? Will there be any rationality, any purpose in life?”
— Ai Weiwei (@aiww), on The Rest, which, compiled from footage and interviews collected for his macroscopic Human Flow (2017), looks at the microscopic, individual trauma refugees face.
....
“That is the condition I want to tell Europe: what Europe really is, what we think Europe is, and what we don’t understand.

There are over 2 million refugees in Europe. I talked to many refugees. Yes, they’re safe — but at the same time, they’ve become nobody. It’s such a psychological issue: Have you really escaped? And what the struggle means to you. The meaning of your life. You become nobody. You become transparent. You become a number. Someone sees you simply as unsafe, or a threat to their life, or useless. It’s very hard to accept — a smart, intelligent, strong-willed person, or a young boy: Why do they have to feel abandoned like that?”

15th August:
Day 15
Film 33, Long Time No Sea (Yung-Hui Tsui)
Film 34, A Regular Woman (Sherry Hormann)

Work commitments may have made for a quieter #MIFF2019 two-film day, but work, overseen by Arthur, here, Leonard and Olive, over there, was from a cosy place. As the last weekend of MIFF draws closer, we made a few changes to our list to accommodate a film told in ellipses. “What does a film that is more like a topography feel like? Or like a map, a landscape. Not landscape as in scenery or ‘beautiful’ backdrop. More as in that you as a viewer are standing in the topography, and the scenes from the film are places you can move between and link”. Yes, we’ve swapped a Sunset for a Ridge in a map. And added in Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks for forty-five films in a handful of days.

16th August:
Day 16
Film 35, Journey to a Mother’s Room (Celia Rico Clavellino)
Film 36, The Orphanage (Shahrbanoo Sadat)
Film 37, Judy & Punch (Mirrah Foulkes)
Film 38, Adam (Maryam Touzani)

The bonds formed while smoothing the long strands of dough to make perfect homemade rziza (Adam), and strengthened while eating grapes together to usher in a new year (Journey to a Mother’s Room). The home as a haven. To the outside world, and loss. Grief, change, and moving forward. Making one cup in the morning instead of two: it’s the little things and what they recall and in turn reveal. Scratching at a mark on a glass tabletop, wetting a finger to make sure the mark is gone. Pressing each corner of a napkin firmly as you fold it, as if the cloth would otherwise spring out of shape. “You can’t always be strong.... Sometimes you need other people to help you as well”. Two quiet, remarkable films about the personal journeys of Samia and Abla (in Adam), and the mother and daughter in Journey to a Mother’s Room, “towards things that are essential for them in their lives”. The comfort of a nap on the sofa. The warmth of a home knit. Dinner with an episode. Ping! A face illuminated by a screen. Ah, the tenderness of it all.

“One day, a young woman came knocking at our door looking for work.... My mum quickly understood that she wasn’t looking for a job, but as the woman was heavily pregnant my mother was worried about sending her away. At that time, it was illegal for a hospital to assist unwed women in giving birth, so my parents decided to take her in. I experienced how this woman was trying to suffocate her maternal instinct. She ignored her belly growing and tried to pretend that nothing was going on. The whole experience moved me very deeply.”
— Maryam Touzani, on the origins of her debut film, Adam

17th August:
Day 17
Film 39, Leftover Women (Hilla Medalia, Shosh Shlam)
Film 40, Jinpa (Pema Tseden)

Walking according to the length of our step. China and Tibet, today. Macedonia, Colombia, USA, Syria, Japan, Mauritius, UK, Russia, Venezuela, Greenland, France, Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Cambodia, Morocco, Iceland, Belgium, Ukraine, Palestine, Ireland, Chile, Sudan, Denmark, Peru, Afghanistan, Greece, Italy, Germany, Taiwan, Australia, our yesterdays. Turkey, tomorrow.

18th August:
Forty films so far, and four more to go before the curtain comes down on #MIFF2019, and the picture house becomes a bingo hall, a memory.

Day 18
Films 41, Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman)
Film 42, The Cordillera of Dreams (Patricio Guzmán)
Film 43, Noah Land (Cenk Ertürk)
(screened with the short film Butterflies (Yona Rozenkier))
Film 44, Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach)

Our #MIFF2019 may have ended with the anticipated succession of everyday blows in Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, but it ended on a promising note; forty-four films in a handful of days and we feel invigorated, ready to move into a period of real and energetic making. I close my eyes, and I can see movement; a series of frames, some moving quickly, others lingering. It is not unlike jet lag, which makes sense given all we’ve seen, and I love the toll the festival takes on my head, heart, and body. I love that it gives so much in return for stamina and guts. My body may be sore from making it hold a series of right angle positions, but this can be stretched to what works best in the coming days. Right now, we’re focusing on the impressions left. On the ‘fastrunningjoinedtogether’ poetry of a combine harvester auctioneer in Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana. The film began with agricultural machines and ended with a grave being filled with a trailer-load of soil; with an undertaker tossing a funeral wreath on the fresh mound as casually as the pig farmer marked his pigs with a crude stripe down the length of their spines. Oh, the mourning‪. Mourning for the soul of a country, mourning ‬that rolled into Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera of Dreams and his own cordillera (“little rope”) of memories and hope “that Chile [can] rediscover its childhood and its joy”. The archived and ongoing footage by Pablo Salas bears witness to Pinochet and in doing so reveals the wounds still open to be like the mountain range.

“In Chile, when the sun rises, it had to climb hills, walls and tops before reaching the last stone of the Cordillera. In my country, the Cordillera is everywhere. But for the Chilean citizens, it is an unknown territory. After going North for Nostalgia for the Light and South for The Pearl Button, I now feel ready to shoot this immense spine to explore its mysteries, powerful revelations of Chile’s past and present history.”
— Patricio Guzmán

Our MIFF2019 is anything but over.