the Curb

Director Silje Evensmo Jacobsen's documentary A New Kind of Wilderness won the 2024 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema – Documentary and will be screening at the Adelaide Film Festival on Saturday 26 October and Tuesday 29 October. This serene and moving film follows a young family in the midst of transition. Parents Maria and Nik are raising their four children on a remote farm in Norway,...

Documentarian Ian Darling's filmography includes a myriad of films that explore the fabric of Australian society. With Paul Kelly - Stories of Me , Darling immersed viewers into the poetry of one of Australia's greatest lyricists. In The Final Quarter , the excoriating and cruel racism inflicted upon footy legend Adam Goodes is explored through the media's coverage of the event. Then, working as a...

The AFLW was established in 2016, expanding from an initial eight teams to eighteen in 2022. In the years since it launched, the league has grown to showcase the different styles of football that each corner of Australia has to offer. In Sal Balharrie and Danielle MacLean's essential documentary Like My Brother, we follow four AFLW hopefuls from the Tiwi Islands, Rina, Freda, Juliana and Jess, as...

Over the span of eleven minutes, the impressive short film Yeah the Boys sways and swerves through a boozy night with the lads in nondescript backyard Australia. Drinking culture, Aussie larrikinism, and the masculinity that finds fertile ground in these areas is brought to life with a pulsing score by The Avalanches. Oh, and all of this is presented with an the organic dance movements choreograph...

To call Parish Malfitano's sophomore feature, Salt Along the Tongue , a straight up horror film feels like a disservice to the experience of watching this magnificent melodrama-adjacent film. Yes, there are most certainly horrific elements - blood features heavily throughout the film, upsetting tales about the symbiotic relationship between wasps and figs are told, bodies float in the air in unset...

Finnish-Australian filmmaker Saara Lamberg has crafted a filmography which features genre-defying, boundary pushing films like 2017's Innuendo , 2022's Westermarck Effect , and the docu-fiction film The Lies We Tell Ourselves , which received screenings at Perth's Revelation International Film Festival and the Sydney Underground Film Festival . Screenings of The Lies We Tell Ourselves at these fes...

The Koalas is a documentary that follows in the footsteps of the McIntyre's Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story and Jane Hammonds's Black Cockatoo Crisis, in that it essays the plight of an Australian icon - the koala - alongside the stories of the activists, ecologists, politicians, and wildlife carers who are putting themselves on the line to save the iconic creature. Directed and produced by Gregory Mi...

The upcoming 18th Annual Sydney Underground Film Festival kicks off in Newtown, NSW, on Thursday 12 September with a Smell-O-Rama screening of John Waters cult classic Female Trouble , celebrating its 50th anniversary. The festival runs until Sunday 15 September with a huge array of films and features ranging from the truly bonkers Vulcanizadora to the superbly surreal Can't Stop the Music extrava...

Law Chen's familial documentary Starring Jerry as Himself follows retired Florida man Jerry C. Hsu as he's recruited by Chinese police to become an undercover agent. The documentary follows Jerry as he retells his story about how he was recruited, what actions he needed to take to help inform the agents, and, most importantly, the lengths he goes to to hide his recruitment from his family. Starrin...

One of the smash hit films of the year on the festival circuit has been Mike Cheslik's wonderfully inventive Hundreds of Beavers . Ahead of the films launch in Australia earlier this year, Nadine Whitney caught up with the creative team behind the film to discuss all of its eccentricities. Nadine wrote about the film in her review saying: Describing  Hundreds of Beavers  is almost reduct...

With 2021s phenomenal documentary River under his belt, filmmaker and musician Joseph Nizeti is no stranger to bringing the world of nature to life on the big screen in a way that transforms how we see the environment with live alongside. With his latest film, Fungi: Web of Life , which he co-directs alongside Gisela Kaufmann, Joseph turns from the worlds rivers to the unexplored world of mycology...

When tickets went on sale for Andy Burkitt and Jack Braddy's independent Australian feature film, The Organist , at the 2024 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), the filmmakers managed a rare feat: they sold out their first two screenings, with a third screening quickly being scheduled. Receiving wide audience support for their world premiere is a phenomenal achievement for these emerging...

Akmal Saleh is one of Australia's finest stand up comedians having spent decades keeping Australians entertained through his observant and enjoyable brand of comedy. When not on the stage, Akmal can be heard on screen in an array of kids animated shows like The Wild Adventures of Blinky Bill, Tracey McBean , and the superb animated series 100% Wolf. The sequel to the 2020 werewolf hit, 200% Wolf ,...

In a Violent Nature is one of the most gruesome and gory horror films of the year. It's also a film that Nadine Whitney has called a pure slasher death trip. Director Chris Nash takes audiences on the slasher ride of the year, with his camera following the gnarly Johnny (Ry Barrett) as a silent brute slaughtering an array of college kids who possibly deserve their squishy demise. In the following...

Ruby O'Sullivan-Belfrage is a writer and critic who works and plays on unceded Wurundjeri land. In the wake of Afterwar’s screening at Sydney Film Festival, Ruby O’Sullivan-Belfrage spoke with director Birgitte Stærmose about the impact she hopes the film has, the nature of truth, and how truly annoying the question of genre can be.  Afterwar screened at the 2024 Sydney Film Festival, with a...

Taylor Broadley's feature debut film Stubbornly Here is a welcome blast of indie filmmaking inventiveness with the Perth-based filmmaker presenting a sci-fi-adjacent story about three teens who live in an apathetic society where teenagers sometimes vanish into thin air. Stubbornly Here speaks to the anxieties of the day, focusing on a generation of kids who have grown up in a world that does not s...

There's space in this Bluey obsessed world for two Aussie animated canine stories, with Alexs Stadermann's utterly delightful and wonderfully inventive series 100% Wolf following the exploits of one Freddy Lupin, a werewolf who turns into a puffy pink poodle when the moon comes out. Kicking off in 2019 with the bright and brilliant 100% Wolf which saw Freddy at odds with his pack as he had to prov...

The boxing film subgenre gets an esteemed new entry in the form of Paul Goldman's Kid Snow . Set in the 1970s, Kid Snow follows Billy Howle as the titular character, a washed-up fighter who has one last shot at glory. Shot in the red dirt of WA, Kid Snow also features an impressive line-up of Aussie actors including Phoebe Tonkin, Hunter Page-Lochard, Mark Coles Smith, and Nathan Phillips. Nadine...

One of the finest films having its Australian premiere at the festival is Jaydon Martin's stunning feature debut film Flathead . This fiction-documentary hybrid film follows Cass Cumerford, a bloke near the end of his days who returns to Bundaberg, the region he grew up. Swaying into the town, he finds consolation and support with various religious sects that have sprung up in the land before he f...

In Vitro is the highly anticipated follow-up from Will Howarth (Bombay Beach) and Tom McKeith (Beast, SFF 2016) after their debut feature Beast was nominated for Best First Feature at Toronto International Film Festival 2015. Starring the director Will Howarth, Ashley Zukerman (Fear Street) and Talia Zucker (Lake Mungo). On an isolated cattle farm, Layla and Jack's life takes a dark turn when a st...

The 2024 German Film Festival is currently underway across Australia with screenings taking place from 7 May to 5 June. The poster film for the festival is From Hilde, With Love , by director Andreas Dresen. In the following interview, Nadine Whitney and Andreas talk about his interest in telling the story of Hilde Coppi on screen. Hilde was a young German women who was drawn into the anti-Nazi re...

Roger Ungers is a documentarian who continually presents a new perspective on the world around us. His 2020 documentary Finding Creativity saw him explore the complex nature of creativity, and in turn, he reflects on his own creativity. That personal touch is brought to his latest documentary, Shape . This is a film about physicality and the at times exclusionary manner that the gay community can...

There's something in the water in Perth that leads to a creative movement from local filmmakers who push through microbudget limitations to tell engaging and inventive stories on screen. For emerging filmmakers Katherine Grace and Holly Dodd, that drive for creativity comes in the form of working together as actors and directors on a duo of short films. For Holly, it's the short horror Consumed ,...

As a young man, Matty Hannon explored the world, sinking roots in the Southeast Asian region. Here, he made lifelong friends, became part of families, and fostered a connection with the land that was ultimately severed when he had to return home to Australia to kick off a 'career'. The towering metal structures that became the home for his monotonous office life played a major role in an emerging...

Nainita Desai is an award-winning composer whose work has spanned creative formats, from documentaries like The Reason I Jump where she won an Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition, to TV series like Funny Women , to video games like Telling Lies and Immortality . With over 150 credits to her name, Nainita is nothing short of prolific. In the following interview, Nainita talks about her journey i...