Perth’s revamped Revelation Film Festival is now known as Couched, given the couch is where most cinephiles have taken to worshipping at the altar of film lately.
Couched, presented by film festival streaming service REVonDemand, is a petite but powerful collection of 22 highly anticipated documentaries and narrative features. At $12 a pop or a little more for a variety of multi-film ‘festival passes’, viewers can enjoy festival-quality programming right from their own TV or laptop screens, be they Perth residents or audiences from all over the world.
Sponsored in part by Screen Australia, the announcement of Couched in place of the usual Revelation Film Festival‘s IRL appeal is a delightful coronavirus pivot, keeping audiences safe and happy at home. And happy is a big mood when it comes to some of the titles available, such as teenage rock-doc No Time For Quiet, which follows angsty punk girls as they attend a revelatory rock camp, and learn to express themselves.
Many of the available films have already premiered and made a splash at Sydney and Melbourne’s last film festival incarnations, such as crime mystery hit Cold Case Hammarskjöld and black comedy A Family, concerning a Ukrainian man who hires a group of actors to pretend to be his family.
This is a lineup that includes the latest film from Abel Ferrera alongside a local Western Australian sci-fi indie you’d never get to see elsewhere, entitled An Ideal Host. There’s also docos about the works of Milos Forman and Andrei Tarkosvky, proving that even if Perth is one of the most geographically isolated capital cities in the world, it’s still attuned to the throbbing heartbeat of cinema.
You can buy tickets and check out the full lineup of films via the 2020 Revelation Perth International Film Festival’s website.
