Conor Bateman's Blog, page 10

Strangerland – An Interview with Director Kim Farrant

Kim Farrant’sStrangerland is a visually striking feature debut set in the Australian outback that follows a family in crisis following thedisappearanceof their two children. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and has its Australian premiere in competition at the Sydney Film Festival tonight.

I read that it took you twelve years to make Strangerland.

Thirteen.

Thirteen? That’s real determination to get a story made. What kept you going?

What kept me going was a love...

Haemoo

Shim Sung-bo’s debut feature filmis utterly brutal, both to its characters and its audience. Adapted from a stage playby Sung-bo and hisMemories of Murder director Bong Joon-ho, which in turn is loosely based on a real life event,Haemoo is a slow-burning actof misdirection, jolted to life and completely rendered anew about halfway through its runtime.It’s a film about desperation amidst tragic circumstances, a tale of survival that emerges from melodrama to reveal that what was initially a s...

Ulrich Seidl: A Director at Work

Something that makes Ulrich Seidl so fascinating a director is that his filmmaking process actively merges the real and unreal – Jacques Rivette said that every film is a documentary of its own making, Godard’s variation on the phrase is that every film is a documentary of its actors, and Seidl seems to be one of the few directors today that places those ideas front and center in their films. His sense of “staged reality” (which I wrote about in my review ofIn The Basement yesterday) creates...

In The Basement

Though the title positions the latest Ulrich Seidl documentary as being about basements, in actuality it’s mostly focused on the people within them. Whilst the paraphernalia and oddities on show in the dens of these Austrian citizens tends to amuse, shock or confuse, Seidl is focused on what these spaces can tell us about these people, and thereafter who these people see themselves as; in an interview with the Austrian Film Commission he said that the basement is “the place where people atta...

Tomorrowland

For a film that champions idealism and positivity, the future for Disney’sTomorrowland appears quite bleak. According to early box office figures, it seems set to be aLone Ranger-level hit for the company (read: not a hit) in the United States, and the marketing for the film showcases, above all else, thatno one reallyhad anyidea how to sell the film.That’s not really a knock against them though, because even in the watching ofTomorrowland it doesn’t give itself to easy categorisation, despi...

The Human Behavior Experiments (dir. Alex Gibney, 2006)

In our regular column, Less Than (Five) Zero, we take a look at films that have received less than 50 logged watches on Letterboxd, aiming to discover hidden gems in independent and world cinema. This week Conor Bateman looks ata relatively early film from prolific documentarian Alex Gibney,The Human Behavior Experiments.

Date Watched: 21st May, 2015
Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 11

This year at the Sydney Film Festival, two films from documentarian Alex Gibney will be screenin...

Age of Cannibals

It’s always off-putting to have a film ostensibly billed as a comedy be unable to draw laughter for almost its entire runtime. Aside for one scene of physical comedy involving the packing of a suitcase,Johannes Naber’sAge of Cannibals is a joyless trudge through a misguided critique of capitalism; a satire lacking wit, intelligence or humour and instead packed with offensive racial and religious comments that it fails to fully distinguish as the thoughts of its characters alone.

A script cou...

Miners Shot Down

Rehad Desai’sMiners Shot Down isn’t a particularly well-crafted documentary, with an overreliance ontalking head interviews and Desai’s didactic voiceover to try and direct the viewer to see the Marikana massacre as a microcosm of the abuse of workers rights across the country. Whilst that issue is important, this approach sees Desai caught between the roles of investigative journalist and documentarian, when his strength clearly lies with the former.What liftsMiners Shot Down considerably,...

Of Men and War

“He was a fucker in the wrong place at the wrong time,” says a now-retired army veteran, not with the cold stare we have come to expect when lines like that are delivered in films, but with watery eyes focused on anything but the people around him. His anger still comes out in the phrase, but his face betrays the intended sentiment. In therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, the group of men featured inLaurent Bécue-Renard’sOf Men and War are now-distant echoes of who they once were, hau...

Clouds of Sils Maria

Clouds of Sils Maria, the latest film from Olivier Assayas, is a return to the behind-the-scenes hijinks of his masterful 1996 featureIrma Vep, swapping out film for theatre, yet retaining the amusing stunt casting (Jean-Pierre Léaud directing actors replaced by Kristen Stewart wryly talking about celebrity) and snappydialogue. A film about aging and self-transformation, Silsis a janus-faced feature,at once a nuanced study of a relationship that unfortunately shifts into clumsy subtext-as-te...