Opening Night
Closing Night
Galas
Showcase Films
Silent Film
Che
Opening Night
The year's festival kicks off with Lone Scherfig's delightful depiction of 1960s London, followed by music, drinks and canapés at our famous after-party. Join us and special guest Carey Mulligan, An Education's sparkling ingénue, in celebrating the first of what will surely be a spectacular eleven days.
An Education
Romance, drama, intrigue-An Education is an entertaining portrayal of the growing pains that accompany early adulthood. Set in the London suburb of Twickenham in 1961, the story centres around Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a witty overachiever in her last year at a strict girls' school. Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), a charismatic older man whose seemingly innocent intrusion into Jenny's life catalyses her dreams of becoming a cultured socialite. A romance quickly develops between the pair, and Jenny's previously steadfast educational commitments all but evaporate with the promise of marriage-that is, until an untimely truth surfaces about David, teaching Jenny that her real education has only just begun. AF
Thur 30 Jul/7.30pm/Regent 3 & 4
Buy tickets
Closing Night
Balibo
When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, five young newsmen working for Australian television were caught in the crossfire. Well, that's the official line.
This powerful and suspenseful political thriller re-creates the events surrounding their shooting by Indonesian soldiers on 16 October, intercutting them with the story of an older journalist, Roger East, subsequently invited to East Timor by José Ramos-Horta to uncover the truth behind their deaths. But the important questions asked of East by Ramos-Horta in the film, questions never satisfactorily answered in several subsequent investigations, concern not the Indonesian but the Australian government.
East was one of three journalists in East Timor at the time; Jill Jolliffe was working as a freelancer for Reuters, and it is on her book that Balibo is based. This is an important story for Australians, and the film's co-writer and director, Robert Connolly, shows here both the same moral concerns and the ability to weave them into a compelling piece of film that he exhibited in his directorial début, The Bank, which he also co-wrote. AD-G
A presentation of the Melbourne International Film Festival MIFF Première Fund at the St.George Bank Brisbane International Film Festival.
Sun 9 Aug/8pm/Regent 3
Buy tickets
Galas
Take your festival experience to another level at this year's galas. Each screening will be followed by an after-party, a grand night of entertainment, food and drink in the historic Regent.
Coraline
Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is an energetic young girl who has just moved with her parents into an isolated country house. Prone to boredom and having an unruly imagination, she struggles to give her mother (voiced by Teri Hatcher) and father (voiced by John Hodgman) the peace needed to finish their garden catalogue. Left with few options to satisfy her entertainment needs, Coraline begins an intensive investigation of the house and discovers a secret door to an alternative reality. What ensues is a visual rollercoaster ride into a world where rodents perform amazing circus acts, cats talk, and Coraline is treated like a queen-or so she thinks. Soon her fantasy land becomes a nightmare that threatens her life. Based on the popular children's story by Neil Gaiman and directed by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas), this spellbinding animation will appeal to both young adults and graphic artists. AF
Mon 3 Aug/7pm/Regent 3
Buy tickets
Eden is West
Gentle-natured Elias, an illegal alien from an unidentified country, survives a swim to shore from a human-cargo carrier to wake on a nudist beach of a Mediterranean resort catering to the privileged. With limited language skills, he scrambles to hide his identity and with arresting good looks is soon negotiating sexual advances.
This is a more lighthearted look at the problem of illegal immigrants than the usual dire portraits. It raises questions about identity, racism, relationships, and how we survive and coexist in fractured societies where the many have far less than the lucky few. It is about survival instincts and the unjust barriers that exist for those forgotten people who desire to live a better life at all costs. In Eden Is West, Paris offers the lure of magic and the realisation of dreams. MW
Fri 7 Aug/7.30pm/Regent 3
Buy tickets
Showcase Films
Away We Go
Thirtysomethings Burt and Verona discover they are going to have a child. Expecting support from Burt's parents, who instead leave for a two-year overseas holiday, they turn their initial dismay into an opportunity to embark on their own literal journey of discovery. Taking to the road, they visit old friends in places from Miami to Canada; from new-age intellectuals to slightly desperate crazies, from the negligent to the overly protective, each welcoming parent proffers well-meaning advice to the fleeing couple.
From Sam Mendes (who won an Academy Award for best director for his début, American Beauty), the subject matter of this offbeat indie film, liberally laced with irony, humour, and tenderness, made ‘with a little speed, and a little lightness of touch' (Mendes in interview), is perhaps a surprise after last year's Revolutionary Road. But the precision of the craft is exactly what we would expect from this master director. AD-G
Sat 1 Aug/7.15pm/Regent 3
Buy tickets
Prime Mover
Set in the trucking recesses of Dubbo, Prime Mover is a masterful blend of action and drama. The story follows Thomas (Michael Dorman, Suburban Mayhem), a talented pinstriper whose dream is to trade in his paintbrush for his own eighteen wheeler. Every bit a cowboy, Thomas is both charming and reckless, a lethal combination with which he courts Melissa (Emily Barclay, Suburban Mayhem), a local petrol-station attendant. But ambition can be unforgiving, and a seemingly innocent dealing with a loan-shark causes some unforgiving bumps in the road that threaten to jackknife everything Thomas has accomplished.
Directed by David Caesar (Dirty Deeds, Mullet) and featuring the acting talents of William McInnes and Ben Mendelsohn, the film hurls the audience down an emotional and philosophical highway. Central themes include family, trust, and the challenges of chasing the dream of a lifetime. AF
Sat 8 Aug/7.15pm/Regent 3
Buy tickets
The September Issue
Legendary Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour is often called the devil or the fashion pope, and the magazine's September issue is the veritable glam bible of the fashion world, created in the buzzy, consumerist heart of Manhattan, with brilliant shoots in Paris and Rome. In this engaging fly-on-the-wall documentary, we observe the extraordinary style guru editing the magazine, obsessing over tiny details, brooking no opposition, and, with moments to spare, triumphantly delivering the ‘biggest one in our history': 840 pages of the headspinning fall-preview issue. As the mega-issue somehow takes shape amid the turmoil, Wintour's fascinating sidekicks are witnessed toiling, arguing, and bitching-especially the spectacular André Leon Talley, editor-at-large, and Grace Coddington, genius creative director, who pulls off an inspired eleventh-hour masterstroke. We are also given more intimate glimpses of Anna's softer side as a daughter, sister, and proud mother. HY
Tues 4 Aug/7.15pm/Regent 3
Buy tickets
Unmade Beds
Unmade Beds is a gritty yet playful film about youth squatter culture in London. Directed by Alexis Dos Santos, this story follows Axl (Fernando Tielve) and Vera (Déborah François), two foreign nationals who take refuge in the warehouse-dwelling bohemian underground. Axl and Vera never officially meet, although they share the same space and often cross paths.
The motivation of each character is revealed incrementally throughout the film, and back stories remain preciously guarded. Axl is in London to find the father who abandoned him as a child, and Vera seeks to escape the memory of a failed romance. From these two starting points, the audience gains an endearing perspective on the youthful experiences of having sex, drinking alcohol, and sleeping in the occasional unmade bed. AF
Sparks at BIFF -Age 15+
Wed 5 Aug/7.30/Regent 3
Buy tickets
Silent Film
The Last Laugh
Take advantage of a free screening of this innovative German chamber drama, one of the first films to experiment with unconventional camerawork. Ron West will accompany this screening on the City Hall pipe organ with a specially composed score.
The doorman of a leading hotel in the city centre is in love with the prestige his position and his uniform bring him. His world falls apart when he is unexpectedly demoted to lavatory attendant. Mortified, he enters a world of delusion. Hovering somewhere between tragedy and cruel comedy, the charade moves towards an unexpectedly ironic ending.
One of the defining films of silent cinema, The Last Laugh enjoyed worldwide fame as it pushed the form to new heights. The everyday was transformed; the constantly moving camera was precisely choreographed to draw the viewer into a world of light and movement. But technical virtuosity alone does not make a great film. Emil Jannings's performance still has the capacity to amaze audiences- it shows how much it is possible for an actor to convey, even when facing away from the camera. BH
Sun 2 Aug/2.30pm/City Hall
Free Screening
Che
Che: Parts One & Two
The historical Che has become like the historical Jesus, with many gospels. There is the Che of the t-shirt and poster; Che the brilliant tactician; the fatally flawed Che who began one of his epistles with ‘This is the history of failure'; the godless, beardless mystic in Salles's Motorcycle Diaries; and the Comandante Superstar in Richard Fleisher's Che!. Even Steven Soderbergh and star/producer Benicio Del Toro's four-hour-plus-long diptych has time for only three. Part One, ‘The Argentine', is a two-hander: Che the radically chic celebrity of the early 1960s, recorded in Maysles Brothers-like Direct cinema, adjoins Che the bearded Yul Brynner-type, the cigar-chomping leader of a revolutionary wild bunch (Soderbergh himself has called it ‘a John Sturges movie') that survived the Sierra Maestra wilderness and the house-to-house shootout at Santa Clara. In comparison, Part Two, ‘The Guerrilla', channels Ken Loach-but also Terrence Malick, whose project this was initially. Naturalistic and vernacular, yet also rhythmic and fatalistic (and shot in naturally lit yet film-like Red digital by Soderbergh in his Peter Andrews guise), this is Che the chess student, Che of the final diary-an almost third-person Marxist analysis of his own ethical and political failure of radical leadership, down to the final move to a campesino guard on 8 October 1967.
The ellipsed Ches are an issue. There are five years between the two parts; The Butcher of La Cabaña, the barking Dr. Strange-Che of the Missile Crisis, and the farcical intervention in the Congo are all absent. But although we may not get the mystic life or the life of power-truly omissions-and although these are, in essence, Westerns (Part One, Late-Hollywood Classic; Part Two, Revisionist), we do get Che's essential rich and tireless personal politique, the moral life that governed his interaction with his comrades and followers. And Part Two has a sense of predestination: the last shot is almost the first, Che the seasick and pensive medical practitioner wondering what Raúl and Fidel (finely played by Rodrigo Santoro and Demián Bichir, normally only known to Western audiences as guest sexy Latins in US TV dramas like Weeds and Lost) have got him into. It proposes, as Soderbergh and Del Toro have, a third, featurette-length study of the Congo business, and an eternal movie. QT
Part One: Fri 7 Aug/12pm/Regent 1
Buy tickets
Part Two: Fri 7 Aug/2.30pm/Regent 1
Buy tickets