SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL - Persecution is complex - IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2025) + THE SECRET AGENT (Kleber Mendonca Filho, Brazil, 2025)

These two films were among a number of blockbuster successes at the Sydney Film Festival. One measure of such success occurs when the Dress Circle is opened up and filled with a thousand bodies, many of them in the rear seats peering at a screen the size of a postage stamp from seats installed when the nation was a whole lot thinner than it is now. That happened with both.

Some 150 programs, a third of the 448 on offer, sold out  and the SFF management reported it's attendance was up by 11% to more than 150,000 admissions, claimed by CEO Frances Wallace as  "the highest selling edition in its 72-year history. The 150,000 attendees represented a 11% increase on 2024."  Though what to make of the claim previously made in  2019 that that  "event was the most highly attended Sydney Film Festival to date: attendances at screenings, events and talks were up by 10.5% in 2019 to 188,000." Maybe it's a BC (Before Covid)/AC reset.

Both films came to the festival accompanied by their directors, fresh from award-laden appearances at Cannes where Jafar Panahi's film It Was Just An Accident won the Palme d'Or and Kleber Mendonca Filho won the Best Director Award and the FIPRESCI Prize awarded by a Jury presided over by our own CJ Johnson. 

Panahi's film, as with everything he makes, shows no fear. It's story of a victim of official state torture accidentally coming across the man who may or may not have been his torturer is an an astonishing blend of comedy and up to the minute politics via a series of increasingly absurd twists of circumstance. And you get the sense of underlying, seemingly casually displayed, bravery by not only Panahi but also his actors and technicians in making a film which lays out the oppressiveness of the regime and the dangers its citizens still face each day.

Wagner Moura, opening sequence of The Secret Agent

Cant say the same about The Secret Agent which sets itself back in 1977 when Brazil was a fascist police state. The film takes over  two and a half hours chiefly to tell the story of one dissident among a broad canvas of the fearful, the disgruntled and the lumbering police state and its assassins. It may be that there are still lessons and warnings for Brazilians, indeed for all of us in an age of Trump, ICE, El Salvador concentration camps, mass deportations, arrests of political opponents and, even closer to home, whistleblowers being jailed and police forces everywhere being given ever greater resources, one of the few election promises made routinely and one of the few honoured to the letter. 

I digress...The Secret Agent is a safer story and the director is never likely to go to jail for telling it at such length and with such languour, a trope demonstrated from the very start in a slow boil opening sequence involving a VW beetle pulling in for petrol, a dead body lying in the sun and a stray police car whose inhabitants, rather than investigating the body threaten and try to shakedown the VW driver. All that takes over 18 minutes and finally the film gets going...

Sydney Film Festival - Another happy family film - BIRTHRIGHT (Zoe Pepper, Australia, 2025)

Maria Angelico, Travis Jeffery, Birthright

I wish I had written down one phrase uttered by director Zoe Pepper in her introductory remarks to the screening of her film Birthright at the Sydney Film Festival. Suddenly  a remark was made that sought to elevate the film to a level where it's comedy and drama have ultra-significance for Australian society as we endure the twin nation-destroying crises of cost of living and housing unaffordability inflicted on us by the do-nothing showboating Albanese government, crises unlikely to be solved in anyone's lifetime by Albo and his crew of chancers, opportunists and ne'er do wells who have stolen our politics and have embarked on a journey designed to inflict endless pain on us all for the next generation or even beyond. Right...got that...

But I didn't remember the words and so I'll have to let it go...

Not too long into Birthright I kept thinking this film is picking up on some familiar tropes. The laugh out loud but frequently violent satires of Miike Takashi came to mind, but as the film upped towards some quite unexpected violence, it seemed to me that the method, if not the subject, was previously seen in the various iterations of the TV series of Fargo.

For an hour or so it is a funny film. A late thirties couple, she heavily pregnant, are booted from their flat and land themselves back with his parents in what seems to be, if not luxurious, very comfortable accommodation. The young couple cant afford a place of their own. He's just lost his job as well. (How the  father worked to buy the house is the subject of one bitter exchange between father and son. "It's not like that anymore"!) The parents feel very put upon and quite unwelcoming and even plot to get rid of the 'kids'. That's foiled by one very funny plot development....and there's one genuinely brilliant bit of humour involving sex and a leather jacket.

Then, on their wedding anniversary night, the parents decide they aren't going to take it anymore and the film goes down a very dark and violent path. Not quite as funny.... 

The crowd loved this debut feature out of the west. It played in Tribeca and you can read what attracted the international attention here. It has a distributor and with a bit of luck it should be more widely seen. 

At the Sydney Film Festival - Happy family movies - WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2025) & MIRRORS NO. 3 (Christian Petzold, German, 2025)

Ha Song-guk, Kang So-yi, What Does That Nature Say To You

The last Hong Sang-soo film I saw was titled in water. Note no caps. The film was screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 2023 but I saw it last year at the Reflet Medicis cinema in Paris, along with a handful of others at a morning session. Hong has made over thirty features and I guess over the years I may have seen about half of them, most often as a result of Tony Rayns selecting them when he programmed the wonderful Dragons and Tigers section of the Vancouver Film Festival. 

In water is a film which requires some advance knowledge before sitting down to watch it. I didn’t have any of that advance knowledge beyond Hong’s name and thus it was that after watching it for maybe forty minutes I’d had enough and got up and left. If my French had been up to the task I would have complained to the management that the film was out of focus throughout. Close and medium shots had some clarity. Long shots were a blur. When I mentioned this to a Korean film aficionado later I was somewhat taken aback to be told that the out of focus visuals were in fact the director’s intention. Wikipedia filled in this lack of information when it advised that “Hong opted to shoot In Water mostly out of focus to reflect the main character’s creative block.” Right. How brilliant. That wasn't the explanation given by my Korean film aficionado but well...

The SFF program notes for Hong’s latest film What Does That Nature Say to You didn’t mention any similar such hurdles, describing the film as “the latest witty and incisive drama by Korean indie auteur Hong Sang Soo (in water, SFF 2023) Berlin Competition , 2025)” and “especially illuminating and rich in charming humour”. Not quite what I saw but interesting enough once you get over Hong’s slow boil of story line which leads to the fateful evening when a thirty-ish woman brings home her boyfriend of three years to finally meet her parents and the parents seemingly  effortlessly get him into a drunken shouting mood. It dissipates next day when he leaves and there is what a  critic might call an enigmatic ending involving a flat tyre.

Paula Beer, Mirrors No. 3

Christian Petzold has been a festival favourite for a decade and a half. He’s also big into enigma and never more so than in his Mirrors No.3. The program notes tell us something entirely unclear from the film itself. “Named for the third movement of a suite for solo piano composed by Maurice Ravel, Mirrors No.3 “(or as it appears on the screen, Miroirs No. 3, but wait for it) “is a beguiling exploration of loss, healing and how to confront the past to move forward, told in Petzold’s signature elegant style.” Analyse that. Actually I thought for a long stretch the film was somewhat Highsmithian – a chance introduction of two characters, one clings to the other and slowly we work out why the other is prepared to let this happen. Then in one outburst an unknown truth is revealed. But here no one gets murdered and some of the participants are happier than when the film began…and we have some musical elements to contend with. I assume, because I didn’t notice it in the credits, that the final piano recital  is the titular suite by Ravel…

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.

****************************

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 Sydney Film Festival (Part 3) – Janice Tong's Short Take on ALL SHALL BE WELL (從今以後, Ray Yeung, Hong Kong/China (2024)

 

Lin-lin Wu, Patra Au, All Shall Be Well

 

All Shall Be Well is a beautifully made small film from Hong Kong that at its heart looks at the idea of what makes a modern family. From its first frames – an early morning routine of two familiar lovers in their 60s, their silent movements, habitual, tender, every day. There’s no need for dialogue or any introduction to these two characters. 

 

It’s impossible not to be captivated by the understated performances of Patra Au as Auntie Angie and her life companion, Pat (Lin-Lin Wu). The two women are clearly still in love with each other, so many poignant moments of them sitting next to each other at their dresser, preparing their breakfast (this was the loveliest – like a well-rehearsed pas de deux), or walking down the street to the market together. Theirs was a companionable life that has been bedded down like the course of a winding river. No doubt they had weathered storms in earlier times, although family members now seem to be supportive. I’m sure that ‘coming out’ in Hong Kong for their generation would have been extremely difficult.

 

When Pat dies all of a sudden, and as she didn’t leave a will, Angie’s world is literally torn to shreds. The much needed time for grieving your other half recedes to the background as the infighting begins. What kind of funeral should be performed? According to whose wishes, now that Pat is no longer alive to speak for herself? Where should she be buried? What happens to the apartment that was Pat and Angie’s co-residence? What was their relationship in the eyes of their family, or the law? 

Patra Au

Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing is that Angie was constantly referred to as ‘her good friend’ or ‘they were like sisters’, as the family insists on keeping their relationship hidden, like a dirty family secret, when dealing with the authorities or lawyers or the Buddhist priest. More than that, they began to deny their relationship had ever existed. And in the end, the family, being blood relatives, gets the final say. The loophole for same sex couples in Hong Kong does not recognise this type of relationship if one has passed on without a will. 

 

The Cantonese title of the film, 從今以後, is a well-known turn of phrase, a Chinese idiom that translates literally as ‘from now on’, but it’s meaning is really about ‘starting again’ once we’ve come to a realisation of some past mistake or action that needs to be corrected. Perhaps the English title All Shall Be Well may be read as its adjoining couplet; that from now on, (having realised our mistakes) we’re able to amend our wrongs, that all shall be well. If you get this phrase next time in a fortune cookie, read into it this profound message.

 

We were lucky to have the director, Ray Yeung, present at the screening, where he talked about the impetus that drove him to make the film and some of his filmic choices. Although the film won the Best Queer Film at the Berlin Volksbühne, he said it was extremely difficult to source funding to make the film, "I was told that no one wants to see two lesbians over 60 in a relationship", especially because in Hong Kong, “old gay couples are a minority within a minority”.

 

For me personally, there's pure joy in hearing my mother tongue, Cantonese, spoken on the big screen (it has been a while for me with new Hong Kong films), the nature of the spoken language has many colloquialisms that only native speakers would be able to pick up on its nuances. Especially nostalgic moments were from some of the early scenes where the family and children all got together to play games: red light, green light; and marble checkers – I still have my set from Hong Kong, brought over to Australia all those years ago. A lovely reminder of my old home town.

 

All Shall Be Well has carved out a small oasis for itself in this fast-paced city – the film is slow and poignant, filled with moments of pause and meditation, as though it's asking the city to also take time out in order to reflect on this story. The pared-back colour palette and generally monotonal treatment in the film adds to its consideredness: of loss, grief and rejection. With this film, Ray Yeung has raised an important question for our millennia: who has the right to speak for, and make decisions for the one who is no longer there? 

 

The 71st Sydney Film Festival screened from 5 to 16 June 2024.

At the Sydney Film Festival and now The Current Cinema - Janice Tong's short take on KINDS OF KINDNESS (Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/UK/USA, 2024)

 

Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘triptych fable’ as it is described in its press kit is all but a well funded (you can tell by the way it’s filmed and it’s mise en scène) farcical romp that lacks the kind of abstract ‘weirdness’ (another oft used word associated with the film) Lynchian cinephiles so love. It matters little that it’s broken out into 3 stories, the 2 hour 45 mins screening time was at best, unpleasant, but overall, on the far side of inducing tedious boredom.

 

Perhaps..  as the second film I watched on the same night, immediately following Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 3 hours 17 mins, About Dry Grasses meant I had little tolerance for anything less-than-brilliant held true. 

 

With Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos has moved away from his earlier masterpieces like Dogtooth (2009) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017. They offered us a kind of darkly tragic Euripidic-Sophoclean take on life. 

Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe

Instead, Lanthimos is following his Poor Things (2023) trajectory of installing us in a mind-numbing and meaningless simulacrum — a sort of dystopian Disneyland (as if the real thing is not frightening enough). Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe reunite here, three times, across three stories, each playing different characters, but are all simulacra of their previous selves – this was intended on the part of the director and his co-writer, Ehimis Filippou. Filippou and Lanthimos wanted the three stories and their characters to inhabit the same universe, but they are not woven as interconnecting narratives, in fact, the three stories are only linked by the initial that is common to all three titles: the R.M.F of The Death of R.M.F; R.M.F. is Flying and R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich. No, we don’t get to find out what R.M.F. stands for, but we do see these initials embroidered on a shirt of a man in the first story.

 

In The Death of R.M.F, Jesse Plemons, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival this year for this role, plays a middle aged corporate type, whose sole occupation in life is to keep his boss (Dafoe) happy…sure he is not all that obedient because he takes small liberties by acting against instructions (like wearing his own choice of clothes for the day) or lying about what he’s has or hasn’t done. But this wasn’t a problem until his position was ousted by a more obedient pawn (Stone). Whereas in R.M.F. is Flying, Plemons is a dedicated husband whose wife (Stone), a marine biologist who returns home from being lost at sea for many months. But he soon suspects that she is not who she says she is. Lastly, in R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich, Plemons is paired with Stone as a kind of bounty hunter in search of a particular person – a surviving twin who has the miraculous ability to heal. Folks, if you’re wanting to see the dance scene in the motel parking lot (b, you’ll have to wait until the last 10 mins of the film. Or, just YouTube it.

 

 

 

Perhaps a good way to describe the film is as an alt-fiction piece, where the whole world has become overrun by cults, and these three stories are just examples of power and the desire of people wanting to control other people (kind of like a magnified version of social media); the smacker is the other’s blind willingness to be controlled. Boy, the lengths in which a person would go to in order to submit to the other’s power is excruciatingly banal. Sadly, I cannot see this film as a play on anything psychological like the Stockholm Syndrome or attuned to a philosophical idea like that of ‘the bull is nothing without its matador’ (Cixous), it's ‘weirdness’ is really just plain sad and not satire…In the session I attended, there was a lot of laughter from the audience, and usually at unexpected moments in the film. I guess they were a mix of uncomfortable sniggers and genuine chortles of disbelief. I doubt if anyone laughed in the same way at a screening of Mulholland Drive.

 

All in all, I found this to be a difficult film to like even though it’s well made. 

 

The 71st Sydney Film Festival screened from 5 to16 June 2024.

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.

Sydney Film Festival - Rod Bishop finds some absorbing, impressive film-making - ABOUT DRY GRASSES (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey France Germany 2023)

 Of late, Nuri Bilge Ceylan has stretched the running times of his Chekhovian-influenced Turkish tales. This one is 197 mins, The Wild Pear Tree (2018) is 188 minutes and Winter Sleep (2014) is 196 minutes.

Admirers of his work will instantly recognize the Turkish writer-director’s figures in Anatolian landscapes, this time opening with a shot of Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) trudging through deep snow to the village of Incesu. He is a misanthropic art teacher grimly waiting to complete the last of his four years in this outpost so he can move to Istanbul. 

Samet is irritated by his students and not very encouraging, at one point telling them none will become artists and that most will end up growing potatoes and sugar beets to feed the wealthy.

But he does have a favourite, the 14-year-old Sevim (Ece Bağci) with whom he surreptitiously flirts and buys her presents. Sevim writes him a love letter that falls into the hands of one of his faculty colleagues. Scandal awaits.

Samet is also hiding his competitive drive from his teacher-colleague and housemate Kenan (Musab Ekici). Together they visit another teacher Nuray (Merve Dizdar) in a near-by town and Samet jealously watches as Kenan and Nuray’s mutual attraction grows. He decides, at a later date, to court and seduce Nuray. 

 

Sevin (Ece Bagci)

Subsequently, in a painstaking scene of emotional violence, he confesses all to the stricken Kenan. For his part, Kenan does not realize the secretive pleasure Semet is feeling from this conquest, but Ceylan makes damned sure his audience does.

Does this sound like enough plot for a film that is exactly the same length as Doctor Zhivago, the 1965 David Lean epic that managed to deal with the Russian Civil War, the Russian Revolution and the First World War in three hours and sixteen minutes (with an Interval)?

As he has done in the past, Ceylan stretches his plot to fit the running time, methodically teasing, exploring and dissecting his characters. 

In one lengthy exchange between Samet and Nuray, who has lost a leg in a terrorist bombing in Ankara, the political and the personal are chewed over at length – Nuray’s social commitment up against Samet’s misanthropic helplessness. In this exchange Nuray askes Samet what kind of person he is and Samet responds with: “Shall I tell you the truth or try to make you happy?”. Truth, Ceylan is trying to tell us, comes from and is defined by the narrator.

This exchange is followed by a breaking of the 4^th wall, a startling cinematic flourish from Ceylan before he proceeds into his final act and the eventual appearance of the dry grasses. It’s absorbing, impressive filmmaking.  

 

AT THE SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL - Adrienne McKibbins recommends the mini-retrospective of the biggest star of all time - AMITABH BACHCHAN

Amitahb Bachchan

“I am as common as the common man and as special as him too” -- Amitabh Bachchan 

How is it possible to sum up Amitabh Bachchan? arguably the most recognised and important figure in Hindi cinema Amitabh Bachchan. Bachchan is an actor, film producer, television host, and briefly a politician. His career has lasted over five decades. During that time, Bachchan has appeared in over 200 films. An icon of the Hindi film industry, he has worked with virtually every major director, and important female star, and has more books and articles written about him than any other figure in Indian cinema.

At 80 years of age, he has three films in progress for 2023-2024.

It is actually impossible to underestimate his significance to world cinema. In 1999 a BBC online poll voted Bachchan the all-time greatest star of stage or screen, winning by a substantial margin over Sir Laurence Olivier in second place, followed by Sir Alec Guinness in third. 

Deewaar (The Wall,1975) 

Despite his world-wide fame, his versatility as an actor, and superb spoken English, he has not ventured beyond Indian cinema to the global mainstream, (despite numerous offers) except for a small role in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.

Of course, in a career of such longevity there have been upheavals, controversies, digressions and flops.  

Bachchan, has reinvented his persona a number of times to suit the changing trends and styles of filmmaking. He has taken a tilt at politics as well as a successful stab at being a TV host via Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Hindi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire), which saw him acquire the following of a new and younger audience.

Kaala Patthar (Black Stone, 1979)

Bachchan’s screen career started in 1969 as a voice narrator in Mrinal Sen's film Bhuvan Shome. Utilising his impressively deep and wide baritone vocal range, he has narrated many films, including Satyajit Ray's 1977 film Shatranj Ke Khiladi. and Gowariker’s 2001 Oscar nominated film Lagaan . 

As an on-screen presence Bachchan popularity soared in the early seventies with a series of films that earned him the designation of ‘Indian cinema’s “angry young man”. His fast rise to fame from 1972 to 1974 catapulted him to the heights of superstardom having made 44 feature films between 1969 and 1976, his impact being measured by the fact that at any time during his period at least four films of his films were playing simultaneously in Indian cinemas,

In 1992 Bachchan took an extended break from the Hindi film industry and did not appear on screen for five years. The nineties were a difficult time for him with failed business ventures and paucity of successful films.

Amar Akbar Anthony (1977)

In 2000 he returned to the screen starring with Shah Rukh Khan in Mohabbetien produced by Yash Chopra and directed by the producer’s son Aditya Chopra. Mohabbetien was a huge triumph, both critically and importantly, commercially.  This ushered in a new period of success for the actor, as he adopted a new, more paternalistic persona that returned him to prominence.

Although you could not call four films a comprehnsive retrospective — it’s a drop in the ocean — the films selected for screening at this year’s Sydney Film Festival all represent Bachchan at the height of his popularity. Deewaar (The Wall,1975) and Kaala Patthar (Black Stone, 1979) are by his favourite director Yash Chopra and were scripted by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, the writers who invented and shaped Bachchan’s “angry young man persona” from the nineteen seventies.

Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), a Hindi classic that paired Bachchan with two other big stars of the seventies, Rishi Kapoor, and Vinod Khanna, demonstrated Bachchan’s impeccable comic timing, a talent that was probably not exploited enough during his long career. Then there is the iconic Don (1978), nowadays considered a cult classic in which Bachchan plays a double role, a familiar narrative device in Hindi cinema.

Also written by Khan and Akhtar, Don is such an iconic film that it has been remade in various languages, including Tamil, Telegu, and Punjabi. The most famous version is the 2006 Don made by Javed Akhter’s son Farhan Akhtar (actor/producer/director).  The script was adapted and updated by Farhan and Javed Akhtar, and the lead (double) role was played by Shah Rukh Khan and inspired a successful sequel. 

Don (1978)

This snapshot mini-season of Bachchan gems offers a look at the superstar in sone of his finest early roles. These films should encourage those not so familiar with his work to further explore (and appreciate) a phenomenal Indian icon’s filmic oeuvre.

For more information about venues session times and bookings CLICK HERE FOR THE SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL BACHCHAN PAGE