Sydney Film Festival program launched
The 2012 Sydney Film Festival (SFF) program was launched at Customs House today. New festival director Nashen Moodley (pictured) led the crowd, including Premier Barry O’Farrell and actors Deborah Mailman and Ryan Corr, through selected highlights of the 12-day program, which will showcase 157 titles.
The SFF will include 18 world premieres, 107 Australian premieres, 30 Australian productions and films from 50 countries in 48 languages.
“The joy of a film festival is the breadth and diversity of program, and this year’s will span music documentaries, horror flicks and Bertolucci classics — and the Official Competition films made by exciting new talents and masters of the form will continue to provoke, court controversy and broaden our understanding of the world,” Moodley said.
The festival will open on Wednesday, June 6 with the world premiere of Australian comedy/drama Not Suitable For Children, which Moodley described as a “very funny, sexy, quintessentially Sydney film”. It stars True Blood actor Ryan Kwanten as a directionless twentysomething whose cancer scare makes him reassess what’s important in life.
Closing the festival on June 17 is the eccentric US comedy Safety Not Guaranteed, making its Australian premiere.
Moodley said the SFF team was particularly excited about the program of events at the Lower Town Hall Festival Hub, which will be abuzz with free exhibitions, concerts, performances and screenings.
Other highlights include a nine-film-strong retrospective of the work of Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, whose frank depictions of sexuality range from the 1972 classic Last Tango In
Paris to 2003’s The Dreamers, and the ‘Freak Me Out’ program, bringing together a selection of the weirdest and most wonderful fringe films from around the world.
Queer highlights of the festival include the dark, disturbing South African drama Beauty, about a repressed husband and father whose secret gay urges manifest in dangerous ways; Bully, an ambitious US documentary that highlights the scourge of bullying in schools across America; and The Parade, a Serbian odd-couple comedy about a gay veterinarian and a homophobic war veteran united to protect Belgrade’s gay pride parade.
Tickets for the 2012 Sydney Film Festival are on sale now.
info: www.sff.org.au
And in keeping with how the mainstream showcase gay works, two of the three are dark and disturbing, while the third is a gay vs straight sitcom shtick. Check out the program of any gay film festival this year and you’re guaranteed to find stuff that better represents the diversity of what living life as an L, G, B or T person is like, but hetero audiences just aren’t interested in seeing it.