French Film Festival Preview

Carlos/Le Chacal

Olivier Assayas‘ (Summer Hours) Carlos was originally shot and cut as a five and a half hours TV miniseries (which won Best Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television at the Globe Globes 2010), it has since been cut down to a two and a half hour film, and this is the version screening at the FFF. Looking at the exploits of infamous Venezuelan terrorist/revolutionary Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, this film paints a very negative picture of the man who is better known as Carlos the Jackal (Edgar Ramirez,The Bourne Ultimatum).

At the beginning of the film we see a very confident young Carlos travel to Beirut to join The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1970. We follow Carlos up until his 1994 capture and arrest in Khartoum, Sudan. Throughout this time although Carlos’ alliances chop and change as he is involved in European communism, Arab nationalism and Islamist causes, his revolutionary persona grows to iconic proportions as he become the poster-boy for international terrorism through the 70s and 80s.

Early on in the film during a heated debate Carlos is told by another Venezuelan revolutionary “That’s what you want-to be admired.”. Shown as an egotist and a chauvinist, Carlos’ commitment to ‘the cause’ is perfectly highlighted by his involvement in the 1975 OPEC raid where he shows himself to be both self-serving and self-preserving.

Travelling between many countries and covering the geopolitics of three decades the film picks up the many hypocrisies of the regimes and organisations Carlos is associated with; such as the PFLP leader who couldn’t care less about the persecution of the Kurds in Iraq, or the German communists debating the difference between anti-semitism and anti-zionism.

Carlos (Edgar Ramirez)

Refusing to allow in any of the idealisation of Soderbergh’s Che (2008) films, Assayas presents a man whose narcissism sees him go from idealistic revolutionary to public enemy number one and whose vanity ultimately places him as a forgotten page in Cold War history. Edgar Ramirez’ performance as Carlos is, of course, the glue that holds the film together. Playing the Lothario revolutionary, the gun-obsessed criminal and the image-conscience terrorist, Ramirez beautifully executes all Carlos’ personas giving us the man behind the myth.

On Tour/ Tournée

Mathieu Almaric (Quantum of Solace, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) directs and stars in this film about an American Burlesque troupe on tour in Western France. Almaric plays Joachim a failed Parisian TV producer, who is hoping for a triumphant return to France after a stint in America. Joachim has brought five American burlesque performers with him for a pre-arranged tour of Coastal France. It isn’t long before plans start to fall apart and Joachim isn’t living up to the performers’ expectations.

This very loosely scripted film stars real-life New York performers such as Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz andMimi le Meaux. Practitioners of what is called Neo-Burlesque, these buxom and bawdy women define their style of performance as ‘women doing burlesque for women’. As the troupe travels from chain hotel to chain hotel, performing at less and less glamourous theatres, the film shows the growing tension between the group and the sardonic Joachim, who moves between charm and insult in dealing with his unruly American performers.

Director and star Mathieu Almaric with his Burlesque stars

Filmed in both English and French, On Tour is one of those great films which offers you a little slice of life, without much concern for plot or cinematic polish. Almaric is fantastic as the weasely promoter, Joachim, who having burnt all his bridges before going to America tries rather unsuccessfully to reunite with former colleagues, friends and his children. But somehow this almost pathetic character is also likeable and his genuine respect for the burlesque performances and his desperate attempts to keep everything on track are endearing. There is a particularly lovely throwaway scene between Joachim and a petrol station attendant (played by Aurélia Petit) with a delightfully playful dialogue that highlights Almaric’s talents as a filmmaker.

Winning best director as the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 for this film, Almaric’s naturalistic approach to filmmaking serves him very well in this setting. While the acting performances of the burlesque artists aren’t always convincing, their unique and sassy personalities win you over. This witty, saucy and rambunctious film is a refreshing change of pace to conventional cinema fare.

My Father’s Guests/ Les Invitiés de mon Père

Actor turned director Anne Le Ny (Those who Remain/ Ceux qui Restant) gives us a tale of immigration and family in modern France with her second film, My Father’s Guests.This comedy takes more than a few pot-shots at bleeding heart liberals as it looks at the difference between rhetoric and practice. Focusing on a well-to-do middle class Parisian family, the film looks at the dynamics between middle-aged siblings Babette (Karin Viard) and Arnaud (Fabrice Luchini) and their 80-year old father Lucien (Michel Aumont).

When ageing humanitarian Lucien decides to open his doors to some illegal immigrants, his family is split in their reactions. While his G.P. daughter and daddy’s girl Babette and his politically active granddaughter (Flore Babled) applaud his decision, his rich lawyer son and daughter-in-law are less impressed with the idea. However when the family find out Lucien has married a beautiful 28-year old Moldovan refugee, Tatiana (Veronica Novak) to allow her and her young daughter to stay in the country, the family have trouble reconciling this reality with the image of the illegal immigrants they were expecting. As Tatiana’s behaviour towards their father begins to look suspicious, Babette and Arnaud connect over their distrust.

While Le Ny and co-scriptwriter Luc Béraud start out initially giving us as a satirical comedy exploring the values of Paris’ bourgeoisie and poking fun at their left-leanings views, there is definitely a mood shift about half-way through the film and the immigration aspect that has been used to fuel the comedy is buried for the more fruitful topic of family.

Arnaud (Fabrice Luchini) and Babette (Karin Viard)

Viard and Luchini have a great chemistry as brother and sister, whose father’s increasingly worrying behaviour sees them growing closer. Veronica Novak also gives a great performance as the tough-as-nails Eastern European immigrant. In a film that offers ample opportunity to laugh at the characters and their mores, it is Tatiana’s story which will give audiences the most trouble with the moral ambiguity which is offered by Le Ny, but never resolved.

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First published on Trespass

Possible Worlds- The Wild Hunt/Suck

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Winning Best Canadian First Feature Film at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, Alexandre Franchi’s The Wild Hunt is an original examination of power, or probably more accurately- the lack of it. Centred around medieval re-enactments and the world of LARPers (Live-Action Role Players), the film was shot in Quebec in an actual rural LARPing facility-Le Duché de Bicolline, using real LARPers as extras.

The film follows Erik Magnusson (Ricky Mabe), a non-player, as he enters the ‘medieval world’ to try and patch things up with his girlfriend Lyn (Kaniehtiio Horn), who has recently been seduced by the game. Will Erik enter into the spirit of the place with its Knights, Elves,Vikings and maurading Barbarians in order to reclaim his lady?

This film makes a pretty serious statement about modern men’s feelings of impotence. Seeking power by adopting identities from by-gone eras and getting thrills from staged battles- the fantasy world of the LARPers, in the film, is part-history, part-Tolkien. This imagined reality allows people with status concerns in everyday life to take on personas of kings and warriors- giving them a sense of power and purpose. This deliberate departure from the mandane ‘normal world’ is best realised through the character of Bjorn (Mark A. Krupa, Co-writer and Producer), leader of the Vikings and Erik’s brother. Bjorn is so reliant on his created identity that he is unable to leave the fantasy world, staying constantly in character.

The female characters in this film are left largely unexplored- especially Lyn, who is far from sympathetic, so much so that you wonder why Erik wants her back. The story surrounding the brothers, Erik and Bjorn is however a compelling one- making The Wild Hunt an impressive debut. The film takes its audience into a fascinating and curious setting- as it considers the darker side of human nature and the need to feel powerful. The Wild Hunt has a real sense of menace that grows as the characters push the boundaries of their created world and identities. How far will the game go?

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It was only a matter of time before a film combined vampires and rock music, because what’s cooler than the blood-sucking undead? The blood-sucking undead in a band! Suck is a rock musical that breaks with horror tradition, giving us vampires that aren’t all that pretty, or that broody; not concerned with eternal life, these blood-suckers are on a quest for eternal fame.

Suck tells the tale of a working band called The Winners. Touring bars in Canada and The States, the band has never had its ‘big break’. Living out of their tour hearse and with a truly crap manager (Dave Foley), The Winners seem to be going nowhere. That is until bassist Jennifer (Jessica Paré) has an unusual encounter with a mysterious audience member. Suddenly Jennifer’s stage appeal increases tenfold and the band actually gets a following. But at what cost?

Writer/director Rob Stefaniuk gives us a fun, at times absurdist, music-loving film with Suck. Along with the central band cast, the film also hosts to an eclectic mix of musician- including Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and Moby. Suck plays for laughs not screams, with the more macabre moments twisted for comedic effect.

Using quirky special effects and with plenty of homages to the vampire genre and its musical influences this is a film with its tongue- firmly- in- its- cheek. Suck plays with a variation on the Robert Johnson and the Devil scenario, asking the question- how far would you go to be famous?

First Published in Trespass

Women on Top- Interviews with Film Festival Directors

I have been lucky enough to work on a few film festivals in N.S.W over the last three years; I volunteered at the Sydney Film Festival (SFF) in 2008 and 2009, I have written for the Spanish Film Festival blog for the past two years and this year I have been working on the Dungog Film Festival. As well as getting to see how much time and effort goes into making these cinematic celebrations a success, I have also been inspired by the women who run them.

Clare Stewart of the Sydney Film Festival, Natalia Ortiz of the Spanish Film Festival and Allanah Zitserman spoke to me about their roles as Film Festival Directors, their passion for films, and the female experience in the Film Industry. This was especially generous as they all took time out during the run-up to their respective festival when they are at their most busy.

The most obvious question for all three women is, how do they define their role as a film festival director?

With the biggest festival to contend with, The Sydney Film Festival is now in its 57th year, Clare has been at the controls for four years,

“The role has many faces and is incredibly varied. I guess the critical part of my job really is the selection of the films for the festival and the overarching architecture of the guest filmmakers; choosing the guest filmmakers who will come to accompany those films.”

Both Natalia and Allanah founded their own festivals with the focus on the cinema closest to their own hearts, Spanish and Australian,

Running in five cities, The Spanish Film Festival comes to the end of its 13th year at the end of May. Natalia is hands on with every part of the festival,

“I reinvent the festival every year, by that I mean every year the program has completely different things to offer. I also work with the schools in promoting the films for kids. I supervise all the design of the website, the television commercials that we have, the program, the whole image of the festival. I also supervise the coordination of the print movement with the chairman. A bit of everything really”

The youngest of the festivals, The Dungog Film Festival runs over four days in May in the picturesque Hunter Valley region. This year is the 4th year of Allanah’s festival;

“I wear a lot of hats in this particular job. It is about developing a really dynamic and diverse festival that showcases the best of Australian screen content across the board. And really my focus has always been to create something that is about bringing Australian film and content to Australian audiences.”

How did these three hard-working ladies start their love affair with the cinema?

Clare, a country girl growing up in a small town, doesn’t quite have the childhood stories about films you might expect from such a passionate cinephile.

“You read all the wonderful tales about Martin Scorsese being taken off to see Red Shoes as a four year old by his mother, I have a very very scant number of stories to tell from my early childhood and teenage years. I can remember E.T. at the Leongatha drive-in, and Hanna Barbera productions’ Charlotte’s Web at Frankston when I was four or something. But really my passion for cinema came about because I lucked into taking on Media Studies as a course. I was majoring in cinema studies and film production. It was really there and the move to Melbourne and being surrounded by the opportunity to try all sorts of cinema I hadn’t known about before. Through things like the Melbourne Cinémathèque, and the Kino cinema had just opened at that time. It was a very exciting time for me then.”

In contrast Natalia’s induction to the world of films started from an early age in Spain, as part of a long-term family love affair with the cinema.

“My mother was a film critic at the national radio in Spain and used to do all the reviews and interviews for the San Sebastian International Film Festival. My father was more of a painter, but did the billboards, back in those days they were painted by hand. They both loved cinema, arthouse cinema- so I grew up watching Pasolini and Fellini combined with Disney films. It was really exciting, obviously everyone in my family loved cinema. For me it is like the air I breathe, I really need it, it is more than just like it, it’s a real need, I suck life from cinema.”

Allanah’s commitment to Australian cinema and Australian filmmakers comes from her drive to work hard and her belief in giving everything a go;

‘I came here as a refugee, when I was three, with my family. Everyday that I’ve been here, I have a sense within me about how lucky I am, that I ended up here, and how different my life would have been, had my mum not chosen to go to the country that is the furthest away from Russia. We came with one suitcase, we lived in housing commission properties, it was pretty tough for both my family and me. My parents instilled in me a very strong work ethic and a desire to be educated, that was something that was always in me. For me it wasn’t so much about what I was going to do, I didn’t know I was going to be in film, I just knew whatever I was going to do I was going to throw myself in 150%.”

Although these women have very different backgrounds, they all seem to have found the place that suits them best in their roles as festival directors.

Before becoming the Festival Director of the Sydney Film Festival, Clare was Head of Film Programs at ACMI (Australian Centre for Moving Images);

“I started volunteering at the Melbourne Cinémathèque and really got into programming as a sort of way to just feed myself if you like. I found out that was exactly the right place for me to be, because it combined the critical thinking I like to do about films with the role of actually taking that to an audience. Where I get my real buzz, is that great moment when the lights go down and you feel the audience engaging with a film that you’ve worked really hard to get onto that screen, and it is a very very rewarding moment. So it turns out that the perfect place for me was precisely in-between criticism and filmmaking.”

Natalia worked in the Spanish film industry as an editor for a number of years, before moving half way across the world;

“When I moved to Australia I realised the Spanish film industry was misrepresented on the screens here. You could only see Carlos Saura and Pedro Almodóvar, the usual suspects kind of thing. I thought there was more to it and because of my contacts and knowledge of the industry I could do something about it. I wasn’t really thinking about a film festival, I thought more about a film society and bringing a few films and doing Q&As etc… That grew to a national film festival with 45 films this year.”

Allanah movement into films began with a successful side project whilst studying business, starting up and promoting a club night called Barberella;

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“It ignited something in me, and it became clear to me I had to do something creative that included the business side of me. I kept doing events. I knew I wasn’t going to work for a corporate company, I needed to do something else. I met Stavros and I worked with him on Strange Planet. I remember the first time that he brought me to set, to the production office and I walked in and I just had this moment where I just knew this is exactly what I wanted to do. It was creative, it was exciting, it was risk-taking and it tapped into my love of clothing, my love of music, my love of hard work, my love of the business side and story telling.”

In 2007 Allanah co-founded the Dungog Film Festival, the biggest festival of Australian content in the world, with her partner Stavros Kazantzidis (with whom she co-wrote and co-produced the AFI award-winning Russian Dolls) “People always find it quite amusing that it took a Russian and a Greek to put on the first Australian festival.”

This being women’s week, I had to ask these high-profile women, who are at the top of their field, were they concerned about the lack of women in key positions behind the camera in the film industry?

Clare made a point that I had found to be very true whilst researching,

“I certainly think you see a lot of women in producing roles, in bureaucracies, you see a lot of women now in the curatorial programming side of things. But I do think it still really is a struggle for women who are directing and are in certain technical roles as well. I’m not really sure why that is the case.”

And while Allanah is very positive about the Australian Film Industry; ‘in this country we’ve got a lot of really talented women filmmakers. I think Australia is quite progression in that regard.”

It is Natalia who is most passionate about the issue,

“I think probably when people are reading your article they will be like ‘ah here we go again’ but you know there are still people who don’t want to acknowledge there is an issue for women to be treated equally. You can see it in the film industry, I think it is about 8 or 9 % of films are directed by women, and 15% of important roles in the film industry are held by women; that is directing, writing or producing. Why is that, we are as creative as males. This year a women won an Oscar for the first time in history- why is that? This is something that we need to question obviously.”

Clare, Natalia and Allanah all thrive on the shared film experience, bringing their audience, original and dynamic programs. Each of their festivals showcase the amazing diversity in film today. Their programs all reflect the breadth of female filmmaking talent too. This year the Spanish Film Festival had a special section devoted to films from female directors, called All By Women, (some recommendations of films to look out for during the SFF and Dungog Film Festival from Clare and Allanah are at the end of this piece).

I asked Clare, Natalia and Allanah to each give me a highlight or a stand out moment from their festival careers so far and I think each answer illustrations their dedication to film and their desire to put on the best possible events for their audiences.

Clare “After the intense effort of establishing the official competition having Hunger take out the first official competition prize [in the inaugural year, 2008] was a really terrific moment. Being able to secure the second screening in the world of a film like Steve McQueen’s Hunger for that competitive program and then having such an extraordinary film go on and win, really set the agenda, set the benchmark. A festival director would want that to happen for a competition, which was about audacious, courageous and cutting edge films. That was definitely a very significant moment.”

Natalia “Just getting [the festival] up and running every year! Because every year there is a different story, the financial crisis, the swine flu- last year we couldn’t get any films coming out of Mexico, and we’d bought out a special Luis Buñuel retrospective. This year we had the volcanic ash in Europe. Every year the biggest achievement is to look back in June and say “we’ve done it”. It is a learning curve, when I look back at the first festival with four films over a weekend and where we are today- you can imagine ever single day is huge learning in every aspect of what you do.”

Allanah “I guess just having 500 people at the Saturday night party dancing together. From the ages of 18-85, all different backgrounds and social backgrounds, all mixing and mingling and having such a wonderful time together. Last year we had Three Blind Mice, on the Saturday night and we had a line going from the cinema right up to the train station to get into the film, and we ran out of seats, so we were throwing more seats in.”


The Spanish Film Festival has finished for this year in Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide, but is still underway in Brisbane, and due to ‘popular demand’ the festival has been extended in Melbourne- click here for details.

The Dungog Film Festival runs from 27th -30th May. For programming and ticketing information click here

The Sydney Film Festival runs from the 2nd-14th June. For programming and ticketing information click here

Here are some recommendations from Clare and Allanah of some of the best of female directed films on offer at their festivals;

The Sydney Film Festival- Clare

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Miranda Otto in Shirey Barrett’s South Solitary

“I’m so excited this year about how many films we have in the program that are directed by women. I couldn’t be more delighted to be opening and closing the festival with films by Shirley Barrett and Lisa Cholodenko, two very intoxicating filmmakers who have great track records and whom we have been waiting for next films from for quite some time. You look at their films, you look at Debra Granik’s Winters’ Bone, the very wonderful, compelling, stark and riveting film that won the jury prize at Sundance this year. You look at Claire McCarthy the Sydneysider’s second feature The Waiting City, which has just come leaps and bounds since her first film which we loved very much and did the world premiere in my first festival Cost Life. As well as Julie Bertucelli’s film which is screening in official competition, a French Australian co- production called The Tree and Sophie Letourneur, a young, extraordinary French director who has made a film Chicks about a bunch of Parisan students in their early twenties, who all share this apartment called the Ranch, which is a very different kind of film again. Through to someone really classic, well classic in the sense that she is a contemporary master, Claire Denis and her wonderful film White Material. I think that there are a lot of really terrific films directed by women on offer in the festival this year”

Dungog Film Festival- Allanah

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Lily Bell-Tindley and John Hurt in Belinda Chayko’s Lou

“This year’s program shows how many women are working in the industry- Belinda Chayko’s Lou is the opening night film Sue Brooks’ Subdivision is the festival’s closing night film. We also have the World Premiere of Surviving Georgia by Sandra Sciberras and Kate Whitbread. We’ve got Alexandra Schepisi’s amazing short film One Night. Also this year there are Master Classes with Gillian Armstrong and Nadia Tass, as well as a panel discussion called Women in Film, done in collaboration with iTunes’ Meet the Filmmaker Panel, which features Belinda Chayko, Gillian Armstrong and Alexandra Schepisi.”


Published as part of Trespass' Women's Week