From Thursday 16 September to Sunday 26 September, the 9th Queer Screen Film Fest will showcase documentaries and narrative feature films from 17 different countries in 18 different spoken languages – and you can watch them all from the comfort of your living room. Due to the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, the festival is,…
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The phrase ‘backwards and in heels’ is derived from a cartoon by Bob Thaves drawn in 1982. Specifically, the cartoon stated that Ginger Rogers performed everything that Fred Astaire did in their films, except backwards and in heels. This phrase has come to emulate the recurrent struggles of women working in a patriarchal world, as…
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You weren’t allowed to be gay at my high school, but of course that never stopped anyone – my best friend included. We’d known each other for five years, been out of school for one, when she came out to me. It wasn’t anything major on my end, she was my friend and her sexuality…
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‘Water can be any shape, it just depends on the container,’ my brother eloquently said as we drove to the cinema. It was a good point – as he predicted, the new Guillermo del Toro film The Shape of Water fits into many movie genre moulds. It is a monster movie, an arthouse film, a…
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How did you spend last New Year’s Eve? Most of us go to a party or a festival, where we can kick back with champagne and friends. But filmmakers Sarah Jayne Portelli and Ivan Malekin spent NYE 2016 doing the thing they love most: making a film. The result is Friends, Foes & Fireworks, a…
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It’s a quiet Friday lunchtime when I meet Tasmanian filmmaker Ninna Millikin in Hobart’s charismatic suburb of Battery Point. I wait in a small park surrounded by nineteenth-century cottages, and we find a window seat in a cosy café nearby. It seems appropriate that we meet in such a distinctive part of Hobart given what…
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Zelos is a story of cheating. You have probably seen a lot of films like this, but what makes this one different is its realism. And unlike so many other films about cheating, this film is: written, directed, and co-produced by two young women (director Jo-Anne Brechin and writer Claire J Harris) and ALSO has…
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When I sit down to chat with filmmaker Claudia Pickering over the phone, I am immediately struck by her infectious enthusiasm. She’s sitting in a café working on a web series while we talk. I’m sitting at my desk at home, but still get swept up in the excitement of her burgeoning career in…
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Sofia Coppola’s latest film, The Beguiled, opens with what seems like an innocent scene: a young girl out in the woods, humming to herself as she collects wild mushrooms. Yet there is something else going on beneath the surface: an undeniably sinister undertone present despite beautiful imagery. To beguile means to ‘persuade, attract, or interest…
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Jordan Peele’s Get Out extraordinarily combines the horror genre with poignant social commentary, using satirical observations to show the racial divide within Western society. For his directorial debut, Peele achieved his goal of showing a ‘common humanity’ by dispelling usual movie tropes. The film tells the story of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young black man…
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Imagine this… a society that thinks it is strange to see a woman who is independent. They think it’s odd to find a woman who won’t be shushed, who is vocal, who doesn’t define herself in relation to a man—a woman who wants to fight back against oppression. This is the fantasy world of Wonder…
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At the Australian box office in 2014, just 8 per cent of the top 250 films had female directors. There were 21 Australian films among the top earners, and women directed only 14 per cent of them. These are just some of the many statistics in Screen Australia’s 2015 Gender Matters report that reveal the…
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Beauty and the Beast is another Disney reboot. You’re probably expecting me to say: get over it Disney I have seen this before! But I am not going to say that, because frankly I don’t care. Why? Well because this is a fairy tale. Fairy tales are always being retold and in each retelling, they…
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Director Rachel Perkins’ latest film, Jasper Jones, is a powerful and suspenseful coming-of-age drama that will undoubtedly join the likes of Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in the canon of great Australian films. Adapted from Craig Silvey’s novel of the same name, the film opens in 1969, when young…
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