At the close, a potoroo rootles for fungi
MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024
ACMI
THE CAPITOL
FORUM
HOYTS Melbourne Central
IMAX
KINO
Thursday 8th – Sunday 25th August, 2024
For when the memory needs a kickstart, a record of what was. Each day, we walked from home to theatre and back again. The beautiful 42-films-seen holiday.
Friday 9th August
Levan Akin, Crossing, 2024, ACMI 2
Yvonne Rainer, Lives of Performers, 1972, ACMI 2
Raven Jackson, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, 2023, IMAX
Today’s succession of small and glorious moments, on screen, and to and from, on the first day of MIFF.
Noticing how present the performers feel on the screen as they hold their still-frame pose, with only a telltale twitch of a muscle, flicker of an eye, and ripple of fabric across the body to give them away. This collection of 35 poses from ‘Lulu’, paused, felt like it could be happening live before my eyes, right then and there. Like Clara Bow reincarnated in 1972, transcendent Valda Setterfield, as Valda, and Merce Cunningham co, in Yvonne Rainer’s debut feature proved a rare treat to see on the big screen, following on beautifully from Levan Akin’s tale by the waters of the Bosphorus, which also involved two particularly joyous, brief spark, dance memory sequences, as we picked cucumbers from the neighbour’s garden, disappeared to connect in Istanbul. Elliptical time and rivers coursed into Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, in which no form is held forever, as no form ends or begins, it just changes form, passing through, as rain returns to the atmosphere or becomes groundwater or a river. The rich smell of earth after the rain, the thrum of insects, moments on the porch, a fine three-film start. And a brushtail possum on the walk home waiting for us to pass.
Saturday 10th August
Tsai Ming-liang, Abiding Nowhere, 2024, ACMI 2
Sally Aitken, Every Little Thing, 2023, IMAX
Day Two’s gathering of small and illuminated moments, on screen, and to and from MIFF.
A red-robed monk, positioned in a composition, walks through the scene, including the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, in delicious contrast to a handful of people arriving as the film begins to unfurl in the measured pace of each footfall. Tsai Ming-liang’s Abiding Nowhere, the tenth in his Walker series, is a beautiful meditation, and together with Sally Aitken’s Every Little Thing hummingbird rescue, rehabilitation, and release documentary, the reflective and the spark was a pairing we couldn’t refuse.
At a glance, the meditative pace of the former and the brilliant streak of the latter, a perfect, one slow, the other fast, pairing. Or so we thought, but who is to say how either a monk or a hummingbird experiences states and ways of being in the world? Who is to say that a mediative state of slowed-down walking is experienced as slow, and does slow even come into it, or that the fast-hum wing beats of a hummingbird are experienced as feeling fast?
Every Little Thing struck a particular chord as we watched Terry Masear care for tiny, amazing, full of gusto, full of spirit, multi-faceted hummingbirds like Cactus, Sugar Baby, Jimmy, and Wasabi from her home in Los Angeles. Many of our recent rescues have involved horrific injuries where the only kind outcome is for them to be rushed to the vets for euthanasia. Terry described, though in different phrasing, that she measures each case not by the final outcome but by the amount of love and compassion by which each individual was surrounded by.
Sunday 11th August
Nosrat Karimi, The Carriage Driver (Doroshkechi), 1971, ACMI 2
Shinji Somai, Moving (お引越し), 1993, Kino 2
Yvonne Rainer, Film About a Woman Who…, 1974, Kino 1
Bouncing about in a carriage, eating sunflower seeds from a paper bag, for the pre-revolutionary Iranian film The Carriage Driver; pulling up a chair at the triangle-shaped table, only to be floored by the final tender scenes, in Shinji Somai’s Moving; rewinding the clock to 1974 for Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman Who… and enjoying the silence and Edvard Grieg, with the “You could always have an ocean ending” ending for day three of MIFF. Eight films in, vacating one space in order to inhabit another, and sighting a ringtail in a tree on the walk homeward. Is that you, Fern? Two trees down from where we once rescued you, out the front of a Fernwood gym; the little noise you made suggests possibly. This tree, being slightly taller than the one we found you in, though, connects to the powerlines, so you can come, feast, and go. And feast you have; look at the nibbled top half! Take care, Fern, or friend of Fern.
Monday 12th August
Maja Tschumi, Immortals ( الخالدون.), 2024, ACMI 2
For day four, as one of us taught wraparound cover and dos-à-dos pamphlet stitch books (Artists’ Books at RMIT School of Art), the other navigated the aftermath of Iraq’s October 2019 protests with Milo, Avin, and Khalili (@immortals.doc), in ACMI’s cinema 2 once more, on the annual, if somewhat interrupted, MIFF holiday. Roll on, where you can, roll on.
Tuesday 13th August
Yoshimi Itazu, The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store, 2023, ACMI 1
Damon Gameau, Future Council, 2024, ACMI 1
Hala Elkoussy, East of Noon, 2024, ACMI 2
In a city without clocks, in an unspecified time, could be twenty years ago, could be 50 years from now. Film 12, on the fifth day of #MIFF2024, where every object can become a percussive form. The tap, tap, thwack of a rubber thong, worn on the hand, against the opening of a series of pipes of varying lengths. Dialling on a Bakelite phone. The hinged opening and snap-click-shut of a cassette recorder. The sounds machines make that describe their actions, from the letter C shape curling round to reach the 9, to the tape deck closing. Sounds that describe actions that often feel lacking in my smooth, largely digital world. Scratch that, perhaps there is still sound as my fingers tap at the keyboard on the screen, hinting at the mechanics of the backscreen, as I recall the strike of a typewriter’s keys and Abdo hearing music in everything around him. The chick in the hand. The oversized animal masks. The silhouetted figures in conversation behind the curtain appearing like puppets. A kiss behind an umbrella. The ping of a triangle. The sea. “Once upon a time, there were frightened people. They were so frightened that their imaginations fled”, says Galala, the keeper of stories. “I tell people stories to soothe them.”
Also seen, alongside Hala Elkoussy’s brilliant East of Noon, Yoshimi Itazu’s The Concierge animation, and @damon.gameau’s inspiring Future Council.
“Artists are some of the most important contributors to normalcy because they seem to be free. The film is about this problem, but I did not fall on it immediately. When I first wrote the character of Galala, who is the storyteller, she was all benevolent. She offers diversion by using personal history to entertain people. And then I faced myself and realized, it’s not all benevolent.”
— Hala Elkoussy
Wednesday 14th August
Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, Gaucho Gaucho, 2024, Forum
Michel Hazanavicius, The Most Precious of Cargoes, 2024, Forum
Agnieszka Holland, Green Border, 2023, Forum
Hello, old friend. Yesterday, a triple at the Forum, for ‘who are we? And where are we going?’ For Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s sublime silvered poetry, Gaucho Gaucho, where extended leg guards render the horses momentarily winged like Pegasus, as they flutter and shimmer, though of course, these horses already have their own kind of wings, wings we get a sense of when they ‘soar’; Michel Hazanavicius’s animated retelling of Jean-Claude Grumberg’s The Most Precious of Cargoes, in a Polish forest through which the trains to the camps carve their way through, and Agnieszka Holland’s devastating Green Border between Poland and Belarus. When asked ‘Why did you decide to make this film?’ she replied: “I decided to do it because it’s going on. It’s happening. It’s the situation which is on the Polish-Belarusian border, but which is on all borders of the rich world. It’s one of the most important issues of the contemporary world, migration and how we respond. We are changing Europe into some kind of fortress and we believe that we will reach security if we create walls around our safe world. But at the same time we see that we become susceptible to blackmail and provocation coming from outside dictators and regimes. We are forgetting the achievements in the second half of the twentieth century when we believe that crimes against humanity and nationalism and racism belong to the past, at least in Europe. I’m interested in the human side of that. The choices that people have to make. That’s why I decided to show the triple perspective—the refugees, but also the activists, local people, and the border guards who received the order to act in a way which is practically illegal. But they believe that they are serving their country.”
Thursday 15th August
Payal Kapadia, All We Imagine as Light, 2024, Forum
Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, No Other Land, 2024, documenting the forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta, Forum
17 films in, and 24 more to go, and we are enjoying walking in and out each day for our back to back sessions like the MIFF days of old, and using Instagram like we used to, even though it has changed. Instagram, that is, though it applies to both. Though it applies to all things.
Posting daily, once more, as an extension of our experience, and not concerning ourselves with the ads and promoted content that stacks either side of the memory bank. Remembering to use it how we want to: to have fun with it and share information, to converse, to document, to inform and to spark something, however small, in whatever form. But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves here; a forthcoming talk to RMIT School of Art students about our work, and, by continuation, how we built our site and use Instagram to engage is in our minds as we prepare. After which, of course, we’ll be heading to the dark embrace of the theatre once more. Returning to our annual film holiday. We’re not even halfway.
Friday 16th August
🎥 @melbfilmfest, Day eight (via Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson, NGV)
Juan Palacios, As the Tide Comes In (Før stormen), 2023, ACMI 1
Jeremy Workman, Secret Mall Apartment, 2024, ACMI 1
Miguel Gomes, Grand Tour, 2024, Kino 2
Motorcycles gliding to a Strauss waltz; a round ball of a panda swaying in a bamboo canopy; ceiling fans like individual leaves, tapping time to the music, by the light of the silvery moon; in a world where Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant don’t share the screen, to the clink of Singapore Sling while being fitted for a suit, harvesting waterlilies overlaps with the beguiling courtship dance of a rooster and hen conveyed through puppetry, and MIFF day eight offers forth another black and white gem. Preceded by the enchanting, but all too brief, spectrogram visualisations of bird calls in Mandø, and the eking out of a secret space in a shopping mall, complete with cinderblocks and a front door in Providence, in response to the gentrification of a place and the development of a mall over a river.
“… I think cinema makes too much effort to convince audiences that they’re seeing something of this world. But we’re not; we’re seeing the parallel world of cinema, with different laws. I hope it’s a world that puts us in a better condition to connect with the real world, with ourselves and other people, but it’s a different world and I want it to look like a different world. As I’ve said before, all of my films are remakes of The Wizard of Oz. That’s the basis of cinema. Dorothy goes from Kansas to the world of cinema, and you have to create some kind of relation between them, and this is my job in my films. Nowadays there’s an understandable desire to try to fix up the world in cinema, which I value, but I think it can be kind of impossible. You cannot fix the world with cinema. But you can open the minds of people. And then they can maybe try to fix up the world.”
— Miguel Gomes
Saturday 17th–Sunday 18th August
Jonathan Millet, Ghost Trail (Les Fantômes), 2024, Hoyts Melbourne Central
Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, 2024, Hoyts Melbourne Central
Mohammad Rasoulof, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, 2024, The Capitol
Constance Tsang, Blue Sun Palace, 2024, Forum
Matthew Rankin, Universal Language, 2024, ACMI 1
Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, My Favourite Cake (Keyke mahboobe man), The Capitol
Films 21 through 26, ten days in, under the skin. Taking us to Stuttgart, Paris, and Beirut with Hamid, a Syrian exile in Ghost Trail; and, in echo of the Grand Tour collaged across the British empire from Bangkok to Shanghai, with Molly sending telegrams to Edward, for Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, two decades thread together along the Yangtze River, now with Qiaoqiao sending texts to Bin, one character at a time, on an early mobile phone; before we arrive, by the skin of our teeth, in Tehran for the slow build detestation of Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
Sunday’s three films find with us chasing our tails, as the body tries to keep up, but once more the triptych delivers with themes of loss and tenderness, displacement and community, and a shared meal in a massage parlour in Queens in Blue Sun Palace. We take a bus ride with a turkey in a world where Tehran and Winnipeg, by way of Jacques Tati and beige-brick, right angles fuse, and end the night, with our last scheduled session at The Capitol for (the promise of) cake, graceful, joyful dancing with Mahin and Faramarz, and fixing the lighting in the courtyard garden. As ever, there have been many moments we’ve responded to, but the dancing, always, steals our hearts. Seeing what movement unlocks in their bodies.
“There are not many Iranian actresses who would be ready to perform without a hijab, to dance, and drink on screen. They’d be afraid to. But when Lily read the script, she came back to us and she said it was brilliant and she wanted to play the role. We told her it could have serious consequences for everyone involved, including her, but she said she was absolutely ready for it.“
— Behtash Sanaeeha
Monday 19th August
Klaudia Reynicke, Reinas, 2024, ACMI 2
Sunday to the peal of bells, Monday to the wood ducks calling from high in the palm trees on Spring. In the spirit of the nostalgia sparked by film 27, Reinas (here we are, Lima in the ‘90s), and the recent Secret Mall Apartment (late ‘90s to early 2000s, Rhode Island), scenes from the walk in alongside scenes from our long ago. 1995, second year of art school.
Tuesday 20th August
Tawfik Alzaidi, Norah, 2023, ACMI 1 (slide 4)
Nick Dwyer and Tu Neill, A Century in Sound (@acenturyinsound), Kino 1
(Also pictured, the sea as a musical subject, the cover of the 1905 first edition of Debussy’s La Mer published by A. Durand & Fils. Image courtesy of Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music.)
Sitting quietly in the Meikyoku Kissa Lion, a 100-year-old classical music café in Shibuya, listening to Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Bernstein conducting Beethoven. No cake, no talking, no photography neither. Just a wall of finely-honed speakers playing orchestral recordings, and calm.
Tuesday, and we have reached the days where ‘by this time next, it’ll all be over’ applies. Not that we’re placing too much emphasis on the grumble. From Saudi Arabia for a portrait and the extinguishing of light (Norah), to before the bubble burst (A Century in Sound), we’ve traveled far.
Wednesday 21st August
Hong Sang-soo, A Traveler’s Needs, 2024, Forum
Nora Fingscheidt, The Outrun, 2024, Forum
Bubbling along, enjoying the pastel colours peach, lemon, and sky, and the bright grass green of Isabelle Huppert‘s cardigan, tape wrapped around a pen nib, and the painted rooftop. A Traveler’s Needs reminded me of playing the recorder in primary school. I remember miming in class, because I hadn’t practiced and I didn’t want to find a wrong note. Or something like that. I remember playing the guitar, equally badly, too, and dragging my case behind me on the way to school. From the lovely repeat of conversations striking different notes, ‘how did it feel?’ I felt happy. Twinning beautifully with Nora Fingscheidt’s “selkie slipped from its skin”, The Outrun, to swim in the company of seals, to sight the dome of their head bobbing in the distance, and those big dark pools of eyes, to raise your head above the water and call out like a seal: what could be finer? In the elements, the ultimate balm. I felt peace. Films 30 and 31. The colour green, any green, and seal smitten.
Thursday 22nd August
Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, The Falling Sky (A queda do céu), 2024, ACMI 2, @acmionline
Gints Zilbalodis, Flow, 2024, ACMI 1
Films 32 and 33, holding up the sky in the heart of the Amazon with the Amazonian Yanomami people, and later, in the company of a wide-eyed black cat, a lemur, a gentle-nudging capybara, a Labrador, and a stork, finding the perfect vessel in which to sail into Thursday afternoon. From the miners “eating the earth”, and the Napë (white person/people) destroying the land-forest as they brutally, carelessly carve a road through the land, bringing with them epidemics, and destruction, to the landscape being submerged at pace in Flow (followed by a Q&A with Flow director Gints Zilbalodis and producer Matiss Kaza), another two-film day, paired beautifully, heavily. Where I felt a recognition of the intelligence of animals, others saw a religious meaning in the symbolism of the heavens and an ark (thanks to questions via Slido), and I am reminded once again of the importance of leaving open spaces for people to enter and feel their own way through. Animal intelligence is astonishing, and their beauty and agility, beyond breathtaking. The broad and rich intelligence of other species is so far from how our intelligence is formed that some of us humans, we can struggle to fathom it.
To me, Flow posits that our way of reckoning is not the only way. This, too, is felt in The Falling Sky, perhaps none more so than when Davi speaks direct to camera and says, “money is the only reason for which you really cry.”
Friday 23rd August
David Allen, Wilding, 2024, ACMI 1
Ellen Kuras, Lee, 2024, Forum
Nina Conti, Sunlight, 2024, ACMI 2
Seems only fitting that after seeing The Outrun with its elusive Corncrakes, once believed to turn into moorhens in the winter, to explain their absence, and which have since become scarce as they have been pushed to the margins, to the ‘unproductive’ spaces not worth taming, that one should appear in Findings, quoted below. It also seems fitting given today’s films started with Wilding, in which beavers (thanks to a license, several years in waiting) and storks return, and free-roaming herbivores and harvest mice too, to Knepp Estate, UK.
“The next morning I stroll along the beach; the tide has washed away the Land-Rover’s tracks. There’s an oil drum, an oystercatcher’s nest and a long dead dolphin. Behind the beach, on the huge sand dunes wild flowers are coming into bloom, bloody cranesbill, orchids like pink thumbs. From the end of the beach I follow a track inland until it passes the field where Sarah and I stood last night. Last night it seemed an unsettling place; now it’s green and benign. Crouched in the grass like intelligent stones are half a dozen brown hares, and in the middle stands a scarecrow with a bucket for a head. But there, from deep in the growth at the field’s far edge, comes that noise again: crex-crex, crex-crex, crex-crex.
By her house at the reserve, Sarah’s flattening the grass with a strimmer; she’s splattered with green gunk. She cuts the motor, invites me into the kitchen for coffee, and at a table piled with guides to flowers and bird reports she tells me she acquired her considerable knowledge of birds quickly, in only eight years, as an adult rather than as an obsessive adolescent. It was an extended visit to St Kilda which turned her interest. Knowing birds is like being fluent in a foreign language, or adept with a musical instrument.”
— ‘Crex-Crex’, from Findings by Kathleen Jamie
(Alongside a detail from the Feather-Book of Dionisio Minaggio, circa 1618, and made completely from feathers, in the McGill University Library.)
Saturday 24th August
Kazuhiro Soda, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine (Gokogu no Neko), 2024, Forum
Back From the Ink: Restored Animated Shorts, undertaken in collaboration with the Seth MacFarlane Foundation and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, Hoyts Melbourne Central
Golden Age of Iranian Animation, 1965–77, ACMI 2
From Nina Conti’s deeply cathartic road trip with a monkey still humming, the last MIFF Saturday delivered a raft of observations. Chess-playing elephants; a dancing tattoo come to life, and a cat becoming a shadow, becoming multiple, all in a bid to outfox a canine; wildflower trumpets; outlines of countries becoming animal shapes as the great world spins; solar flares from the sun taking humanistic form and spanking Humpty Dumpty for the error of their greedy ways; baby carrots tucked in by their Mum, the way yesterday’s sow covered her piglets under a duvet of moss and leaves; a river of tears turning to a pool of pearls; and all manner of brilliantly drawn, wildly dreamt, hilariously inventive, impossible to describe visuals to soak in under the skin. A glorious soup!
Including: Koko’s Tattoo (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1928), Little Nobody (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1935), The Little Stranger (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1936), Greedy Humpty Dumpty (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1936), Peeping Penguins (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1937), The Fresh Vegetable Mystery (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1939), So Does An Automobile (dir. Dave Fleischer, 1939), The Three Bears (dir. Mannie Davis, 1939) and Two-Gun Rusty (dir. George Pál, 1944).
Including: Malek Jamshid (dir. Nosrat Karimi, 1965), Grey City (dir. Farshid Mesghali, 1972), Malek Black Bird (dir. Morteza Momayez, 1973), Atal Matal (dir. Norrodin Zarrin-Kelk, 1974), Rook (dir. Ali Akbar Sadeghi, 1974), I Am the One Who (dir. Ali Akbar Sadeghi, 1974), The Mad, Mad, Mad World (dir. Norrodin Zarrin-Kelk, 1975), Malak Khorshid (dir. Ali Akbar Sadeghi, 1975) and Better, Comfier (dir. Farshid Mesghali, 1977).
Sunday 25th August
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Small Black Room, 1949, ACMI 2
Yôko Kuno, and Nobuhiro Yamashita, Ghost Cat Anzu, 2024, Hoyts Melbourne Central
Gisela Kaufmann and Joseph Nizeti, Fungi: Web of Life, 2023, IMAX
Last day of MIFF begins sober at the Hickory Tree nightclub (for the brilliantly funny and exquisite restoration of The Small Black Room with “Have a drink” Sammy, Susan, and a cat named Snowball), finds us cycling with a Ghost Cat, and finally, having said farewell to the quail-like forest spirits, deposits us, feet up, for a 3D-screening of the genius of mycelial networks and the awe-inspiring world of fungi. In the earth, growing a beautiful festival ending. An earlier Wildlife Victoria text for a rescue of a Long-nosed potoroo in the inner suburbs, which turned out to be a non-native rat, even makes an appearance in takayna / the Tarkine, in the circular nature of things.
A 3D potoroo rootles around for fungi. Perfection. MIFF over for another year, some 42 films later.
Verso of photo of Byron and Farrar: “BL9/57. “Next time you just decide to go home when we’re out together, I’d be obliged if you’d tell me”. After Sammy Rice, crippled scientific backroom worker, and his girl friend Susan have quarrelled in the Hickory Tree nightclub over his lack of ambition, she walks out and goes back to their flat.
THE SMALL BACK ROOM is written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Adapted from Nigel Balchin’s novel, starring David Farrar and Kathleen Byron. A production of The Archers for London Films.
KATHLEEN BYRON. DAVID FARRAR. (and Snowball)”
Here’s to next year, already, Snowball.
Image credit: Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s “documentary film about an ensemble of iconic gauchos living beyond the boundaries of the modern world”, Gaucho Gaucho, 2024.
