Melbourne 2024

Some Australians have objected to all these outsiders depicting their countrymen as drunken kangaroo-killers, but the reviews were outstanding, especially when Wake in Fright was revived a little over a decade ago. “Yes,” wrote Australian critic Adrian Martin, “there is certainly the emptiness, the roads to nowhere, the cosmic despair in Kotcheff’s indelible vision. But there is also a dark, explosive energy, no matter how misdirected; things do, indeed, happen. Kotcheff found himself fascinated by the contradictions of Australian life, and he explored, to the bitter end, his own ambivalence toward it. This fascination and ambivalence found their form in a vivid, eternally haunting film.”

On August 16, Hear My Eyes will present the world premiere of a new restoration with a live score performed by Surprise Chef as part of this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival. Opening this Thursday with Memoir of a Snail, the second claymation feature from Adam Elliot (Mary and Max), and running through August 25, Melbourne will present more than 250 films.

On August 17, the festival will celebrate Godzilla’s seventieth birthday with an all-night marathon of seven movies. Total running time: 700 minutes. There will be strands devoted to the work of Yvonne Rainer and the Iranian New Wave, and the program of recent restorations includes Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room (1949), Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), and Chantal Akerman’s Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989). The Headliners strand features such Cannes favorites as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.

The Guardian’s Luke Buckmaster and Time Out’s Stephen A. Russell have each selected ten films from the lineup to recommend. One of Buckmaster’s picks is Magic Beach, a unique adaptation of Alison Lester’s beloved 1990 children’s book in that director Robert Connolly has asked ten animators to render passages of the story in his or her own style. Russell is looking forward to Alexis Manya Spraic’s The World According to Allee Willis, a portrait of the late songwriter who cowrote Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” the Pet Shop Boys’ “What Have I Done to Deserve This?,” and the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance.”

Bright Horizons is Melbourne’s only competitive strand, and the aim here is to spotlight first and second features from up and coming filmmakers. Among the ten titles slated to compete are Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, Gints Zilbalodis’s animated Flow, and India Donaldson’s Good One, which opens in New York on Friday. Metrograph Journal has brought Donaldson and Eliza Hittman (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) together for a conversation about the writing and production of Good One. “I love short stories,” says Donaldson, “and I love films that, rather than going broader, go deeper.”