The Sydney Film Festival has revealed a sneak peak of this year’s program, in advance of the full program launch to be announced on May 9. This first look reveals 26 new films on the line-up for the festival, which runs from June 6 to June 17. This year marks its 65th year.
The below information is taken from the official press release:
Leading the pack…
Leading the titles announced today is Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist. The film is a fascinating profile of revolutionary fashion designer and punk icon Vivienne Westwood from UK model-turned-filmmaker Lorna Tucker.
Also topping the list is the winner of Venice Film Festival’s 2017 Grand Jury Prize, Foxtrot, from award-winning Israeli director Samuel Maoz; and 2018 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Award winner, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, featuring rising stars Chloë Grace Moretz (Carrie), Sasha Lane (American Honey) and Forrest Goodluck (The Revenant).
Two Oscar winners will also present their latest works: Sebastián Lelio’s (A Fantastic Woman, SFF 2017) Disobedience starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, and Debra Granik’s (Winter’s Bone) Leave No Trace featuring young New Zealand actress Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie.
Bold psychosexual thriller, Piercing, starring Australian actress Mia Wasikowska (Madame Bovary, SFF 2015), and spine-tingling British chiller Ghost Stories starring Martin Freeman (The Hobbit), kicks off the 2018 Festival’s Freak Me Out program.
Anchor and Hope also delivers more star power with Natalia Tena (Harry Potter) and Oona Chaplin (Game of Thrones) alongside her mother, Golden Globe nominee Geraldine Chaplin (Chaplin), in the second feature by award-winning Spanish director Carlos Marques-Marcet (10.000 Km).
New films from Australia
Closer to home, Australian journalist Travis Beard’s fascinating documentary RocKabul examines Afghanistan’s first metal band District Unknown, and I Used to be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story, is a coming-of-age documentary about the intense love of boybands, from The Beatles to One Direction.
Maya the Bee: The Honey Games is a new family adventure – voiced by an all-star Australian cast including Richard Roxburgh, The Umbilical Brothers’ Dave Collins and Shane Dundas, and Justine Clarke (ABC’s Play School) – from Australian animation veteran Noel Cleary (Blinky Bill).
An exhilarating debut feature from Australian director Jason Raftopoulos, West of Sunshine, starring Damien Hill (Pawno) alongside his real life step-son Ty Perham, and Kat Stewart (Offspring), will also screen in 2018.
Big festival winners and nominees
Favourites selected from the international festival circuit include: Sundance 2018 Special Jury Prize winner, Genesis 2.0, a documentary following scientific efforts to resurrect the woolly mammoth in an Arctic spin on Jurassic Park; and Berlinale Silver Bear winner, Mug, from renowned Polish filmmaker Małgorzata Szumowska.
Also highly anticipated are Oscar-nominated films: The Breadwinner and The Insult. The Breadwinner was nominated for Best Animated Feature and produced by a team of Academy Award winners including Angelina Jolie and animation studio Cartoon Saloon (Song of the Sea – SFF 2015). Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri’s potent legal thriller The Insult was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee American Animals stars a cast of young Hollywood talent including Evan Peters (American Horror Story) and Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk, The Killing of a Sacred Deer).
The brand-new digital restoration, from the National Film and Sound Archive, of iconic Australian Oscar nominated film My Brilliant Career (1979) – from acclaimed director Gillian Armstrong and featuring Judy Davis in her movie debut – will revive this multiple award winner for new audiences.
Outstanding documentaries
Sydney Film Festival’s documentary program will again deliver the most exciting true stories about people, places, enterprises and phenomena from Australia and around the globe.
The Festival opens a window into the lives of extraordinary young people, from Chef Flynn, about prodigy chef Flynn McGarry who became one of the world’s top chefs at just 13 years old, to students finding innovative ways to tackle the most complex environmental issues facing humanity today in Inventing Tomorrow.
A light is shone in dangerous places, from the murder that made true crime an American obsession in Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, to the life of a veteran Kurdish soldier deactivating landmines in Iraq using only a pen knife in The Deminer, to The Long Season, an intimate record of daily life for women in a Syrian refugee camp.
Quirky hits
The Festival also features heart-warming fly-on-the-wall glimpses into personal places, such as the family castle of Spanish director Gustavo Salmeron’s eccentric mother in Lots of Kids, A Monkey and A Castle. And the roly-poly lives of five guide puppies as they train for the ultimate canine career in Pick of the Litter – also screening in Sydney Film Festival’s brand new Screen Day Out program, developed for high school students.
Interracial love, religious cults, Thai high society, and an appetite for raw offal complete a preview of the Festival’s more avant-garde works, with classic noir Samui Song from Thai auteur Pen-ek Rataranuang (Last Life In the Universe).
New venue
In 2018 the Festival will bring films from the world’s top film festivals to venues across Sydney. For the first time the Festival will present a program of films at HOYTS Entertainment Quarter in Moore Park.
The venue will feature specially selected line-up of family films, as well as Screenability, the platform for screen practitioners with disability.
The State Theatre, Dendy Opera Quays, Dendy Newtown, Event Cinemas George Street, Art Gallery of NSW, the Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace Cremorne, Randwick Ritz, and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre return as official Festival screening venues. An exciting virtual reality program will return to the Festival Hub at Sydney Town Hall premiering cutting edge VR experiences, many for the first time in Australia.
