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AUSTRALIAN FILM-MAKERS AT CINEMA REBORN 2025
Cinema Reborn 2025 will present seven films by Australian film-makers. All will be presented in the presence of the directors or in the case of the films of the late Anna Kannava, the producer. All have been restored by the film-makers themselves working in conjunction with renowned Australian director and director of photography Ray Argall and his company Piccolo Films. For information about session times, bookings and credits CLICK HERE
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Alice Rohrwacher and Alfonso Cuarón |
After the magic realism and rural working-class exploitation of her third feature Happy as Lazzaro (2018), Alice Rohrwacher returned to the children and female adolescents of her first two features.
Le Pupille (2022), a 38-minute short produced by Alfonso Cuarón, set in a Catholic orphanage during World War Two was nominated for an Oscar in 2023.
The orphan girls in Le Pupille just wanna have fun, but are subjected to a religiously inspired disciplinary regime led by a particularly nasty nun (Alba Rohrwacher). She labels one girl as “wicked” and the softly spoken student responds by inspiring her classmates to rebel.
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Le Pupille |
It takes only a couple of minutes with Rohrwacher’s first feature Heavenly Bodies (2011) to realize her filmmaking talents were fully-formed from the very start of her career.
As was her view of Italian Catholicism, and she follows the 13-year-old Marta, living in rural poverty and suffering through her training for Communion – both as a supplicant raising her head for a blessing and as a prisoner transitioning from the wonders and innocence of her childhood to the expectations of her gender role in adult life.
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Heavenly Bodies |
The girls and female adolescents are replaced by the man-child Lazzaro in Happy as Lazzaro (2018). Perhaps ‘somewhere on the spectrum’, Lazzaro lives in an impoverished rural community of indentured labourers growing tobacco for down-at-heel, titled nobility. They are out of time and place, but discovered by an astonished carabinieri.
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Josh O'Connor, La Chimera |
It’s the same religious divinity, magical realism and ancient worlds that her girls and female adolescents reach out for in Heavenly Bodies, The Wonders and Le Pupille.
It’s Rohrwacher’s distinctive world where she focuses on her main characters as they transition from their wondrous childhoods into the rigors and disappointments of adult life.
My viewing partner describes Rohrwacher as “a visionary with a courageous sense of conviction, her films all delivered with a light-handed exultation”.
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David Hare's copy |
The film might be more approachable if you see part one but what we end up with is a brain frying succession of wide screen set piece displays with a few anime characters wandering through them. The plot finally settles into a Kirikou rip off.
It has the rebellious kid Ne Zha (Yanting Lü) who is half of the Chaos Pearl with Ao Bing (Mo Han), a more sedate character. After some gross-out bodily fluids comedy, suited to his tot aspect, we get down to what passes for a plot with the immortals battling monsters as represented by the Dragon King rulers of the Four Seas, setting their sea creatures against the Chan Sect’s bearded baby Wuliang from the Yu Zu Palace on a cloud, with the valiant human defenders of the Chentang Pass as victims of The Dragon Rulers of the Four Seas. The master pan is to convert opponents into immortality pearls in the mighty heavenly cauldron. Devices like the sky splitting severed hand are employed by faltering frozen parents and a chubby stone matron who ends up as rocks imprisoned in a metal cage, while hostile Badger Armies and (impressive) underwater dragons, which are normally found only in the Eastern region, get into the combat. Will our hero be able to withstand the ice thorns which have immobilised him as the true author of the celestial infamy is revealed?
Admirers of King Hu (Touch of Zen’s immortals on wavering bamboo stalks) and Li Han-hsiang (Love Etern’s derisive white outfit idlers) will recognise their influence. The panoramas of grotesque monsters from Asian traditional art and kiddie literature are impressive but constant barrages of them tend to have a numbing effect. The film just keeps on going long after the big screen impact of its great design and laboratory work has been absorbed. We end with a joke anachronistic routine embedded in the end titles Toon freaks and curious tinies are likely to enjoy it.