These past 3 weeks I have been volunteering at the Melbourne International Film Festival and I have seen some amazing films. Hoho, here’s a list:
- Partners in Crime, Taiwan, Fiction, dir. Chang Jung-Chi
- HEAD, USA, Fiction, Dir. Bob Rafelson
- Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, USA, Documentary, dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland
- Burroughs: The Movie, USA, Documentary, dir. Howard Brookner
- The Cult of JT Leroy, USA, Documentary, dir. Majorie Sturm
- Experimental Shorts
- International Shorts
- Fresh Dressed, USA, Documentary, dir. Sacha Jenkins
- Cartel Land, Mexico, USA, Documentary, dir. Matthew Heineman
- Being 14, France, Fiction, dir. helene Zimmerman
- Graceful Girls, Australia, Documentary, dir. Olivia Peniston-Bird
- Speed Sisters, Canada, Denmark, Palestine, Qatar, UK, USA, Documentary, dir. Amber Fares
- Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown, USA, Documentary, dir. Alex Gibney
- She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, USA, Documentary, dir. Mary Dore
So from this list, it’s obvious that I love watching films haha. But seriously, it’s obvious that I love watching documentaries (9 out of 12 feature length films that watched were documentaries). I find other people’s stories and experiences so interesting and inspiring. My favourite type of book is biographies about amazing women (The past 3 weeks I have read I Am Malala, The Time In-between, and Just Kids), and I think that my focus on the struggles and stories of women is evident in the list above (5 out of 9 documentaries about women, 5 out of 9 directed by women). It is interesting to note that the documentaries that are directed by women are about other women. I find it really uplifting to know that women are taking more control in the representation of our gender, and all these documentaries were positive representations of women, which is what I believe to be the number one solution for fixing the gender representation problem that the media has.
In terms of inspiring aesthetics, Cartel Land was breathtaking. It documented the two vigilante groups that formed to fight the Cartel in America and in Mexico. The time-lapse shots of the landscape and the rising and setting sun were so vibrantly coloured and contrasted poignantly with the jumpy hand-held footage of the camera operator covering gun fights between the Cartel and the vigilantes. The film was also cleverly edited to bookend the film with shots of the Cartel cooking methamphetamine, with the audience’s suspicions of who this man is confirmed in the last shot. I thought it was a lovely narrative device that reminded me of crime thriller television shows, which is relevant to film 3 when thinking about drama devices that work well in documentaries.
The Experimental Shorts screening was pretty eventful for me, which you can read about in a previous post here.
Surprisingly, I also watched a lot of films at home in between watching films at MIFF… Have I spiralled into some dark place that resembles a cinema with me surrounded by strangers who yell at people for checking their phones during the film, whilst I survive on a diet of popcorn and popcorn alone? … Probably.
