2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival

The 2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival has been judged a huge success with twenty two world premieres, including nine features and three documentary features, 62 Australian premieres and 143 films from 49 different countries screened over just 11 days.

The Film Festival has been visited and enjoyed by numerous well known players in the Australian film industry including Hugo Weaving, Natalie Imbruglia, Rolf de Heer, Scott Hicks, Bruce Beresford, Matt Day, Sarah Watt, William McInnes, Warwick Thornton, and Aden Young – to name just a few.

Attendances across the main screening program grew by 30% from 2007, with 18% of sessions SOLD OUT.

I myself managed to see 13 film out of a planned 15. In the end, for a variety or reasons, I was too exhausted to even consider attending my two scheduled screenings last Saturday. One was the free screening of Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe, which was to be followed immediately by a new documentary on the Senegalese singer, Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love.

I’m really glad I was able to immerse myself in the Film Festival to the extent I could. Technically it would have been possible to see up to five movies a day for 11 days straight, but that would have taken a Herculean effort on my part, and quite frankly I wasn’t up to it.

Considering I didn’t attend even one screening last year, I think I did very well this time around.
I’m still in the process of writing reviews for a bunch of films, which I will eventually add here, but overall the highlights for me were Steven Soderberg’s, Che (parts 1 & 2); the Korean film, Treeless Mountain, and the Turkish film, Three Monkeys. I was also very impressed with JCVD starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the new Australian film, Van Diemen’s Land.

Image courtesy of 2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival

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In Review: Three Monkeys (2008)

Yesterday, was my ‘movie marathon’ day at the 2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival, where I caught three films. Here they are, reviewed in the order in which I saw them.

I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen a Turkish film before, which is a pity, because if Three Monkeys is anything to go by, I have missed some terrific movies.

This is a dark, stylish, noir thriller which sees a man agreeing to take the rap for his political master who is involved in a car accident. In return for doing time for a crime he did not commit, his boss will continue to pay his salary to his family, and also settle the ‘debt’ with a lump sum payment when the man is eventually released. While he is in prison, his wife is left to hold the family together and she and her son quickly get caught up in a web of passion and betrayal.

Director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan carried off the Best Director Award at Cannes for this, his fifth feature, and it’s not hard to see why.

Three Monkeys is is a dark, brooding film, where every shot has been thought through and framed with meticulous detail. Long, intense close ups of the principal characters produces sustained psychological tension as unspoken words seem to fly through the air like knives.

The principal cast of Three Monkeys; Yavuz Bingöl, Hatice Aslan, Ahmat Rifal Sungar, and Ercan Kesal, are univerally good, but top credits should go to Hatice Aslan, the femme fatale of the piece, who has the ability to convey many layers of meaning by saying little and feeling much.

Highly recommended.

“Every shot seems lifted right off the wall of an art gallery and just as powerfully, if quietly, satisfying.” (Hollywood Reporter)

Four stars
Image courtesy of BigPond Adelaide Film Festival

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