Sydney Film Festival

The irony was not lost on Alice Englert – writer, director and star of the dark comedy Bad Behaviour – that her Sydney Film Festival premiere was taking place within the same program that featured a film retrospective devoted to her mother, Jane Campion. “It does feel kind of insane,” Englert told the Sydney Morning Herald of the festival’s family affair.

The documentary feature, Freedom is Beautiful, focuses on two remarkable Kurdish Iranian asylum seekers who are musicians, artists, poets and close friends. Farhad Bandesh and Mostafa ‘Moz’ Azimitibar were also freed within a month of each other, in 2020, after each having spent eight years locked up in brutal refugee camps on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and a Melbourne detention center run by the Australian Government.

Cate Blanchett might be the biggest star of the Aussie drama, The New Boy, but the film’s opening night premiere for the 70th annual Sydney Film Festival (June 7-18) prompted the biggest response for its smallest stars. Blanchett, who is also a co-producer, was absent as Indigenous writer/director Warwick Thornton took to the stage at the State Theatre and gave a special nod to the eight young boys in their first film – including the young lead, Aswan Reid.

Just a few weeks after receiving the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, the Belgium film Close, written and directed by Lukas Dhont, won this Sunday the biggest prize at Sydney Film Festival (SFF). Close is the story of two male teens who attend secondary school in a rural town.

The third time is the charm: so the old adage goes, and that’s certainly been the case for the long-awaited, twice-delayed 68th annual Sydney Film Festival, which opened November 3 at the iconic Sydney State Theatre with a packed house watching Western Sydney-set drama, Here Out West.   The prestigious festival – which was canceled altogether in 2020 due to Covid – usually takes place in June each year, but this year was initially pushed back to August in line with delays from other major festivals, including Cannes.