On Leonardo Sciascia - Rod Bishop reviews A SICILIAN MAN: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul

A SICILIAN MAN: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul, by Caroline Moorehead, Chatto and Windus, 2026  

The great Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia dedicated most of his life to exposing the Mafia and the widespread corruption he saw in Italian institutions. 

Remarkably, he lived long enough to publish 14 books and copious essays, with many of his works adapted for the screen. These included 11 feature films and 7 feature length television programs.

Lifelong friends with Pasolini, there were also unrealized film collaborations with Roberto Rossellini, Sergio Leone and Michaelangelo Antonioni.

In this impressively researched biography, Caroline Moorehead gives a detailed account of the rise of the Mafia after WW2. She includes the scandalous friars at the Capuchin monastery in the central Sicilian town of Mazzarino. 

In 1956, shots were fired in the monastery and Brother Agrippino emerged wounded from his room, a victim of mistaken-friar-identity. A letter soon arrived threatening to destroy an entire monastery and kill all its friars unless two million lire was paid in ransom. 

A local landowner was then murdered in his Fiat 600 after ignoring dire warnings from an older friar during confession in church.

The local police uncovered:

“…a web of corruption and extortion, organized by friars during confession and carried out by Mafia enforcers, with local people obliged to hand over large sums of money to the monastery’s gardener. In the monastery itself, were found stashes of cash, guns and vast quantities of delicious food. The friars, who had taken vows of poverty, had set up bank accounts all over Sicily and were making loans at extortionate rates. They had become millionaires.”

A Mafia-run criminal covenant no less; the friars a microcosm of the Mafia’s re-emergence in Sicilian life after WW2. Kept under some control during Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship, the Mafia stayed underground until the end of the war. 

Moorehouse writes of the Allied invasion of Sicily; and Charles Poletti, a former governor of New York who was parachuted into Palermo and tasked with the preparations for rebuilding and restoring democracy in a liberated Sicily and the rest of Italy.

Despite Poletti’s fluency in Italian (including Sicilian and Neapolitan dialects) he had an interpreter and driver named Vito Genovese, who had been a Mafia Don in New York, but was now back in his Italian homeland with the Allied troops.

Genovese had donated $4 million to Mussolini’s fascist party, but switched sides with the Allied invasion and offered his services to the US Army.

He was a close friend - since childhood - with the notorious Mafia drug lord Lucky Luciano, a Sicilian regarded as the single most important figure in the creation of the American Mafia. 

Mafia boss Genovese, as an interpreter to Colonel Charles Poletti was able to offer him advice: who better to govern than the proven anti-fascists, the men who had been imprisoned as mafiosi by the Fascists in the late 1920s? 

The Mafia were subsequently appointed to government, mayoral and high administrative positions by the apparently politically naïve Allies, who couldn’t leave Sicily fast enough. 

“The Mafia was now back in business. The Allies had profoundly, disastrously, misunderstood the reality of Sicily…not surprisingly, the first thing the Mafia did was to organize a vast black market…and the Mafia grew very rich”. 

The Mafia black markets supplied 70% of Sicily’s food supply. Genovese established one of these black markets, and he with Poletti, are two significant figures in Francesco Rosi’s Lucky Luciano (1973), a crime drama that clearly places the blame for the rise of the Mafia after WW2 at the feet of the Americans. 

Vito Genovese can be seen posing in US army uniform in a photograph with the notorious black market bandit leader Salvatore Giuliano. Among those murdered by Giuliano’s bandit gang between the Allied invasion in 1943 and his death in1950, were 87 Carabinieri and 33 Polizia (see also Salvatore Giuliano, dir, Francesco Rosi, 1962).

 

Leonardo Sciascia

Leonardo Sciascia was born in the impoverished Sulphur mining town of Racalmuto (‘a dead village’) in 1921, with no electricity or water, and grew up with Mussolini in power. 

From an early age his view of a Sicily as corrupted by Fascists, the Mafia, the Catholic Church, the carabinieri, and later the Christian Democrats, was fully formed. He witnessed the Mafia spread all over Italy and by the late 1970s, his fame as an anti-Mafia author was known nationwide. Fellow author Gesualdo Bufalino said: “Sciascia became spokesman for the collective conscience of Italy.” 

He did more than any other writer to reveal and expose the Mafia and the corrupt politics endemic to Italy.  

Sciascia’s novels, stories and screenplays become notable additions to Italian cinema, and its growing sub-genre of Mafia gangster films. 

They include: To Each His Own aka We Still Kill the Old Way, dir. Elio Petri (1967); The Day of the Owl, aka Mafia and aka The Mafia Makes the Law, dir. Damiano Damiani (1968); A Matter of Conscience, dir. Giovanni Grimaldi (1970); Bronte, chronicle of a massacre, dir. Florestano Vancini (1972); Illustrious Corpses, dir. Francesco Rosi (1976); One Way or Another, dir. Elio Petri (1976); A Sold Life, dir. Aldo Florio (1976); The Moro Affair, dir. Giuseppe Ferrara (1986); Open Doors, dir. Gianni Amelio (1990); A Simple Story, dir. Emidio Greco (1991) and The Council of Egypt, dir. Emidio Greco (2002).

There were seven feature length films for television – The Man I Killed, Board Game, Western di cose Nostre, Grand Hotel des Palmes and remakes of The Day of the Owl, The Council of Egypt and To Each His Own.

Recently, a collection of writings on the cinema by Sciascia was published in Italian as Questo non è un racconto (This is not a story).

Included are 17 pages from 1972 by Sciascia titled Per Sergio Leone. It’s an unrealized treatment for a film on Italo-American hoodlums in prohibition-era New York City, and with recognizable similarities to Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

There are seven writer credits on the Leone film, including Harry Grey’s autobiographical novel The Hoods, but Sciascia is not included.

Although these 17 pages are not mentioned in A Sicilian Man, Caroline Moorehead refers to an acrimonious lunch in Palermo between Leone and Sciascia over a film collaboration. It seems Sciascia, abandoning lunch, left the table first with Leone following soon after.

Among other projects mentioned in Questo non è un racconto is a 62-page script for Rossellini’s Viva I’ltalia! later titled Garibaldi (1960), but without a credit for Sciascia. Also, a never realized project with Michelangelo Antonioni, Patire o morire (To Suffer or to Die).

Although quite different men, Sciascia was a long-term friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini and helped him to set up Officina, a new magazine in Bologna. Pasolini, who believed “the intellectual courage to tell the truth and political reality are incompatible in Italy”, told Sciascia that his book Todo Modo (One Way or Another) was the best metaphor he had ever read for thirty years of Christian Democrat rule and Mafiosi power.

The two men saw themselves as fighting side by side against the Christian Democrats, and the spread of corruption and Mafia power. They also mourned the lost dialects and the peasant worlds of their youth. After Pasolini’s murder, Sciascia said: “Now he is no longer there, I realise that I have to speak louder.”

Sciascia wasn’t necessarily enamored by the cinema: “The truth of literature and the fiction of the cinema work on two untranslatable planes.” He did praise Francesco Rosi’s adaptation of Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri excellenti) and thought it penetrated the “agitated labyrinth of our daily existence”. In that film, magistrates, judges, police and reformers are gunned down by a vengeful Mafia. Sciascia felt Rosi had kept faith with his view of venal leaders and discredited institutions.

But he suffered through his friend Pasolini’s final film Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom: “It’s terrible, terrible…one should never make such despairing films.” 

The Current French Cinema (2) - Tom Ryan reviews JEAN VALJEAN (Éric Besnard, 2025) and COLOURS OF TIME (Cedric Klapisch, 2024)

If 2026’s local offerings – via the French Film Festival and general release (current and forthcoming) – are any indication, the cinema of France is in good health. An earlier post by Tom reviewing two other new French films, The Richest Woman in the World (Thierry Klifa, 2025) and The Stranger (François Ozon, 2025), can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE

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Éric Besnard

Jean Valjean (2025, Éric Besnard, 99 minutes, currently screening)

Writer-director Éric Besnard’s affecting and stylistically bold Jean Valjean is probably best described as a prequel to the numerous adaptations of Les Misérables that have variously graced or plagued the world’s screens and stages over the best part of a century. Drawing on only the first two books of Victor Hugo’s famous novel (1), it begins soon after its title character (played by Bernard regular Grégory Gadebois) has been released from prison after serving a lengthy sentence.  

From the first time we see him, it’s as if he’s been cursed by his existence, a lumbering, threatening bear of a man merging into the light from a horrible nightmare and still in a state of shock. When he arrives after dark in the small town of Digne, in the south of France, nobody wants to have anything to do with him. Until he finds himself at the local bishop’s presbytery door. 

Grégory Gadebois as Jean Valjean

Although his housekeeper (Alexandra Lamy) is immediately distrustful and hostile, the bishop (Bernard Campan) welcomes the social outcast as a fellow traveller who’s stumbled on to the wrong side of the tracks and is in danger. Meanwhile, the bishop’s ailing sister (Isabelle Carré) looks on with a mixture of admiration for her brother’s fearless generosity and concern for what might follow. 

Largely unfolding in the house’s shadowy interiors, the visual gloom evocatively relieved only by flickering candlelight, Jean Valjean is beautifully shot in CinemaScope by veteran cinematographer Laurent Dailland. Honouring its source, the film’s style is realist in spirit if not in style, Besnard’s account of a lost soul on the road to recovery persuasively portraying the bishop’s capacity for compassion as a force capable of saving the human race from itself.

(1)    Part of the inspiration for the character of Les Misérables’ protagonist Jean Valjean was the life of Eugène François Vidocq (1775 – 1857). A rogue and former convict who ended up on the other side of the law running a detective agency, Vidocq was part of Victor Hugo’s social circle. He died five years before the author’s famous novel first appeared in 1862. 

But long before then, in 1829, with the help of some writer friends, he’d published his (heavily romanticised) memoirs, which, like Les Misérables, have inspired several screen and stage adaptations. They include A Scandal in Paris (1945), directed by Douglas Sirk, who described it to interviewer Stephen Harvey in 1978 as “my best film”, and starring George Sanders as the consummate gentleman con artist. 

Cedric Klapisch

La venue de l’avenir / Colours of Time (2024, Cedric Klapisch, 126 minutes, opens July 23)

This is another of Cedric Klapisch’s accomplished films about people from different backgrounds being thrown together by circumstance and becoming partners in an adventure that guides them towards a new understanding of how the world works and their places in it. This time, though, it’s more like a fairytale that sweeps us into a realm where the past sweetly kisses the present, those who just don’t get it are readily sidelined, and the dreamers deservedly triumph in the end.

The set-up is straightforward, intertwining two amiably sentimental coming-of-age journeys. One, set in the present day, takes four cousins from Paris to Normandy to unshutter the home of an ancestor in anticipation of the place being torn down to make room for a shopping-mall car park. The other, set in the 1890s, the era of la Belle Époque that gave rise to Impressionism, takes that ancestor, Adèle (Suzanne Lindon), from Normandy to Paris in search of her mother. 

The cousins have only just learned of each other’s existence and have little in common. But a genial meet-and-greet during their train trip quickly breaks the ice. To all-round amusement, Seb (Abraham Wapler) explains that he creates “digital content”; Celine (Julia Piaton) is an engineer in the transport industry, forever on her mobile; Abdel (Zinedine Soualem, a Klapisch regular) is a French middle-school teacher; and Guy (Vincent Macaigne) is a beekeeper and union activist. And soon after they step inside their destination, a veritable museum of their ancestry, they find that they’re of a like mind about what’s to be done with Adèle’s cottage. 

Odette (Sara Giraudeau), Adele (Suzanne Lindon)

Whereas they travel by train, the countryside zipping past virtually unnoticed through the window alongside them, Adèle undertakes her journey first by horse and carriage and then by riverboat along the Seine, immersed in the glorious countryside of Van Gogh and Renoir flowers and riverside greenery. En route, she meets two young men from Le Havre, Lucien (Vassili Schneider), a photographer, and Anatole (Paul Kircher), a painter, with whom she hesitantly but quickly bonds.

A genuine sense of wonder accompanies the cousins’ dawning recognition of the secrets Adèle’s belongings hold to where they’ve come from and who they are. As their investigations and imaginations lead them across the threshold between now and then – in one scene literally and amusingly, under the influence of the hallucinogenic ayahuasca – the past comes alive for them, highlighting its connections and differences.  

And the film’s time-shifts do likewise for us as the characters walk the same streets and landscapes, cross the same bridges, ponder the same sights and visit the same places. Just as the singer Seb films in the present day (Claire Pommet) muses musically by the Seine about how Paris is filled with “the murmurs of other lives”, a friend of Lucien’s (Angèle Garnier) in the 1890s atop a Montmartre stairway waxes excitedly about the electrified nocturnal glow of L’avenue de l’opera as “the avenue of the future”.

 

Klapisch clearly had a lot of fun planning and executing all of this, working with longtime co-writer Santiago Amigorena and providing his now-regular cinematographer Alexis Kavyrchine with plenty of scope to make use of his painterly eye. The end result (whose original French title translates as “The Arrival of the Future”) is utterly irresistible.

 

At CINEMA REBORN - David Heslin's introduction to the Melbourne screening of THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME (Kira Muratova, USSR, 1989)

 Editor's Note: This is the fourth transcript of an introduction to a program in the Cinema Reborn 2026 season. Previous introductions published by Margot Nash on the Australian Social Realism program,  CJ Johnson on One Hour with You  and Barrie Pattison on The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul can be found if you click on the author's names.

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Kira Muratova

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes of The Asthenic Syndrome  that “From beginning to end, this movie comes at you like a tidal wave.” If that sounds like it could be either an exhilarating or rather unpleasant experience, I hope I can provide a little context here to help you swim through this brilliant but very unconventional film. 

The best place to start might be to say something about its director, Kira Muratova. Born in 1934 to Romanian parents in an area now within the borders of Moldova, she began making films in the early 1960s with her husband, Aleksandr Muratov, before launching a solo directorial career that would span nearly 50 years. Much of that time was spent in Odesa, and specifically the Odesa Film Studio, which had been famous for producing the early works of Alexander Dovzhenko, among other pioneering Ukrainian filmmakers. 

By 1989, Muratova had already been making feature films for two decades, but she was mostly unknown abroad thanks in part to the suppression of her early films – particularly her 1971 masterpiece The Long Farewell, (Cinema Reborn, 2022) which was banned for its failure to adhere to the dictates of social realism. Like many iconoclastic Eastern European directors of the time, her career throughout the 1970s and early 1980s existed in tension with authorities. She spent years on end unable to make films, and when she did, the interventions were often intolerable; indeed, her 1983 film Among Grey Stones received such a butchered final cut that she refused to be credited. 

That all changed with glasnost; keen to atone for the sins of their predecessors, a newly appointed film commission rushed to revive her work. Her first two features, Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell, were finally allowed to be screened at festivals abroad across 1987 and 1988, where they received major awards, and The Asthenic Syndrome was fast-tracked into production. But her troubles with the censors weren’t over: The Asthenic Syndrome would go on to receive the honour of being the only Soviet-produced film to be banned during glasnost, having been suppressed for six months due to Muratova’s refusal to remove the profanity in a scene on a train at the very end of the film. After the film was screened at festivals abroad to acclaim, the Soviet censors relented and finally released it without cuts in April 1990.

But it’s hard to imagine that this could have been their only misgiving about the film. The Asthenic Syndrome is an extraordinary satirical portrait of life during the last spasms of the Soviet Union; what it depicts is no less than a society and individuals within it in a state of collapse. Basic amenities don’t work; day-to-day interactions are guided by haphazard, meaningless aggression; aspirational slogans in the classroom are met with indifference. It’s not for nothing that Adam Curtis gave the subtitle TraumaZone to his recent documentary series about this period. Those who lived through these years in the USSR and its successor states – in which scarcity prevailed, institutions crumbled and organised crime was rife – know all too well that that is no exaggeration.

Even in the somewhat heightened, darkly comical version of that reality that The Asthenic Syndrome presents, there is an aspect of documentary. Thus you have some of the film’s stranger excursions, such as a scene in which four women go to look for a lost dog at a pound; we’re subsequently treated to a rather harrowing montage of dogs crowded together in squalid cells that seems to step outside of the film, even ending in an on-screen quotation as if we’d just watched an RSPCA ad. For Muratova, a vegetarian, this sequence indicts her society as a whole; if the most vulnerable are treated this way, what hope is there for humans? But the goal here isn’t didactic; indeed, Muratova approvingly cited Tolstoy for revealing, in her words, “the naivety of the intelligentsia who believe that culture and art can transform the world”. In contrast, Muratova says, “I’m not out to re-educate; I aim only to reflect.”

There’s a lot of bleakness in those reflections, but also a great deal of beauty. Muratova often uses the music of Schubert as a lyrical counterpoint here; and there’s a particularly lovely sequence with a slightly out-of-tune rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” that I think sums up the film’s melancholic humour.

The Asthenic Syndrome has quite an unusual structure: in a sense, it’s two films in one. The first, which goes for about forty minutes, follows middle-aged doctor Natasha, played by Olga Antonova, whose husband has just died, through the streets of Odesa in black-and-white; in the second, in colour, it’s revealed that the first was a film-within-the-film that a schoolteacher, Nikolai, played by co-writer Sergei Popov, has been sleeping through in a cinema. Contrary to what some might assume, Popov was primarily responsible for devising Natasha’s story, whereas Muratova claimed to identify most closely with the character of Nikolai.

Both of these characters have their own struggles: Natasha, in her grief, lashes out at everyone within arm’s reach; Nikolai, on the other hand, a sensitive intellectual who fancies himself a writer, is narcoleptic, and when awake shuffles through life in a detached manner. Both seem to be suffering in their own way from the syndrome of the title: asthenia, or a weakness that renders them unable to function properly. But this is clearly an infirmity shared by everything and everyone that surrounds them, and there is little hope for recovery.

Jane Taubman, whose 2005 monograph on Muratova is still one of the key English-language studies of her work, says of The Asthenic Syndrome that “Muratova’s triumph is in making apocalypse palpable.” So, with that, I’d like to welcome you all to the end of the world – or the end of a world, with the caveat that all empires in decline eventually come to resemble one another.

At CINEMA REBORN - Margot Nash's introduction to the Sydney screening of the Australian Social Realism program.

 Cinema Reborn: Australian Social Realism: Three Shorts (1977- 1983) 

My name is Margot Nash. A big thank you to Cinema Reborn for asking me to introduce this program. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the unceded land we meet on today, the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. 

Mary Callaghan

When Wall Street crashed in 1929, the world plunged into what is now known as the Great Depression.  In Australia, working people suffered mass unemployment and poverty, but the reality of their stories was rarely recorded on screen. The Hollywood behemoth was taking over film exhibition and distribution in this country, shutting Australian filmmakers out, (but that’s another story) and Australian cinemas were dominated by escapist feel good movies, meant to cheer people up. It was before television and newsreels played in the cinemas on a constant loop, with news from Australia and around the world as well as ‘human interest’ stories, which did not include the tough stories of working-class life. 

 

Social Realism emerged as an international art movement, during this time depicting the lives of the poor and marginalized. United by a belief in the power of art to reflect reality, and raise awareness of social issues, it was an anti-war and anti-fascist movement that included film, theatre, photography, painting and literature.  In Australia, Sydney’s New Theatre emerged in 1932 from the Sydney Workers Art Club under the slogan ’Art As a Weapon’. 

 

Ray Argall

Later, the Melbourne Realist Film Group in the 40s and the Sydney Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit in the 50s documented working-class lives and their struggles for social justice. John Hughes’ 2006 documentary The Archive Project tells the story of the Realist Film Group, and some of you will have seen some of the Waterside Workers Film Unit films, which I introduced at Cinema Reborn in 2022. Both groups were closely connected with the New Theatre.

 

The most famous Waterside Workers film was The Hungry Miles. Made in 1955 it was about the struggle on the waterfront against the unfair work practices of the shipowners during the Great Depression. Without newsreel archival footage to draw on, the unit staged re-enactments. Today, it is this vivid footage that is often used as archival film of the Depression. Even though it was filmed in the 1950s using wharfie non-actors, many of whom had lived through the Depression.

 

The Australian film renaissance in the 1970s opened up possibilities for local filmmakers to explore Australian stories. Many focussed on colonial foundation stories, or what has been described as the ‘bonnet’ dramas. However, social realism remained a developing historical thread with feature dramas like Ken Hannam’s Sunday too Far Away, about the 1956 shearers strike, and John Duigan’s Mouth to Mouth about homeless working-class kids.

 

In the early 1980s, the Art and Working Life movement in both Sydney and Melbourne carried on the social realist tradition, across genres, in an attempt to bridge the gap between professional artists and the labour movement.

 

David Hay

The three films you will see today – Ray Argall’s 1983 Julie, Julie..., Dave Hay and Martha Ansara’s 1977 Me and Daphne and Mary Callaghan’s 1982 Greetings from Wollongong carry on this tradition. Theywere all filmed in existing workplaces and homes using mainly non-actors, thus also drawing on the legacy of Neorealism, which emerged during World War 2 with Rossellini’s Rome Open City, filmed in 1945 on the streets and in the houses of war-torn Rome, using actors like Anna Magnani alongside non-actors.

 

Me and Daphne

All three films explore the reality of working-class women’s work in the late 70s and early 80s. The dead-end, low-paid, repetitive factory jobs, often in isolated rural areas, the desire for social justice and the need to speak out, but also the desire for ‘something more’. For pleasure, for experience, or even just time to rest and reflect.

 

The women you will meet in these stories all want ‘something more’ and their gritty social realist narratives can also be contextualised within the 1970s women’s liberation movement, which told women they not only had the right to speak up and fight for their rights, but they could do anything they wanted to, if they put their mind to it.

 

Martha Ansara, who produced and filmed Me and Daphne, fought tooth and nail to get into the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) to learn the camera, eventually pretending she wanted to be a director, so she could get access to the camera department, which, at that time, was solely a male domain.

 

Greetings from Wollongong

Before directing Greetings from Wollongong, the late Mary Callaghan had directed a short student film called Image Plus about the unreal and unattainable images of women in the media. Callaghan brought this analysis, along with her flair as a visual artist, to Greetings from Wollongong which follows a group of young unemployed kids who all need to find work to survive, but who also desire pleasure, and fun, in a bleak industrial town that has little to offer them. 

 

When we meet the main character in Ray Argall’s short film Julie, Julie..., she is cruising on her beloved motorbike, alone and free, on the highway heading for Melbourne from Broken Hill, looking for ‘something more’, when her plans are interrupted and her life changes. Again, the actors are predominantly non-actors and the locations reflect the reality of Julie’s choices. 

 

Of the three films, Greetings from Wollongong was the only one to receive funding from the then Australian Film Commission’s Creative Development Branch and Women’s Film Fund. It also had support from local businesses, unions and regional organisations and Mary produced a set of screen-printed postcards to raise money for the film.

 

Julie, Julie...

Julie, Julie... was made by the filmmakers on spec as a cinema short. The cinema chains, at the time, were talking about screening shorts before features, so they filmed it on Super 16mm in order to blow it up 35mm to this end. Unfortunately, this never happened, but they kept going. Ray, who had been making music videos and working for the ABC, had his own equipment and, working with a small independent crew. He and his co-workers financed it themselves and paid award wages. 

 

Me and Daphne has a more complex provenance which I don’t have time to do full justice to today, but I will try.  It was made at AFTRS ostensibly as a training film for students. The legendary John Flaus, was running the Open program at the time, and wanted a film to teach students about ‘visual thinking’. Why choose a close up as opposed to a wide shot?  Why use voice over instead of sync sound etc. Shot in a chicken factory in NSW, the film was directed by Dave Hay and shot by Martha Ansara.  

 

Dave had been to film school at UCLA and, inspired by social realist films he had studied there, decided to film in a local factory and use actors next to non-actors.  Martha brought a short story called Confessions of a Cannery Worker by Lillian Rosser. It was about a mother and daughter, forced work in a pineapple cannery in Brisbane to pay their electricity bill. They decided to use this story ‘as the basis for the plot to be illustrated in the proposed training film’. Then they set out to make two films. One for training film school students and the other to show the conditions migrant women workers had to endure, and their struggle for better conditions. 

 

The images of migrant women on the production line in the chicken factory in Me and Daphne are unforgettable and the film itself became something of a cause célèbre because, after it was screened to the Head of the Film School, Jerzy Toeplitz and the Director of the Training School, Storry Walton, Toeplitz pulled it out of circulation and ordered it to be recut. 

 

Fearing it would be destroyed, our fearless young filmmakers decided they would ‘retrieve’ the original negatives from the laboratory and put the film back together. So, Dave forged Toeplitz’s signature, picked up the original negative from the lab (in broad daylight), had it secretly edited and neg matched in Melbourne, and sent out of the country for prints to be made.

 

While Dave was dodging Commonwealth Police surveillance, Martha mounted a campaign to raise funds to finish the film but, just as it was set to screen at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op in Darlinghurst, the Co-op received a court injunction from AFTRS barring the screening. Not to be deterred the filmmakers famously screened it outside the Co-op, on a wall in St Peters Lane, where, luckily, Martha met a fancy high-profile lawyer. 

 

AFTRS took them to the Supreme Court and all the film materials were seized. Dave and Martha’s decided to argue that, as the creative originators of the film, they should hold joint copyright with the school, and therefore have an equal say in the film’s exhibition and distribution. Unfortunately, Dave got sick and Martha had to front up alone, but after much ado, while the case was lost (after the judge found out about the St Peters Lane screening), the filmmakers did eventually get all the footage back.

 

This screening is the first public screening of Me and Daphne since that time, although the film was distributed covertly for years by the late Julie Wiggins.

Martha is very much alive and here if you want to ask her questions later, Martha please stand up. Warrior woman. Not to be messed with.

(Clap clap).

 

Ray Argall is also here. Another warrior, whose tireless work to restore and value the work of Australian independent filmmakers is also legendary. He restored all three films in this program, along with Greg Fitzgerald who did the restoration work on the sound.

 

Please stand up Ray and Greg.     (Clap clap)  

I hope you enjoy the films. You can see the Chips Mackinolty screen-printed poster (above) for the Filmmakers Co - op screening of Me and Daphne, alongside Mary Callaghan’s fluorescent screen-printed postcards for Greetings for Wollongong in the glass case just outside the door when you leave the cinema.

 

Thank you very much

 

Margot Nash 10 May 2026

The Current French Cinema - Tom Ryan reviews THE RICHEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD (Thierry Klifa, 2025) & THE STRANGER (François Ozon, 2025)

La femme la plus riche du monde /The Richest Woman in the World (2025, Thierry Klifa, 121 minutes)

Thierry Klifa

Former film journalist Thierry Klifa’s film is, an opening caption announces, “loosely inspired” by the 2010 Bettencourt affair. So, first, some background. Billionaire Liliane Bettencourt (who died in 2017) was the wife of a high-ranking French cabinet minister. He’d formerly been a member of a pro-Nazi group supported by her father, from whom she inherited the L'Oréal empire in 1957. Thirty years on, she met a photographer (for the magazine, Egoïste), befriended him and became his benefactor, their relationship eventually opening the door to a scandal that embroiled not only members of her family but also the Sarkozy government. (1)

The details of that case are more or less consistent with what happens in the film, although the characters’ names have been changed not so much to protect the innocent, presumably, as to ensure that the filmmakers don’t end up in court. Klifa puts it slightly differently: “Rather than illustrate the story we already know,” he recently told The New York Times. “I thought I would show something we didn’t know, represent a milieu that has almost never been represented in France: the milieu of the grande bourgeoisie, of the ultrarich, of very chic families who slip under the radar and who are never spoken about – especially in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was no social media and everything wasn’t all over the press.”

In the film, co-written by Klifa, first with Cédric Anger and then Jacques Fieschi, Bettencourt becomes Marianne Farrère (played by Isabelle Huppert), the head of Windler Paris, a woman lost in an airless world where everything is in its proper place and money is the everyday currency of intimate exchange. 

Guy, her cabinet-minister husband (André Marcon), is solid and supportive but staid, his values in sharp contrast those of flamboyant photographer Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte), who works for a magazine that’s now (hilariously) Selfish and who likes to light up every room he enters. Although he can be entertaining – Marianne is immediately drawn to him – he is most certainly not to be trusted. 

Lafitte exuberantly embraces the part, as he has similar roles in recent times (The Party’s Over! / Classe Moyenne, Class Reunion / T’as pas change and the TV series, Class Act / Tapie). “There’s nothing more sinister than good taste,” his Fantin reflects, loudly, as he’s introduced to the conservative claustrophobia of Marianne’s existence, going on to draw her out of the prison of her wealth that she’d thought was her fortress against the world.

 

Isabelle Huppert 

Alongside them, their presences gradually increasing in significance, are Marianne’s stepdaughter, Frédérique (Marina Foïs), her husband, Jean-Marc (Mathieu Demy, son of Jacques and Agnes Varda), and Marianne’s butler, Jérôme (Raphaël Personnaz). Initially, Fantin charms Frédérique by telling her she’d look very pretty without her glasses – she removes them immediately and we never see her wearing them again – but she’s soon suspicious of his motives and bewildered by his bravado. “Have you always been like this?” she asks. “We’re happier when we dare,” he replies past a provocatively raised eyebrow.  

He immediately sums up Jean-Marc as a man who’s doomed to mediocrity because he doesn’t. On the other hand, his radar remains on full alert, and with good reason, as soon as he encounters Jérôme, who, like him, is gay. And, embodying the spirit of the proverbial cat among the pigeons, he knows everyone’s secrets (except for Jérôme’s) and how to exploit them. 

Klifa’s film doesn’t sidestep the dark aspects of his story – specifically its connections to what took place in France during the years of the German Occupation – and the film maintains its distance from all the characters. But he still manages to make us care: “I never tried to make these characters likeable, or to force any emotional attachment,” he says. “What mattered was staying as close as possible to their inner truth.  They are both monstrous and deeply childlike. If emotion does emerge, it’s through their vulnerabilities, their solitude.”  

     (1) The affair is the subject of the three-part 2023 documentary, The Billionaire, the Boyfriend and the Butler, currently available on Netflix.

L'Étranger/The Stranger (2025, François Ozon, 122 minutes)

François Ozon

The Stranger is François Ozon’s 25th feature, co-written with regular collaborator Philippe Piazzo and based on Albert Camus’ famous novel, first published in 1942. Both book and film are set in Algiers in 1938, a time of turmoil marked by increasing hostility to French oppression. With a population of around seven million, six million of whom were Muslim, it had been a colony for more than a century with independence still more than two decades away. (1)

Shot in black and white with Morocco playing Algiers, Ozon’s film – like Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation (2) – remains relatively faithful to Camus’ original with its simple plot, its enigmatic protagonist and narrator, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), and its sketch of a society trying to make sense of a man who’s simply not interested in its rules. Its chief difference lies in how it draws to the surface the social and political circumstances in which Meursault finds himself. “I felt I was pulling on a thread that Camus had woven without developing,” Ozon says.

The film opens with a French cinema newsreel from the 1930s, effectively an advertisement designed to attract Europeans to view Algeria as a desirable place to visit, totally erasing its troubled history. A precursor perhaps to the current American president’s visualisation of Gaza as a tourist destination! 

Benjamin Voisin

In the next sequence, Meursault is introduced, a shadowy figure finding himself sharing a large detention cell with a group of Arab men. Asked why he’s there, he announces, “I killed an Arab,” before the film plunges into the past that has led to his incarceration and that has determined his fate.

Like Camus’ Meursault, Ozon’s remains a mystery, a metaphorical blank page who tempts us to try to inscribe motives on him for his mindset only to thwart us at every turn. The lack of emotion in Voisin’s performance is compelling; he could easily be an actor in a Bresson film. As Ozon’s studied compositions watch Meursault either in close-up or wide-shots shared by others, Voisin’s responses give nothing away. And Meursault is watching too, an impassive observer as the world passes him by, perhaps wondering about what he’s seeing, perhaps not. Several times during the course of the film, he says he’s bored by it all. (3)

For the actor, the demands of the role made for an unexpected challenge. “Playing absence is extremely draining,” Voisin says. “Doing almost nothing, saying almost nothing, is intensely physical! At the end of each day of shooting, I was utterly exhausted.

One effect of this air of detachment attached to Meursault is to shift our attention on to what’s happening around him. When news arrives of his mother’s death, Meursault travels to the countryside to visit the aged-care home where her body awaits burial. As he indifferently goes through the motions of what’s required, what emerges in scene after scene are the rituals ruling what’s going on: the expectation that he’ll want to see her body for the last time (“What’s the point?” he asks), the vigil as he sits overnight with her coffin, the other residents at the home filing in to say their farewells, the horse and carriage that serve as a hearse, the procession to the church, the mass, his black armband… 

He’s a person with desires – and they’re manifested in his relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder, who has the demeanour of a young Juliette Binoche) – but his disengagement is palpable, and that makes the world around him a key issue for the film. The signs in the cinema foyer forbidding entry to “indigenes”; his neighbour (Pierre Lottin) brutalising his Arab mistress; Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), whose brother Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) is the man Meursault subsequently kills; the traces of racism that infect interactions in the street; the courtroom rituals; the propositions put forward there about his crime. Was it premeditated? Was it in self-defence? Was it chance?

The film invites us to decode all of this, and to see it in a wider context, social and historical. In a scene that doesn’t happen in the novel (the only one from which Meursault is excluded as a witness), Marie and Djemila come face-to-face during a break in the trial, Djemila’s protests about how her brother has been forgotten by the trial leading to Marie’s attempt to defend Meursault’s place in the scheme of things (“His home is here”), which produces a scoff from Djemila that says everything that needs to be said. Neither Djemila nor Moussa have names in Camus’ novel.

Featuring an edgy score by West African Arab composer Fatima Al-Qadiri (and including The Cure’s 1980 song “Killing of an Arab” over the closing credits), Ozon’s film is gripping, politically astute and, finally, like its source, deeply unsettling.

 (1) Algeria was where Camus was born (in 1913) and where he lived until 1942, when he moved to Paris, eventually joing the Resistance

(2)   Ozon on Visconti’s adaptation: “I obviously watched Visconti’s 1967 film. In one of his interviews, he confessed that he hadn’t been able to make the film he wanted, that he had been frustrated, that he wasn’t happy with it, and that his initial choice for Meursault was not Mastroianni, but Delon, which was honestly a much better idea. The perfect incarnation of Meursault in the 1960s was indeed the young Delon, who featured in Le Samouraï, or, even better, the Delon from Antonioni’s L’eclisse, who, in my opinion, would have been the ideal Italian director to adapt The Stranger.”

      (3) Ozon on Meursault: “I identified with him completely! To me, he’s a filmmaker! He looks around him; he sees characters, actors. The others are acting their lives. But not him, he refuses to play along. He never lies. Life is a stage play from which he is absent. However, he sees the beauty of the world, and its violence too. And when he observes this violence, he doesn’t intervene. He remains a spectator. Until the very end, when he finally rebels and becomes the actor of his own life!”