Film Update: Brisbane International Film Festival
This year the Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF) found its home at the Hoyts Regent cinema. Brisbane's most baroque architecture, the ghost of a Genet play, on-site alcohol–who could want more? This change of venue was perhaps the most visible sign of broader changes to the Festival, which seemed more certain of its feet than ever in its third year. Artistic Director Anne Demy-Geroe, and the Programming Advisory Panel assembled a bold and eclectic celluloid diet, with enough toothsome morsels to sate even the jaded pallet of your despondent (don't ask) correspondent.
Highlights this year were Asian films (as always), and animated works. The first session I caught–Amazing Model Animation–was wonderment all the way, from the Festival's cinema trailer on. The trailer harked from the Brisbane-based Abomination studio, a whimsical stop-motion evocation of regional identity. A gecko poking tongues, a beleaguered claymation spectator with stray strands of film unspooling from the shoulders, side-kick projector making like an agitated bow-wow, and a set like some bomb-blasted back-o'Bourke. It's great to see something this inventive made locally, and even better when it's done for corporate colour.
The first film of the program proper was (South Australian) Durand Grieg's Total Recession, one of the most remarkable Australian films I've seen. Director Grieg lost two years labouring at this monsterpiece, and the technical rigour shows in every frame. Supremely sublime, Total Recession is as compelling as it is revolting-punk rock's rhetoric about the suburban nightmare cast in a carcass of rotting roast-chicken. The Junky's Christmas, which followed, succeeded by virtue of William Burroughs' drawled, dead pan narration and the sardonic wit of his story. Burroughs is a fantastic orator, and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
From The Hair Opera. Director, Yuri Obitani. Still courtesy Brisbane International Film Festival.
