The 64th Sydney Film Festival ended on 18 June this year. In this extensive piece, we look back at the festival as a whole, cataloguing our reviews and interviews, as well as giving out some awards to the best of the festival.
Official Competition
The winner of the 2017 Sydney Film Prize was On Body and Soul, directed by Ildiko Enyedi. You can read our review of that film here.
| Title | No. Staff Seen | High Rec. | Rec. | Not Rec. | S. Not Rec. |
| Felicite | 4 | 3 | 1 | ||
| Happy End | 9 | 6 | 3 | ||
| I Am Not Your Negro | 6 | 1 | 4 | 1 | |
| My Happy Family | 3 | 3 | |||
| On Body and Soul | 5 | 1 | 4 | ||
| Pop Aye | 3 | 3 | |||
| The Beguiled | 8 | 5 | 3 | ||
| The Other Side of Hope | 7 | 5 | 2 | ||
| The Untamed | 5 | 5 | |||
| Una | 3 | 1 | 2 | ||
| We Don’t Need A Map | 4 | 1 | 3 | ||
| Wolf and Sheep | 4 | 1 | 3 |
Awards
Consensus – Best Film of the Official Competition: NO CONSENSUS
For the first time in four years of covering Sydney Film Festival, our contributors can come to no clear consensus about the best film of the Official Competition. No film has more than a single rating of Highly Recommended, which suggests not merely a disagreement among our editors and contributors about the best film but rather a disappointing state of the competition as a whole.
Consensus – Features That Deserved a Competition Berth:
By the Time It Gets Dark, dir. Anocha Suwichakornpong – Thailand
“It’s a film that paints a flawed, enduring image of modernity, of Thailand as a country in a lengthy process of negotiation with its past, and of its increasingly globalised place in the world. The various attempts at connection, tethers of intimacy, and yearning for meaning create a potent image of broader human experience.” – Review by Jeremy Elphick
The Ornithologist, dir. Joao Pedro Rodrigues – Portugal
“The work never feels particular indebted to a certain reading of religion or spirituality. Rodrigues’ depiction of this introspection creates an immersive and complex work, as well as his most conceptually dense. While it is only the latest in a string of ground-breaking works from the director, The Ornithologist cements Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ legacy as one of Portugal’s greatest filmmakers.” – Review by Jeremy Elphick
Consensus – Best of the Rest:
Good Time, dir. Josh and Benny Safdie – USA
“Heaven Knows What situated an oft-harrowing intimate narrative within the fractious web of the social and architectural infrastructure of New York City. Good Time, the latest film from Josh and Benny Safdie, swaps out those everpresent physical markers of the cityscape for televisual ones: the runaway tale of Robert Pattinson’s Constantine Nikas feels like a background story in a COPS episode brought to bizarrely symphonic life.'” – Conor Bateman
Newton, dir. Amit Masurkar – India
“If Court (2015) used its darkly comic sensibility to lay bare the nightmarish absurdity of the Indian legal system, Newton takes on that sensibility to provide an honest reflection of Indian democracy and its many contradictions. The strength of the film is its understatedness and its universality, the way it ultimately makes a fiercely political statement not limited to just the Indian political landscape.” – Review by Virat Nehru
Song to Song, dir. Terrence Malick – USA
“Terrence Malick’s woozy love heptagon is not about music, SXSW, or Austin, despite what years of production and the online proliferation of film stills involving Rooney Mara and a guitar might have you believe. Anchored in Mara’s almost tragic story of self-discovery, Song to Song is immediately affecting in ways Knight of Cups felt intellectually abstract. Emmanuel Lubezki’s swooping camera seems to latch onto the same intimate promise of the Texan yard in The Tree of Life, though here the beauty is corrupted by the felt presence of invisible tethers: to the past, to some fantasy ideal of love, to unfulfilled dreams.” – Conor Bateman
Consensus – Best Documentaries of the Festival:
The War Show, dir. Andreas Møl Dalsgaard, Obaidah Zytoon – Denmark, Finland, Syria
“Bearing less thematic resemblance to the current Syrian documentaries than the Arabic cinema of displacement — particularly Tewfik Saleh’s harrowing portrayal of the Palestinian exile, The Dupes (1973) — The War Show will linger as a bloodied testament to the loss and sacrifice faced by those forced into diaspora.” – Review by Isabelle Galet-Lalande
Ama-San, dir. Cláudia Varejão – Portugal
“The director challenges romantic notions of the tradition with these frank inclusions, her camera working alongside the women, making us feel the pull of their muscles in ours — even as, per Sophie Mayer’s remark on ecofeminist cinema, the film can’t avoid the irony that we experience this from the luxury of our cinema seats.” – Review by Blythe Worthy
Austerlitz, dir. Sergei Loznitsa – Ukraine
“Yet it is precisely the director’s economy and calm before this loaded historical subject that makes Austerlitz all the more powerful, allowing the vagaries of past and present to unfurl fugue-like in counterpoint before our eyes. It is a worthy addition to a body of work that has continued to trace the contours of loss, memory and history.” – Review by Ivan Čerečina
Best Acting Performances:
Ia Shugliashvili, My Happy Family
“The lyrics might be a touch on the nose, but Shugliashvili’s performance is so arresting. The inscrutability that has come to define Manana for the preceding hour threatens to slip away in front of a crowd, but she keeps her eyes down, her fingers moving with technical precision, her voice melodic yet emotionless. ” – Review by Conor Bateman
Charo Santos-Concio, The Woman Who Left
“The emotional crescendo of The Woman Who Left in Horacia and Hollanda’s final shared scene is marked by exactly this temporal blurring. As the two take turns singing a cappella renditions of classic songs—West Side Story‘s “Someday”, for instance—they drift between peaks of intimacy, honesty, anger, frustration, and resolve. As difficult to describe as any of Diaz’s most sensorily breathtaking scenes, it exists in impermanence; operating as both a self-contained act and also an integral component of his wide-reaching narrative. ” – Review by Jeremy Elphick
Reza Akhlaghirad, A Man of Integrity
“A Man of Integrity is a character study of how Iranian citizenry themselves are complicit in their own oppression by the state. Reza Akhlaghirad elevates Rasoulof’s humanistic drama by showing us the impact this machinery of oppression has on its victims on a personal level, using subtle facial expressions to convey a gradually growing sense of internalised rage.” – Virat Nehru
Best Cinematography:
Sean Price Williams, Good Time
“Awash in neon pink and green hues, Good Time is a hazy and intoxicating visual trip. Williams’ handheld cinematography — tight on faces and readily claustrophobic — brings us into the headspace of Pattinson’s Constantine without locking us there. The fluctuation between the intimate and the coolly observant is one of the film’s greatest strengths.” – Conor Bateman
Jonathan Frantz, Maliglutit
“You can spot the frost bite on the actors better than you can the horizon, where white ice meets the blinding glare of the sky, and the fact that cinematographer Jonathan Frantz’s camera is reticent to move is understandable — at -48°C, it barely can.” – Review by Jaymes Durante
Rui Poças, The Ornithologist
“The religious imagery in the film is rarely incidental. The permutations of mythology, the Bible, and Rodrigues’ own personal interactions with it create an image of a markedly spiritual journey, as well as a decidedly personal one.” – Review by Jeremy Elphick
Most Divisive Film: The Beguiled
Worst Performance: Jake Gyllenhaal, Okja
Best Performance (Dark Horse Edition): Val Kilmer, chainsawing an amplifier in half, Song to Song
Best Closing Sequence: By the Time It Gets Dark
Best Musical Score: Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin), Good Time
Best Karaoke Scene: Happy End
Best Moshpit: Song to Song
Best Throwaway Gag: Window cleaning, The Other Side of Hope
Best Animal Performance: The titular Axolotl in Axolotl Overkill
Best Line Delivery: [tie] “Okay” – Claes Bang in The Square and “Okay” – Elisabeth Moss in The Square
Best French Loverboy: Claude Lanzmann, Napalm
Interviews (9)
- Akihiko Shiota, Writer/Director of Wet Woman in the Wind*
- Anocha Suwichakornpong, Writer/Director of By the Time It Gets Dark
- Aroush Sarvestani & Behrouz Boochani, Co-writer/co-director of Chauka Please Tell Us The Time
- Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Writer/Director of The Ornithologist*
- Kirsten Tan, Writer/Director of Pop Aye
- Rusudan Glurjidze, Writer/Director of House of Others
- Shahrbanoo Sadat, Writer/Director of Wolf and Sheep
- Shubhashish Bhutiani, Writer/Director of Hotel Salvation
- Teona Strugar Mitevska, Writer/Director of When The Day Had No Name
*= interview from a previous festival
Other Coverage
Reviews (47)
| Highly Recommended | Recommended | Not Recommended | Strongly Not Recommended |
| Ama-San Call Me By Your Name* Fashionista Newton Ordinary People The Ornithologist* The War Show The Woman Who Left* |
* = review from a previous festival