Sydney Underground Film Festival has announced the program for its 10th instalment, and fittingly for such a significant anniversary, it’s a celebration of everything that has helped shape its identity. Across its slate of festival hits, feature documentaries, and retrospectives, there are several names synonymous with bold and independent cinema to be found such as Todd Solondz, John Waters, David Cronenberg, Brian de Palma and Richard Linklater. At the same time, it hasn’t forgotten its duty to bring exciting new voices to the Inner West, featuring international and local filmmakers across feature-length and short-form work. This year’s mid-September weekend will boast all of the irreverence and daring that loyal Factory Theatre attendees have come to expect.
Perhaps the strongest coup in the line-up lands on opening night: Wiener-Dog, the latest from director Todd Solondz (Dark Horse, Welcome to the Dollhouse). Selected for Cannes and Sundance, it curiously skipped both Sydney Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival, making this its Australian premiere. Several other lauded features are making their Australian theatrical debut from the international festival circuit: alt-comic voyage into darkness Entertainment (directed by Rick Alverson, previously behind The Comedy),1 psychokinetic thriller The Mind’s Eye (Joe Begos, Almost Human), black comedy Trash Fire (Richard Bates Jr, Excision and SUFF 2014’s Suburban Gothic), and post-apocalyptic paean to depravity We Are the Flesh (Emiliano Rocha Minter, who has earned the praises of Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu).
Sydney audiences will also be treated to the local premieres of a handful of favourites from Revelation Perth Film Festival: Anna Biller’s luminous comic melodrama The Love Witch,2 Can Evrenol’s bone-chilling Turkish horror Baskin, Leo Gabin’s fragmented YouTube collage A Crackup At The Race Riots, and Steve Oram’s Dogme 95-inflected disassembly of human nature Aaaaaaaah!. Sion Sono also makes an appearance, but rather than the quiet and lyrical Whispering Star that featured in Perth’s line-up, SUFF has opted for The Virgin Psychics, a bawdy mix of superhero adventure and adolescent sex romp.
MonsterFest is also presenting some feature premieres. The most notable of these is Dead Hands Dig Deep, a harrowing exposé on masochistic rock frontman Edwin Borsheim by 19 year-old Sydney director Jai Love, who will be attending the festival and participating in a post-screening Q&A. Monster’s other presentations include Natasha Lyonne-starring body horror Antibirth (music video director Danny Perez), Christopher Lloyd-featuring tale of psychopathy I Am Not a Serial Killer (BAFTA nominee Billy O’Brien), and sexy horror-comedy Vixen Velvet’s Zombie Massacre (SUFF’s very own festival/program director Stefan Popescu).
Documentary offerings are no slouch either. De Palma and Linklater feature here as subjects for analysis from their most famous admirers: Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow in De Palma, and a sea of familiar faces in Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny. The most infamous film in this section, however, may be Rick Harper’s Room Full of Spoons, which reveals the making of Tommy Wiseau’s so-bad-it’s-good masterpiece The Room in a way that Wiseau himself has sought to ban, as Popescu nervously informed the room at the program launch. For more challenging factual fare, SUFF has netted the world premiere of 57 Lawson, Ben Ferris’ measured docu-fiction that observes the tents of a central-Sydney housing estate. Other potential highlights in the stream are Irene Taylor Brodsky’s chilling murder mystery Beware the Slenderman, Nanfu Weng’s sex work-activist saga Hooligan Sparrow, Justin Schein and David Mehiman’s morally murky suicide discussion Left on Purpose, and George Gittoes’ Afghanistan art manifesto Snow Monkey.3
In honour of its 10th year, however, SUFF has pulled out the stops on its retrospective offerings. The closing-night crowd will be treated to Multiple Maniacs, the long-lost John Waters masterpiece restored in all of its smutty glory, and anniversary screenings of de Palma’s Carrie and Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch will take place over the weekend. Joining the usual line up of shorts presentations like ‘WTF’ and ‘Ozploit’ is ‘SUFF Blast From the Past’, a collection of short highlights from the SUFF programs of 2007 and beyond. A potential dark-horse highlight, however, is Re:cinema’s presentation of 16mm films by local experimental filmmakers Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie, along with workshops by Tuohy and the Sydney Film School that will give attendees the chance to play with celluloid for themselves—a throwback if ever there was one. Ferris and Gittoes are among the lecturers for the remaining masterclasses presented by SFS, all of which will prove for another trip into the wild and wonderful, courtesy of a festival that looks primed to go for another ten years.
Sydney Underground Film Festival runs from Thursday the 15th of September to Sunday the 18th of September. To find further information and buy tickets, visit their website.