Queer films headline 2018 Sydney Film Festival program preview
Image: Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz in 'Disobedience'.
The Sydney Film Festival today released a sneak peak of the program for its upcoming 65th edition, with high-profile queer cinema at the forefront.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post will be a major highlight, following a teenage girl sent to a conversion camp in the early ’90s by her conservative aunt.
The starriest film is Disobedience, a drama starring Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz – perhaps the two most underrated Rachels – as two women drawn back together when one returns to their Orthodox Jewish community.
Disobedience was directed by Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio, whose excellent trans drama A Fantastic Woman was recently released in Australia.
His latest is one of our most anticipated queer films of 2018, alongside The Miseducation of Cameron Post.
For something lighter, Spanish film Anchor and Hope follows a longtime lesbian couple who have very different positions on becoming parents, until an old friend visits and presents the possibility of an ideal sperm donor.
On the documentary side, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist gives fashion legend Vivienne Westwood the fashion film biography treatment.
Blurring the line of fact and fiction, American Animals, Bart Layton’s latest since the astonishing The Imposter, features an up-and-coming cast in an art-heist thriller interrupted by the real life men commenting on, and perhaps revising, their own deeds.
Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, her feature film follow-up to Winter’s Bone – which launched Jennifer Lawrence to stardom – eight years in the making.
Australia is represented in Jason Raftopoulos’ West of Sunshine, a working class father-son drama, while this year’s Berlin Film Festival winner, Mug, presents a satirical take on small town hypocrisy in Poland.
Last year’s Venice Film Festival winner, Foxtrot, also appears in the line-up, another satire this time focused on Israeli military culture.
This year’s festival runs from June 6 to June 17 and includes the previously announced, David Strattion-curated Aki Kaurismäki retrospective.
Flexipasses are already on sale, and can be purchased here.
To view the program preview, head to the Sydney Film Festival website. The full program will be announced on May 9.
