A killer line-up this year marks South Australia’s celebration of cinema as a destination festival. Travis Johnson takes us through the highlights.
One of Australia’s best film festivals kicks off one more this October, and it’ll be back sooner than ever before. Since its inception in 2003, The Adelaide Film Festival has run biannually, swapping years with the Adelaide Festival. But the Adelaide Festival became an annual event in 2012, and now the Adelaide Film Festival has followed suit, promising a yearly cavalcade of cinema going forward.
Under the theme A Celebration of Imagination, the 2022 edition runs from October 19-30, 2022, kicking off with the world premiere of opening night film The Angels: Kickin’ Down The Door (pictured above), a deep dive into the history and artistry of Adelaide’s own legendary pub rockers from director Maddie Parry (Hannah Gadsby: Nanette). The expected Opening Night Gala follows, but premium ticket holders will be treated to a special intimate pub gig by The Angels—a must-see for aficionados of Aussie rock.
The closing night film this year is Talk to Me, the debut feature film from Danny and Michael Philippou of the YouTube channel RackaRacka. Starring Miranda Otto, Sophie Wilde, Alexandria Jensen, and Otis Dhanji, the film sees a group of teens accidentally open communications with the afterlife when messing around with a mysterious artifact, only for the supernatural to get personal when one of the spirits they contact claims to be the mother of one of them.
In between we have a veritable plethora of fantastic films. Battling it out in the Feature Fiction Competition are the psychological horror Huesera from Mexican director Michelle Garza Cervera; Riley Keough and Gina Gammell’s War Pony, a drama set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; Romanian/French co-production Metronom, which won Best Direction at Cannes for Alexandru Belc; Whina, James Napier Robertson and Paula Whetu Jones’ biopic of Māori elder and activist Whina Cooper; the Indonesian political thriller Autobiography, by director Makbul Mubarak; and the Ukrainian thriller Klondike, set in the aftermath of the destruction of Flight MH17, from director Maryna Er Gorbach.
The AFF Documentary Competition offers a compelling range of factual films for our study, including Sansón and Me, a hybrid documentary following the life of a Mexican immigrant who finds himself serving a life sentence for murder, from director Rodrigo Reyes; Dos Estaciones, a look at the last Mexican-owned tequila factory in Jalisco; Lidia Duda’s The Fledglings, which lets us join three seven-year-olds as they go to a boarding school for the blind and vision-impaired; fly-on-the-wall doco The Plains from David Easteal; The Hamlet Syndrome, in which a group of young Ukrainian thespians attempt to mount a production of Shakespeare’s play in the lead-up to the Russian invasion; and Hidden Letters, an examination of the secret language developed by Chinese women as a way to express themselves in a fiercely patriarchal society.
Special Presentations this year include the Australian premiere of queer drama My Policeman, starring Harry Styles; TÁR, the Venice favourite which sees Cate Blanchett as the first woman conductor of a German orchestra; queer romantic comedy Bros, starring Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane; and The Banshees of Inisherin, which reunites director Martin McDonagh with his In Bruges actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.
And that’s barely scratching the surface. Elsewhere in the program you’ll find essential music documentary Age of Rage: The Australian Punk Revolution; confronting First Nations anthology film We are Still Here; the long-awaited debut of Adeliade-produced Ozploitation schlocker Ribspreader; the bloody bubblegum pop of Japanese action-comedy Baby Assassins, and much more.
For full details, head to the official website now.
