It's Raining Film Festivals in Sydney - A Quick Guide and a couple of recommendations

Charles Chaplin and Oona O'Neill

Hope springs eternal in the movie trade and some people are still putting on a show directed at cognoscenti and specialist audiences.

A quick guide to what's happening:

Antenna Documentary Film Festival is currently screening and finishes next Saturday 12th. Various venues.

Two films to recommend among the more than 40 programs;

The Real Charlie Chaplin (Peter Middleton & James Spinney, UK/USA, 2021)

Ablaze

Ablaze (Alec Morgan & Tiriki Onus, Australia, 2021)

Alec Morgan,renowned documentarist and a many times contributor to the NFSA's Oral History collection, and Tiriki Onus (with a big assist from producer Tom Zubrycki and others) have assembled an extraordinary story about the life (and film-making career) of Bill Onus, a leader of Australia's First Nations people. Packed house at the first screening. One more to go on Saturday 12th February

Europa! Europa! is currently screening at the Randwick Ritz. Finishes on February 27. (Also in Melbourne)

Hit the link above to explore the 43 titles that will be screened.

Naked

The program includes a new 4K restoration by the BFI of Mike Leigh's searing Naked which won the Best Director and Best Actor prizes at Cannes in 1993. Also screening (once only) are a doco on the formidable British producer Jeremy Thomas The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, a re-edited version of Matteo Garrone's 2008 film Gomorrah You have already missed a feature documentary on Luis Bunuel.

Mardi Gras Film Festival starts on 17 February and runs to 3 March at various locations. Hard to work out the exact number of titles, probably well over fifty, and the festival also has online screenings which can be accessed from anywhere in Australia.

Distant Journey

Jewish Film Festival from 2 March to 3 April at the Randwick Ritz and also in Melbourne. Over seventy programs including shorts, docos and three nights of standup comedy. Among the highlights is Distant Journey directed by Alfred Radok in Czechoslovakia in 1949 which will have the benefit of an introduction by long time Film Alert contributor Barrie Pattison. Described as "One of the first films to confront the horrors of the Holocaust remains one of the most powerful. Suffused with the visceral dread of a waking nightmare, Distant Journey draws from director and Holocaust survivor Alfréd Radok’s own experiences to tell the story of a Czechoslovak Jewish family—including a young doctor and her gentile husband—whose lives are torn apart by the terrors of the Nazi occupation, leading them to a grim fight for survival in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Blending expressionistic cinematography with archival documentary footage to potent effect, this harrowing vision of human atrocity was banned in its home country for more than forty years, only to remerge as urgent and impactful as ever."

The Light Ahead

Also screening is The Light Ahead made in 1939 by the prolific Edgar G Ulmer. It is described thus: "Made on the eve of WWII, this 1939 Yiddish film classic by Edgar G. Ulmer—adapted from a Mendele Mokher Sforim tale—is a sweetly romantic part-comedy, part-satire. David Opatoshu and Helen Beverley, stars from New York’s Artef and Yiddish Art Theaters, are magnetising as two passionate but impoverished lovers who dream of a better life in Odessa. They want to get married, and they dream of a future that transcends their own limitations.

"Offering a meditation on hope, love, and the Jewish faith, The Light Ahead also reflects a painful awareness of the events that will soon overcome European Jewry".

Maigret

Then there is the big one, the biggest exhibition of new French Cinema outside France, an Australia-wide extravaganza the French Film Festival. Title numbers are a little down on previous years. There are only forty one films all told. Among the possible pleasures Gerard Depardieu as Maigret and a restored copy (possibly the same one which has screened quite frequently over the last couple of years at Sydney's Golden Age Cinema or maybe it is indeed a 2022 restoration) of Alain Delon as Highsmith's Tom Ripley in Plein Soleil/Purple Noon. In Sydney there are dozens of sessions of most of the films all over town in the Palace cinemas and the Cremorne Orpheum from 1 March to 6 April. Also playing in Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth Brisbane and Byron Bay.

Let's hope that the crowds venture out and by the time you have seen at least some of the more than 200 films and programs you get yourselves all prepped for restored cinema classics at Cinema Reborn at the Ritz from 27 April to 1 May.