Sydney Film Festival Shares Sneak Peek of 2015 Program
The year's most buzzed about indie films are coming to Sydney.
Film buffs, prep your saliva glands for the Sydney Film Festival entree you’ve been waiting for: the organisers have revealed their first wave of programming, featuring several of the year’s most hotly anticipated movies not named The Avengers or Star Wars.
The tantalising teaser includes 27 titles, many of which have already begun generating buzz at festivals overseas. Slow West, a suspense-filled Western starring Michael Fassbender and Ben Mendelsohn, won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, while post-war German thriller Phoenix was one of the most talked-about films in Toronto late last year. Other dramatic standouts include the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy featuring Paul Dano and John Cusack, and a new take on the world’s most famous detective starring the great Ian McKellen as an ageing Mr Holmes.
But even more impressive than the festival’s dramatic lineup is the first round slate of documentaries. Acclaimed non-fiction filmmakers Alex Gibney and Kirby Dick tackle scientology and campus sexual assaults, respectively, in Going Clear and The Hunting Ground, while How to Change the World chronicles the early years of Greenpeace. Joshua Oppenheimer also returns with The Look of Silence, a kind of sequel/spin-off to his stomach-churning masterpiece The Act of Killing that delves further into the atrocities of Indonesia’s anti-communist purges.
If all that sounds a bit depressing, the programmers have also included a couple of more light-hearted films, such as the whimsical Irish animation Song of the Sea. Fans of Swedish comedy will get a kick out of the new movie from Roy Andersson, the brilliantly named A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. And speaking of the Swedes, film criticism’s honorary dad David Stratton has put together a special retrospective on the quintessential Swedish filmmaker, the one and only Ingmar Bergman.
The Sydney Film Festival will run from June 3 – 14. Check out the currently announced program on the festival website, and keep your eyes peeled for the full program, which is expected to launch on May 6.
Image: Slow West
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