Sydney Underground Film Festival 2019
Sydney's weird and wonderful film festival returns for its 13th year.
Overview
It's time to say alright, alright, alright to a film festival like no other, and to four days of odd, offbeat, unusual, unnerving and electrifying flicks. Every year for 13 years now, the Sydney Underground Film Festival has unleashed its eclectic movie choices upon the city. It's back to do the same again in 2019, with a lineup that starts with Matthew McConaughey as a perpetually high poet, features everything from hyper-violence in Tokyo to cinema-obsessed documentaries, and ends with snowstorm-set horror.
If your kind of festival involves watching McConaughey amble around Florida like he's in a documentary, catching the latest film from Spring Breakers' Harmony Korine and doing so at a special smell-o-vision screening — the cinema will match its scent to the movie — then mosey on over to opening night's The Beach Bum on Thursday, September 12. It's a roving, neon-hued, star-studded trip, with Zac Efron, Snoop Dogg and Isla Fisher also among the cast, and it's certain to set the mood for a weird, wonderful and wild SUFF.
Across the rest of the festival — which runs until Sunday, September 14 at The Factory Theatre, Marrickville — Sydney cinephiles can see Henry Rollins turn gangster in Dreamland, fall for the chaos of Takashi Miike's First Love, witness stop-motion animation get eerie in The Wolf House and see Oscar-winner Olivia Colman step into cult-like church territory in Them That Follow. The list goes on, including on the documentary front, where you can prepare to tap your toes to films about rock 'n' roll magazine Creem, London label Trojan Records and alternative rock in general, then explore the work of filmmakers William Friedkin and Uwe Boll, as well as the ups and downs of rom-coms.
Elsewhere, Jesse Eisenberg takes down toxic masculinity in the hilarious, must-see satire The Art of Self-Defense, while Memory — The Origins of Alien is unmissable if you're fond of Ridley Scott's seminal 1979 space horror classic. Shorts and workshops are also on the bill, before SUFF eventually comes to an end with mind-bender The Lodge.
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