Conor Bateman's Blog, page 6

In The Crosswind

Martti Helde’sIn the Crosswind is a powerful look at the harrowing events of the Russian Holocaust through the eyes of an Estonian woman who is exiled to Siberia with her young daughter. Its emotional potency and historical accuracy, though, only take it so far. Told mostly through the structural conceit of frozen moments in time, with actors frozen in their places as the camera moves around them, the filmmakers are able to craft an impressive physical re-enactment of reality. Unfortunately,...

The Liar

We open on the beige walls of a high-rise apartment. A young woman, sharply dressed in business attire, sits calmly on the couch, flipping through a magazine – but only pausing at the jewelry ads within – whilst sipping from a coffee thermos, the kind coated in a clear layer of plastic to protect the hands from any residual heat. A real estate agent walks around the space and talks through the various features of the apartment, paramount among them is the view of the city. The young woman sm...

The Nightmare

Rodney Ascher’s strengths as a filmmaker come down to how he manages to mess with the minds of his audience. Whether that’s by presenting increasingly in-depth analysis of select sequences in Kubrick’sThe Shining or by taking something absurd – a fear of the 1964 Screen Gems logo – and turning it into a collective symbol for the fear of popular culture controlled by a mysterious force. InThe Nightmare, he is able to fairly effectively play with expectations and the experience of sleep paraly...

Queen of Earth – An Interview with Director Alex Ross Perry

Alex Ross Perry’sQueen of Earth, his follow-up to last year’s searingListen Up Philip, mostly unfurls as a two-hander, duelling performances from Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston convey a corrosive friendship that escalates in animosity during a week-long stay at a lake house. The film played to raves at Berlin earlier this year and seems to be having a similar response here in Melbourne. Ahead of the film’s second screening, we spoke to Perry about the process of making the film, as we...

Vertical Cinema – An Interview with Artist/Filmmaker Joost Rekveld

The Melbourne International Film Festival are screening a series of experimental films this year in a program called Vertical Cinema, commissioned by theSonic Acts festival. Ten shorts will be screened, on a format akin to flipping 35mm film on its side, in Federation Square’s Deakin Edge. We spoke to one of the filmmakers involved in the project, Joost Rekveld, ahead of the screenings on Friday the 14th of August.

First I want to ask about form, because you started out shooting on film in 1...

Prophet’s Prey

Amy Berg beat Alex Gibney to the punch with her 2006 documentary Deliver Us From Evil, which looked at child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Gibney’s 2012 Mea Maxima Culpa treads similar ground, andonly a few years after that film, it seems like the interests of both filmmakers have once more aligned. Comparisons from Berg’s Prophet’s Prey to Gibney’s Scientology exposé Going Clear can easily be drawn: both documentaries follow rampant abuse and corruption within religious institutions, ty...

The Ground We Won – An Interview with Director Christopher Pryor

Christopher Pryor’sThe Ground We Won is a character-focused, black and white documentary about a rugby club in New Zealand. Despite its seemingly simple focus, the film is actually a powerful commentary on masculinity and our inter-generational attachment to sport. Ahead of the film’s screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, we spoke to Pryor about his film.

I’ll start with perhaps an obvious question, which is how did you first come to the story of the Reporoa rugby team?

It...

The Lobster

Yorgos Lanthimos once again proves himself to be an adept social satirist with his latest film, the romance-skewering The Lobster. His first English-language feature, the film sets a wide target, aiming at societal constructions of romance and the way in which people alter themselves to find love. It’s misanthropic, as expected, but perhaps the most broadly funny film from the Greek filmmaker yet. Working with an international cast, and shot on location in Ireland, The Lobster eschews the ex...

Force of Destiny

Paul Cox’sForce of Destiny cannot really be faulted for aiming to be anearnest exploration of impending death and pushing a strong pro-organ donation message,whilst also,as Cox said before the film opened the Melbourne International Film Festival last night, strongly arguing for the importance of love in humanity. In the film’s execution, though, this journey through grief and self-evaluation is a scattershot affair, abstract collages distract from the mostly plain cinematography, the gradua...

Out of the Mist: An Alternate History of New Zealand Cinema

Out of the Mist, perhaps counterintuitively, opens on apackof clouds. The clouds in question hover over New Zealand’s Mt. Cook, captured ingorgeous aerial photography– and in Cinerama no less. The first voice we hear is likewisesurprising, a slightly pitched up Orson Welles narrating the 1958 psuedo-travel documentarySouth Seas Adventure. Wellesspeaks as if opening an adventure epic, savouring every syllable -“they call this country ‘Aotearoa’, the land of the long white cloud.” As the music...