Streaming on Prime Video - Rod Bishop recommends GAZER (Ryan J. Sloan, USA, 2024)

Ariella Mastroianni, Ryan J Sloan

Ryan J. Sloan was working as an electrician when he shot Gazer, his first feature during breaks from his day job. 

It took two-and-a-half-years and was entirely financed by Ryan and the lead actress Ariella Mastroianni. They also share the screenplay credit. 

Described by Indiwire as “A truly independent film in every sense of the word”, this gritty 16mm thriller uses a neurologically challenged Frankie (Mastroianni) as the central character in a crime conspiracy set in the industrial decay of New Jersey.

Frankie suffers from deteriorating memory and time distortions caused by dyschronometria - hours may suddenly go by; recollections from the past are constantly changing or forgotten; perceptions of everyday life are always to be doubted; and nothing in the world is stable.

Frankie’s coping mechanism is an old Sony Walkman playing 30-minute tapes to constantly remind her to focus on, and grapple with, her fracturing reality.

Her husband has apparently suicided and her mother-in-law has custody of her young daughter. Frankie loses her job pumping petrol as she’s constantly listening to her tapes: “What do you see? Focus!”. And a new acquaintance Paige (Renee Gagner), who is escaping a domestically violent brother, has offered to pay Frankie $3000 to collect car keys from her old flat. 

But like Frankie’s constantly breaking reality, all with Paige is not as it seems. Frankie finds herself falling into a dangerous, paranoid trap; following and being followed; and realizing those around her are not who they seem.

The audience becomes as disturbed as Frankie. We are not just observers of her plight, but participants in her disarrayed world. Like her, as events unfold in this murder thriller, we are searching to understand her broken reality.

Dyschronometria is related to dementia and it’s the greatest strength of Gazer, alternating us through inabilities to remember; days that suddenly turn into night; lurching memories that can’t be trusted; and the distortions and uncertainties of understanding life.

Director Ryan J. Sloan has made an exemplary first feature here, greatly aided by Ariella Mastroianni’s mesmerizing and wholly convincing performance as Frankie. She literally holds the film together. And this film is always - and quite deliberately - threatening to fall apart.

Gazer often looks and feels like a 1980s psychological thriller, reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Following, with touches of Cronenberg’s body horror, and Lynch and De Palma paranoias.

Premiering last year in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, it seems odd it was bypassed for selection in Un Certain Regard, the Cannes showcase for best first and second features. 

At the Sydney Film Festival - Tom Ryan considers the films of Palme d'Or winner Jafar Panahi and his retrospective at the SFF - THE SPIRIT OF REBELLION & THE NOT-FILMS

Jafar Panahi

Editor's Note: After this post was published, Jafar Panahi's film It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d'Or  at Cannes. The film also screens at the Sydney Film Festival. The final para of Tom's piece below has been edited to reflect this.

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The 2025 Sydney Film Festival has programmed a welcome retrospective of the work of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, an artist who has always gone his own way against overwhelming odds. 

 

Regular festival goers will need no introduction to the work of Jafar Panahi. Others might, for his films rarely make it on to local screens or streaming services. Which is why this year’s Sydney Film Festival’s honouring of his continuing career is an event worth celebrating. 

 

The White Balloon

In his quiet way, the 64-year-old Iranian writer-director-editor (and, relatively recently, actor) has long exuded the spirit of rebellion. Following his studies at Tehran’s College of Cinema and TV, his career began with a few short documentaries made for TV and work as an assistant director for Abbas Kiarostami (on 1994’s Through the Olive Trees). Then came two remarkable neorealist-inclined features about children, Panahi citing the Italian neorealist movement, and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief (1948) in particular (“It is the most important film of my life”) as key influences. 

In line with De Sica’s film, and with the inclination of a number of his contemporaries’ work, both The White Balloon (1995, co-written by Kiarostami) and The Mirror (1997) are essentially stories of the street. Filtering everyday events through the eyes of a child, Panahi adopts a story-telling strategy which immediately, and classically, sets his youthful protagonists’ innocence in contrast to a world of brutal experience. 

 

For Panahi and his colleagues, it was a way of slipping social critiques past the constraints imposed by their government’s oppressive censorship policies. As the affable filmmaker told me over a dinner shared with his Farsi interpreter during his visit to the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2006, it was a case of direction through indirection. “In Iran, it’s always been difficult to make films that deal with the real circumstances of adults. But you can create situations and put words into the mouths of children that speak indirectly about the problems of their elders.” 

 

Unspoken was the implication that such an approach allowed him to argue to the authorities that he didn’t mean it like that. And he didn‘t need to add that such a method is also irresistible to audiences. Who wouldn’t empathise with lost and homeless children fending for themselves in unforgiving surroundings? Who wouldn’t discover, in their struggle with oppressive circumstances and their ability to adapt to them, a metaphor for humankind’s experience of the world? Or of life in Iran? 

 

The White Balloon was greeted enthusiastically both inside his homeland and beyond its borders. After winning the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995, it even became Iran’s official entry at the Oscars for the Best Foreign Language Film in the following year. Soon afterwards, though, the country’s rulers had second thoughts. They tried to get the nomination withdrawn, and, when that move was unsuccessful, prohibited Panahi’s travel to the US and forbade him from doing interviews with the American press.

 

The Circle

The battle lines were now clearly marked and Panahi’s career has effectively become a cat-and-mouse game with his government that has continued to the present day. By 2000, his social commentaries were no longer camouflaged and his third feature, The Circle, directly and brilliantly examines the plight of women in contemporary Iran. Revising the merry-go-round structure of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play, La Ronde (inadvertently, for Panahi says he was unfamiliar with it), the film moves from incident to incident and character to character as his female protagonists cross paths in the street. Most of them don’t know each other, but they’re linked by the situations in which they find themselves. Each has recently been released from prison and the suggestion is that their confinement was the result of their having challenged the carefully regulated rules of an oppressively patriarchal society.

 

“It was so difficult making The Circle,” Panahi recalled. “They (the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance) just rejected it without any explanation. It was humiliating. Nobody would ever tell me anything. The reason I eventually got to make it was that the independent Iranian press got behind me. But it took me nine months to get permission to make the film and then it was officially banned in Iran.” That ban remains in place, a fate that has befallen much of his subsequent work and he has long been, at least as far as officialdom is concerned, a persona non grata in Iran.

 

Further humiliation followed, although its source lay elsewhere. After the San Francisco Film Festival invited him to accept its Freedom of Expression Prize for The Circle, he’d flown direct from Hong Kong and was in transit at JFK airport in New York when it was made clear to him that he wasn’t welcome. Given his ongoing criticisms of the oppressive Iranian regime, it was impossible to miss the irony of the situation. 

 

After refusing customs officials’ demand that he be fingerprinted, he was arrested. “I showed them my invitation, but they threatened to put me in jail. They refused to allow me an interpreter or a phone-call. Then they chained me together with other women and men from different countries like prisoners from medieval times and refused me entry. It was a nightmare.” He was denied entry to the US and ended up back in Hong Kong.

 

Offside

But the affront only succeeded in adding fuel to the heroically irrepressible filmmaker’s fire. The two films that followed were again direct in their critiques of Iranian society. The engrossing Crimson Gold (2003) deals with an impoverished pizza man, a jewellery heist gone wrong and the trials of class division in Iran. And the simple but compelling Offside (2006) is a story inspired by his daughter about a group of young girls who’ve been denied entry to a World Cup-qualifying match in Tehran and who conjure their own quiet revolution. 

 

Following this, Panahi struggled to get projects off the ground while making very public his disapproval of the ruling regime. After Iran’s 2009 presidential election, he was a vocal supporter of the so-called “Green Movement”, protesting the disputed result that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Then, on March 1, 2010, he was arrested on charges of colluding to commit crimes against the Islamic Republic, leading to headlines around the world. 

 

This Is Not A Film

He was sentenced to six years in prison (subsequently commuted to house arrest) and banned from filmmaking or travelling outside the country for 20 years. After which began his involvement in a series of not-films, beginning with This Is Not A Film (2011), a mischievous masterpiece of allusion ruminating about what a film might be and who might be deemed responsible for its creation. International audiences gained access after it was smuggled out of Iran in a USB stick hidden inside a birthday cake.

 

Soon afterwards, along similar lines, came the cleverly reflexive Closed Curtain (2013), choreographing an interaction between Panahi himself and two other characters – a writer and a young woman – who might or might not be figments of his imagination. It was followed by Taxi (2015), in which Panahi plays a Tehran taxi driver whose passengers ponder their circumstances and (via Panahi’s niece playing one of them) the state of filmmaking in Iran. 

 

Then came 3 Faces (2018), a road movie which finds Panahi literally and metaphorically behind the steering-wheel again in a situation that, like his earlier work, draws attention to the place of women in Iranian society. And No Bears (2022), set in a village near the Turkish border and dealing with a filmmaker (Panahi once more) trying to find a way of telling a story about a couple’s efforts to escape Iran. Something which he has persistently declined to do. 

 

It Was Just An Accident 

Panahi’s travel ban was finally lifted in 2023 and he was at Cannes this year with his latest work, It Was Just an Accident (2025), which has just won the Palme d’Or there and is also screening in competition at the SFF.  But during the years since his initial arrest almost 15 years ago, his not-films have effectively served as a report card to the world that he’s not only alive and well, but that the fire inside still burns bright. They’re also evidence that, even if the style of his filmmaking has changed, his career has continued along the same path he laid out for himself at the start. By way of drawing our evening in 2006 to a close, he declared, “I always wanted to make films that matter.” And he has.

 

A key highlight of this year’s Sydney Film Festival, the complete retrospective of Jafar Panahi’s features screens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from June 7 – 15 

At the Randwick Ritz, Hawthorn Lido and Elsternwick Classic - Sculpting in Time: The Films of ANDREI TARKOVSKY

 

The Ritz, Lido and Classic Cinemas, supported by Cinema Reborn, are presenting a complete retrospective of the feature films of master filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (pictured above). These will be the first ever screenings in Australia to be devoted to a full career review of this master filmmaker. Tarkovsky’s work was previously at Cinema Reborn in 2022 when his masterpiece Mirror was presented in a superb 4K restoration.

 

The retrospective will begin at the Ritz Cinemas in Sydney on March 20 and Lido and Classic Cinemas in Melbourne on March 27, where Tarkovsky’s debut feature Ivan’s Childhood will be screened at 7pm on those dates. In Sydney there will be an introduction to the season at the Ivan’s Childhood screening by Sydney University film studies scholar Matilda Mroz and the main screening of The Sacrifice during the Cinema Reborn 2025 season will be preceded by an introduction by critic Janice Tong. In Melbourne, critics Grace Boschetti (Ivan’s Childhood) and David Heslin (The Sacrifice) will introduce those sessions at the Hawthorn Lido. The Sacrifice will be a part of the 2025 Cinema Reborn season at the Ritz on Thursday 1 May and at Lido on Thursday 8 May, and will  also screen at Classic Cinemas, Elsternwick on Thursday 8 May.

 

Full details of the Tarkovsky retrospective, with links to bookings at each of the cinemas, may be found at these  links.

 

The Hawthorn Lido

The Randwick Ritz

The Elsternwick Classic 

 

The autobiographical note published below was written by Cinema Reborn Foundation Committee member Rod Bishop and was first published in the 2022 Cinema Reborn catalogue when the festival screened Tarkovsky’s 1975 film Mirror. (Click on the link to read Rod's excellent and most comprehensive notes on the film and its restoration)

 

“My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had until then, never been given to me…Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream”.

 

-      Ingmar Bergman

 

Born in 1932 in Zavrazhye, 300 kms from Moscow, Andrei Tarkovsky’s father was the poet and translator Arseny Tarkovsky and his mother Maria Vishnyakova, a graduate of the Maxim GorkyLiterature Institute. He was only five-years-old when his father left the family, volunteering for the army during World War II and being awarded the Red Star. During the war, Andrei Tarkovsky moved to Moscow with his mother and sister where Maria worked as an editor and proofreader.

 

After high school, he studied Arabic at the Oriental Institute in Moscow, but dropped out to work as a prospector for the Academy of Science Institute for Non-Ferrous Metals and Gold, spending a year living in the Siberian taiga in the Krasnoyarsk Province.

 

He was accepted into the directing program at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), making several short films and at least one television docudrama. Collaborating on a script with fellow classmate Andrei Konchalovsky, The Steamroller and the Violin(1960) became his graduation film and won First Prize at the New York Student Film Festival in 1961.

 

His first feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), centred around an orphan who becomes a scout for theSoviet army during World War II, brought Tarkovsky to international attention, winning the Golden Lion at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. Problems with Soviet authorities and several different versions of his second featureAndrei Rublev (1966), a historical epic based around the Russian icon painter, meant the film did not appear at Cannes until 1969 where it won the FIPRESCI prize.Soviet authorities had insisted it be screened Out of Competition.

 

The near three-hour science fiction drama Solaris (1972), adapted from the novel by Stanislaw Lem and described as ‘a sci-fi masterpiece’ by Salman Rushdie won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury atthe 1972 Cannes Film Festival.

 

Mirror(1975) was not well liked by Soviet authorities and suffered severely limited distribution in the USSR in third-class cinemas and workers clubs. It was, however, heralded in the West and its reputation has continued to grow significantly over the past 45 years.

 

His last film in the Soviet Union was Stalker (1979), a philosophical and theological science fiction drama following three men journeying to a mysterious “Zone”. It won the Ecumenical Jury prize at Cannes.

 

Some sources report The First Day (1979),a script by Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky set during the reign of Peter the Great in 18^th Century Russia, was stopped half way through production when it was learnt the film differed from the script submitted to Soviet censors. Tarkovsky was reported to have destroyed most of what was filmed.

 

In Italy, he made the documentary Voyage in Time (1983) with Tonino Guerra and again, with Guerra, started production on Nostalghia (1983), a film set in Italy about a Russian writer who is stricken with homesickness while researching an ex-pat Russian composer.At Cannes, it won the Ecumenical and FIPRESCI prizes and shared a specially created prize ‘Grand Prix du cinema de creation’ with Robert Bresson (for L’argent).

 

In 1985, he was processed as a Soviet Defector in an Italian refugee camp although declaring: “I am not a Soviet dissident. I have no conflict with the Soviet Government…I would be unemployed [in the USSR].”

 

His last film was the spiritually apocalyptic The Sacrifice (1986) made in Sweden and winner of the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and the Ecumenical and FIPRESCI prizes at Cannes. He could not attend the festival to accept the awards and died of cancer on 29 December 1986.

At the Sydney Film Festival and soon in cinemas - Janice Tong's short take on ABOUT DRY GRASSES (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkiye/France/Germany, 2024)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

 

If you want to experience a film that is a slow but sure emotional assault that lasts for the best part of 3 hours and 15 mins then this is the film for you. This is not to say that Nuri Bilge Ceylan is not a master cineaste, it is just, for me at least, About Dry Grasses is a tremendously uneasy film to watch. What is fascinating with Ceylan’s eye, is that it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is that makes this an uncomfortable screening experience, sure, there is an undercurrent of violence throughout, despite the articulate composition, mundane bickering, consummate acting, and some brief moments of poetic beauty. Is it terrible to say that this film reminded me of violent rape scene in Gaspar Noé 2002 Irréversible – that you feel obliged to watch the scene because of its sympathetic camera angle (due to its position on the ground, it puts you on the same point of view of the victim) as the horror unfolds? I remember many people walking out of the French Film Festival screening of that film, and a small handful from this one.

 

The opening scene speaks of an immeasurably bleak snowfield, and one of the most beautiful scenes in the entire film: a long walk from the bus shows a man arriving back from holidays to start the winter term. He is Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), an art teacher at a local high school who returns begrudgingly to work. His hideout, the sports storeroom. Amongst the clutter of equipment it makes him seem like Q from a Bond story, where the things that he hoards are but toys for destruction. Though he’s been here many years, it seems he still lives a transient life, using the school and its provided accommodation to pass the time until he can move on – his dream is to go to Istanbul to teach at a larger school. This is the same for many other teachers, the school and this remote village in Eastern Anatolia is a space of purgatory until you move elsewhere. As Samet later tells the audience in a voiceover, there are only two seasons here, summer and winter, two extreme opposites, and just as the climes shapes the exterior: craggy mountains and its rustle of yellowing dry grasses in summer, having missed the grace of spring, it also moulds the behaviour and temperaments of its inhabitants. You become old without understanding the joy of being young.

 

Deniz Celiloglu

As the school term starts, it's no wonder that Samet laps up the affection from a young school girl, Sevim (Ece Bagci), a touch here, a gift there; they engage in a kind of mentor/protégé flirtation until a love letter written by Sevim is confiscated by another teacher. Although the narrative leads us to believe the letter was intended for another boy, Samet takes pride in thinking it was written for him and uses it to gain an upper hand in the game. Of course, all this soon turns sour, when Samet and his housemate Kenan (Musab Ekici), another teacher at the school, were accused of behavioural misconduct by two students, and you guessed it, Sevim is one of them. 

 

The fact that in this film Samet is not even an antihero – there’s little that is charming about him – makes it difficult to feel any sympathy towards him. He is juvenile in his behaviour towards his housemate, colleagues and potential girlfriend. The extravagant but effective move when Ceylan breaks the fourth wall by tracking Samet’s insecurity through the actual film studio corridors and sets, green screen, cameras, electrical cables and all, ahead of a potential sexual encounter, his conquest of Nuray (a beautifully wrought performance by Merve Dizdar, who deservingly won Best Actress in the 2023 Cannes Film Festival), was such a welcome break of tension for the audience…to acknowledge that, yes, we know, Samet is only a character in the film. 

 

Merve Dizdar

There is no doubt that Ceylan’s cinema is affecting, with long passages of time that invites his audience to fully submerge into the narrative, to be amongst his protagonists (whether we like them or not), he has the ability to hold us captive (not just captivated) in the very atmosphere of the film. His other films Winter Sleep (2014) and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), both previously shown at the SFF were more poetic aesthetically and from these films, we have come to know and love Ceylan for his slow cinema; where the idea of Bergson’s durée (or duration) can only be played out and experienced cinematically. I especially enjoy this lived time within a cinematographic image, and how it can take you out of yourself. Unlike any experiences in real life, you get to live this brighter and bigger second-life on screen. A few of the ‘photographs’, (Samet is an amateur photographer) are filled with this kind of filmic time – a frozen instance of a gaze that stares back at you, whilst the snow still falls, and the wind twists and wraps your hair about your face; but, for that moment, lays bare an existential connection with another person.

 

About Dry Grasses is a meticulously made film; the layering of artifice and meaning, misinterpretation and deceit, cruelty and conquests, not only makes us realise the complexity humans tend to weave in our relationships with each other. The knowledge that there is no letting go once you’ve sunk your teeth into another’s can all but tear apart what it has a hold of. And Ceylan’s eye is as unflinching as it is unsentimental against the daily struggles of the human condition.