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Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival

  • Film, Film festivals
A scary robot holds a huge machine gun in sci-fi film Monsters of Man
Photograph: SuppliedMonsters of Man opens the Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival
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Time Out says

A whole world of weird awaits as this sci-fi showdown brings killer robots to Leichardt

Strap on your spacesuits, folks, and get ready to go where no audience has gone before as the inaugural Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival lifts off in Leichardt. Lighting up screens from November 19-21 at the Actors Centre Australia complex, the festival includes 10 features and 41 shorts from 20 countries.

Australian director Mark Toia’s Monsters of Man will open the festival. Shot in Cambodia, the film features a corrupt CIA agent going rogue whose plan to use prototype robots to take down a drug ring goes horribly wrong, natch. Festival director Simon Foster dubs it “Predator-meets-Robocop”, which is enough to get us over the line. Cult Mad Max 2 star Vernon Wells shows up in Travis Bain’s mini-feature Starspawn: Overture.

There’s a strong contingent of films shot by female directors in the line-up. In Russian director Nikita Argunov’s Nolan-like mind-bender Coma, an architect wakes up to a world that has been torn apart and is constantly shifting back together again in bewildering ways. Italian writer/director Emanuela Rossi’s post-apocalyptic debut Darkness features a father who cloisters his three daughters in a shadowy mansion, claiming that the sun has gone out and that most of the world is dead.

There’s a double bill of Middle Eastern movies on the Saturday night in Iranian directors Ali and Emad Katmiri’s The Fabricated, and United Arab Emirates filmmaker Shahad Ameen’s Scales. The latter is set in a fishing village plagued by sea monsters and has a strong feminist undercurrent as an ostracised girl sets out to put right what the men of the village could not.

If Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker left you feeling a bit blah, local filmmaker Richard de Carvalho’s fan fiction alternative A Blaster in the Right Hands might just use the force a little more favourably over in the shorts category, which also features Japanese director Yuichi Kondo’s Ryoko’s Qubit Sum, a queer-themed romance that took home the Outstanding Film Award at last year’s Berlin Sci-Fi Film Fest.

Freaky cinema your thing? Check out this David Lynch retrospective

Stephen A Russell
Written by
Stephen A Russell

Details

Address:
Price:
$20-$100
Opening hours:
Various
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