Sydney Film Festival 2017 opens tonight (Wednesday) around the city. Twelve days of cinema curated by artistic director Nashen Moodley and his team will feature nearly 300 movies from all over the world – new features and documentaries, revived classics and short films too. The Opening Night Gala at the State Theatre will welcome filmmaker Warwick Thornton and his documentary We Don't Need a Map. We spoke to Moodley ahead of tonight's opening.
Nashen, congratulations on the Sydney Film Festival line-up – a very strong one this year.
Thanks! I think we’re getting the latest and best films. It’s very difficult to secure films from Cannes before Cannes even starts, but we have the Sofia Coppola film The Beguiled; Michael Haneke’s Happy End; Diane Kruger in In the Fade; our closing night film Okja; and the Vanessa Redgrave film Sea Sorrow.
There seem to be a lot of films about the refugee experience this year.
Absolutely, it’s a dominant theme. Filmmakers in many parts of the world are reflecting on this very big international crisis. There are many films that deal with it head on, such as Vanessa Redgrave’s, and then there’s the Haneke film, which is really about a wealthy French family living in Calais close to the Calais jungle but are very oblivious to it.
Also there’s Chauka Please Tell Us the Time, which is shot on a phone by a journalist detained on Manus Island…
Yes. It really gives you a sense of the hopelessness of being on Manus Island. It’s a very powerful work.
Why did you choose the documentary We Don’t Need a Map to open the festival?
It’s a terrific film by a great filmmaker. I first met Warwick Thornton in Cannes after the screening of Samson and Delilah, which I thought was just incredible. This new film is provocative, it’s looking at the history of the Southern Cross, going back to Indigenous tradition and then more recent interpretations. It’s a film about identity, so funny and intelligent – I love films like that that make you laugh and make you think.
Nice to see a tribute to punk in the program.
My colleague, Richard Kuipers, programmed that. He’s a punk tragic. I’m a little more distant from punk, but it’s wonderful to see those films on the big screen.
What emotion sums up this year’s festival?
This year there are a lot of films about romance, love and sexuality. There’s a wonderful film from Hungary called On Body and Soul that won the Golden Bear at Berlin. It’s about two damaged people who work in an abattoir and by chance discover that they share the same dream every night about two deer in the forest. It’s about the difficulty of making something so pure and innocent in the dream world work in real life.
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