Kidnapped by a Congolese rebel militia at the age of 12, Komona is a young pre-teen who lost her adolescence to the horrors of war. Her ‘rite of passage’...
The wife of an English diplomat in Paris is charming, supportive and knows all of the right things to say when at her husband’s side. Then she loses her...
Abigail (Imogen Annesley) is a young teen in modern Sydney who can bring people from the past and also travel there herself. She finds her counterpart in...
Raven’s Gate is an experimental farm in the South Australian outback, the passion project of an idealistic agricultural scientist. Nothing there surely...
It’s a dreary early Sunday morning in London’s Bethnal Green, early in 1947. Before her husband and stepdaughters are awake, unhappily married housewife...
www.nfsa.gov.au
If this venue is missing details or has changed operations, let us know and we will investigate and update the listing.
Please include any website links supporting the requested changes
Just two of the seven collaborations between producer/director Roger Corman, the overripe persona of star Vincent Price and the gothic stories of Edgar...
‘Narcy’ Narcissus is '...cheap, rotten, after-the-war trash.’ So he needs brains, social skills and respectability as his black market operation grows....
Grin without a Cat was a post-cold war, English-language re-edit and re-think of an originally four hour long film essay Marker released in the late 1970s...
Sebastian is an Adelaide Ferris Bueller; middle-class, a natural leader and the son of ‘cool’ liberal parents. Sparrow is a lean and nervy street kid....
In the dark hours after a violent Belfast robbery attempt goes wrong, IRA gunman McQueen (James Mason) tests the loyalty of friends, the kindness of...
Post-war Japanese filmmakers have repeatedly filmed the true and very scandalous story of the 1936 murder of middle-class businessman, Ishida Kichizo by...
Chris Marker began the 1960s in a groundbreaking use of the then-very new generation of 16mm sync-sound cine-cameras. Le Joli mai explores how Paris was...
The 10th Arab Film Festival Australia will share the stories and culture of the Arab world with the Australian audience with an impressive program of six...
Hastily built in 1948, the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh (‘Sweet Spring’) is now a long-established provisional city, housing 70,000 refugees...
There are one million war orphans in Iraq. In Bagdad, Husham has become their sort of DIY social worker, scouring the streets for these homeless kids, and...
In Sanctity (Dir: Ahd, Saudi Arabia, 2012, 37 mins, digital) Areej is a pregnant, young Saudi widow who will endure anything to protect her unborn child –...
Lebanon’s 15-year civil war ended in 1991 and with an amnesty that pardoned all its political crimes. But with an estimated cost of 120,000 lives,...
Casablanca hairdresser Mustapha is really more in the business of ‘taking care of business’. With the help of his influential customers, Mustapha offers...
In 1967 Marker’s SLON filmmaking collective asked four French filmmakers, one Dutch documentary veteran and an American artist living in Paris to respond...
Ōshima’s major historical ‘epic’ begins in the days of austerity after Japan’s defeat in 1945. It then progresses from that ‘year zero’ of modern Japanese...
When the opportunity to steal a fast Porsche presents itself, it’s natural that Ron’s eyes, hands and dreams of freedom act before commonsense. His trip...
Released little more than six months after Breaker Morant, the second of Beresford’s David Williamson adaptations was made by many of team who made both...
The boy of the title is the main breadwinner of an itinerant family roaming the small cities of northern Japan. The family trade is petty extortion, with...
Marker’s ruminative, melancholy masterpiece channels the imagination of a lonely travelling cameraman – evoked in letters from distant Africa and Japan –...
Its 1942 and well behind the then sweeping German military advance into Soviet Union. Although isolated partisans still hide in the region’s dense...
In the late 1960s, Tokyo’s Shinjuku district was as much a scene of revolutionary student intensity as Paris or Berkeley. Cutting between black and white,...
After a horrific crash landing, airline pilot Keller (Robert Powell) is the only one amongst 300 passengers and crew still alive. Wracked with survivor...
Housemaid Shinko wakes from a bad dream – to realise that the nightmare of vicious assault is very real and she is one of the few survivors of a serial...
Intrigue, romance and revolution come together in this action-packed documentary, chronicling the tumultuous birth of a new nation in East Timor. Kirsty...
Power, poverty and sexuality. My Brother the Devil is a coming-of-age drama like no other. Rashid and Mo are two Arab-British brothers growing up in...
Albinos in Tanzania have traditionally been perceived as almost mythical beings. To some they are ghosts who cannot die; to others the result of a family...
The title only gives you some part of the emotional complexity of Farhadi’s Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner. Teheran urban professionals Náder and Simin...
An unnamed Japan-Korean is to be hanged for rape and murder. The execution is carried out efficiently, as ordered by the Japanese penal code. Yet...
Three Teheran families take a getaway weekend holiday together in an isolated villa beside the Caspian Sea. They’re all old law school buddies; although...
Don McAlpine comes to Arc as part of A Shining Light, the Australian Cinematographer’s Society’s weekend of events celebrating its 42nd National ACS...
The English title of Farhadi’s third feature is a loose translation of the name of the Persian New Year. It’s a reference Iranians well understand, with...
On the Japanese-occupied island of Ambon there are clear lines of command and resistance between Anglo-Dutch prisoners of war and their Japanese guards....
The inhabitants of a Tokyo slum are a microcosm of Japanese society and national values. Unable to imagine leaving, nor dreaming of any other life, they...
Ōshima first major feature was also his first film to reach the screens after Japanese establishment studio Shochiku decide to try to cash in on the...
Bill Douglas’ alter ego, Jamie, grows out of the confines of Scottish work class life and then, through his national military service with the RAF, finds...
You know the plot and all the spoilers. Baz Luhrmann well understood their appeal across global pop culture. He brilliantly made us aware of Shakespeare’s...
Becoming an adult brings no joy to juvenile prisoner Akbar. In detention since he impulsively killed his girlfriend when just 16, turning 18 simply gives...
As great an anti-war film as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Guerman’s first solo feature was banned by the Soviets for 15 years, only finally earning a proper...
Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s body of work divides film critics only as to which film is his masterpiece. Mirror, from 1975, tends to be the most...
The third of the Bond films sees Sean Connery trying to thwart Auric Goldfinger’s (Gert Fröbe) plan to rob Fort Knox. It’s the first of four in the series...
Even after 50 years, the Bond franchise still has some catching up to do on the 31-film run of that even more noble British cinematic institution, the...
Ralph has been the bad guy in the popular computer game Fix-It Felix for 30 years, and thinks that it’s his turn to be a hero. He can’t do it in his own...
Set in 1935 in the fictional provincial town of Unchansk, Guerman’s first film to receive wide international exposure – and his only to include several...
Show Me the Magic tells the story of Don McAlpine (1934-). It’s a journey from a one-horse town in outback New South Wales to the heights of Hollywood and...
It’s summer holidays, and Greg’s plans to spend the whole time gaming goes horribly wrong so he’s stuck at scout camp with his Dad. He would rather hang...
An elderly couple travel to see their offspring, but are met with indifference and ignorance. Ozu’s moving, meditative film on mortality has been declared...
Scottish director Bill Douglas’ 1980s Anglo-Australian co-production was ‘a people’s’ version of the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, their trial and their...
In the second film of the series, Greg’s misguided parents try to force a bond between Greg and his older and (apparently) cooler brother Rodrick.
The first in the cinematic adventures of wise-cracking and socially awkward middle-schooler Greg Heffly, his oddball family and friends as told in his...
After a stint working as an assistant director at the Lenfilm studio, Guerman was assigned to his first long feature, co-directed by Grigori Aronov....
Harry Palmer has refined tastes in food, women and caustic quips. But a working British spy in ‘60s London also has to catch the bus, work in cramped...
It took a while for writer-director Jennifer Lynch to crawl back from her failed debut film Boxing Helena (1993), but in recent years the eldest daughter...
Few short films made it into the Sight and Sound top 250 films of all time. When they did, it was because of their extraordinary clarity of expression and...
The story of the ‘Ghans’ – Afghan camel teamsters who were essential to the transportation of supplies in 19th and early 20th century Australia – has been...
The Clock family are ‘borrowers’; little people under the floorboards that live off all the forgotten and discarded bric-a-brac of humans. Humans can’t...
A poignant, passionate, but utterly chaste bond builds between a journalist and a secretary (Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung), as they share the...
The first fully Hollywood feature for 1950s Brit-noir specialist J Lee Thompson, Cape Fear is one of the missing links between classic noir and the more...
Inevitably our James Bond(s) must finally come face to face with their quasi-steampunkish origins. One nice way to do so is via a too-brief tribute to the...
Although barely remembered even in France just a few decades ago, new restorations and critical re-evaluation have elevated director Albert Capellani to...
The first ‘exploitation’ films, White Slavery movies were a key international early feature film sub-genre. They are also a problematic sub-plot in the...
As war looms in an unspecified European nation, a young naval lieutenant allows himself to be condemned as a traitor, rather than expose his wife to...
Two of Danish cinema’s first superstar performers, in films that defined their international allure and fascination. Cinema’s first diva and ‘femme...
Film historian Tom Gunning very rightly points out that ‘more exaggerated claims have been made for this American director … than any other figure in film...
Pre-1913 French feature filmmaking is often mistakenly only associated with what’s called ‘film du art’: static adaptations of classic and historic stage...
Maybe rivalled only by the following year’s Cabiria, Cines studio’s first adaptation of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s parable of Christian faith was the highpoint...
Two milestones of early Italian feature filmmaking; films very different from – and far more intimate than –its better-known historical costume epics....
Damaged by professional rejection, helpless before his wife’s enveloping insanity, and spiritually exhausted, brilliant young bacteriologist von Kammacher...
For decades, the Melbourne Salvation Army’s 1900 Soldiers of the Cross was legendary in the annals of Australian screen history as our – and perhaps the...
Widowed shopkeeper Ingeborg tries to keep her late husband’s business and family together. The debts mount, the local charity bureaucracy is uncharitable,...
Those who experienced Michael Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death in our 2011 Docs with Style series will want to meet another, yet very different, major voice...
Even in 1999 LA, veteran uniform officer Dave Brown is a dinosaur; the last of the 1970s-style, Chief Daryl Gates / pre-Rodney King trial era street cops....
Aimless armoured car driver Steve (Burt Lancaster) keeps scratching the one scar that never seems to stop itching: his lust for ex-wife Anna (Yvonne...
Italian commercial cinema had been growing in budget, spectacle and artistic confidence since 1909, but Milano Films’ 1911 adaptation of the first part of...
It’s certainly the high point of the 1860s Victorian Golden Age. But not quite as we know it: steam is still the power that drives the Empire; but it does...
Hong Kong supercop Fang (Wang Yu) is dispatched to Sydney to extradite a suspect in a drug smuggling case. By the time the holiday’s over, he’s run rings...
Completing our Australia Day, Australian Cinema line-up of the major Australian features of 2012, this special free screening of Canberra-born director...
In the months after the Nazis’ 1943 liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in then Polish city of Lwów, a few hundred still survived in the city’s sewers, their...
Greek-Australian photographer Isaac Raftis (Ewen Leslie) is astonished by his parents’ reaction to the news that he’s travelling to Athens for an...
The brutalised and bitter convicts of Westgate Federal pen (including Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford, John Hoyt and Howard Duff) plan to break out of...
Still clearly the key achievement of Hitchcock’s late and high career of the 1950s, Vertigo has become the emblem of the dark forces that often empower...
What happens when HG Wells (Malcolm McDowell) and Jack the Ripper – the greatest idealist and the great criminal mind of the late 19th century – come face...
In one of Buenos Aires’ old quarters, Roberto runs his family’s not-very-productive hardware store. Obsessive tidiness and a habit of keeping scrapbooks...
Many of their 30 plus films are forgettable and most interchangeable. But a treasured few of Bud Abbot and Lou Costello’s vehicles are enjoyable moments...
In the 1990s, director Whit Stillman was the WASP Woody Allen, the great moralist of the wasted youth of the Clinton-era, Docom-age power elite; a class...
After his career revived via radio in the mid-1930s, and although showing the worse for his love of liquor, comedian W C Field’s last hurrah was a new...
The purest work of Fieldian cinema was saved for his final starring film. Fields, regular acting cronies like Leon Errol and Franklin Pangborn, and a...
It’s late 1960s outback Australia, in the age of the first Mining Boom. Teenager and jazz fan John ‘Dingo’ Anderson is doing his day job in a mining town...
Flirtatious New York schoolgirl Lisa (Anna Paquin) loves to be the centre of attention, to the exasperation of the most adults in her life, such as...
Small-town, Capraesque USA – where the harmless eccentricities of bachelor and barfly Elwood P. Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) have long been tolerated by the...
Highlander director Mulcahy’s addition to the spate of killer animal films that were prevalent from the late 70s. Originally released with the tagline...
Forget everything you know about the newly erupted Nazis-from-Space film genre. Australian director Stephen Amis’ (The Real Thing) adaptation of J.J....
It’s only loyal son Michael (Simon Burke) who can’t see that the days of heavy-horse teamster and rough Queensland Irish patriarch Paddy (Michael Craig)...
Visible Evidence, the international conference on documentary studies, pays its first visit to Canberra, Australia between 19-21 December 2012, co-hosted...
Australia’s weather patterns are undergoing sudden and frightening climate change. It’s during one of these events and the chaos they cause that a Redfern...
With broad access to the Islamic judicial council and Islamic men and women seeking divorce, Divorce: Aussie Islamic Way is a candid glimpse into a...
Anne Delaney reveals new information about tensions in the Australia-US relationship during the Vietnam War, winning praise from the Walkley Documentary...
The NFSA joins with ACT Disability and Community Services Commissioner and Belconnen Arts Centre to celebrate the 2012 International Day of People with a...
1990-1998 looks at the beginnings of world cinema as we now know it; not just international recognition for great filmmakers from nations like Iran,...
Wide-eyed, beautiful but very naïve, all local Tijuana girl Laura (Stephanie Sigman) wants to be is a beauty queen. Against her parent’s objections, she...
A chance to sample Larry Cohen’s 1960s work as a writer/producer, in TV and cinema. El Condor is typical of the sub-textually dense ‘revisionist’...
Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant epitomised the Australian legend and the Australian bush renaissance man: poet, gentleman, bushman, iconoclast, jack-of-all trades,...
October 1972 marked the formation of the South Australian Film Corporation – a date that for many is also the clear start-point for the Australian feature...
Once upon a Time in Cabramatta unfolds with impact and piercing insight while serving as a comprehensive historical record spanning four decades in this...
An extraordinary piece of investigative journalism from ABC-TV’s Four Corners, that not only examines the process of police internal investigations into...
Then the Wind Changed is a first-person insight into the community of Strathewen, where Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 claimed 30 lives and...
Graduating videomakers, animators and new media artists from the undergraduate, Honours and Masters programs of the ANU School of Art will screen their...
1969-1979 crosses back to Europe and the post-New Wave cinemas of Germany, and the UK. It examines the arrival of the wave in Australia, Africa and Latin...
Scott Sanders’ recent homage-slash-parody film has been lauded as one of the most accurate (and hilarious) reflections on the genre. 'I’ve seen a lot of...
Following on from our regular horror doubles and the Larry Cohen retrospective at this year’s Canberra International Film Festival, we begin our regular...
The Story of Film: 1957-1964 interviews Claudia Cardinale, Lars von Trier and Bernardo Bertolucci to unpack the beginnings of new wave cinemas in...
Bruce Beresford and a crew of great Australian male acting talent (Bryan Brown, Alan Cassell, Ed Devereaux, Terence Donovan and ‘Bud’ Tingwell) take on...
Homicide detective Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) starts noticing a frightening pattern amongst the perps. committing otherwise apparently unconnected and...
This series ticks every box in the current refugee debate, featuring unprecedented access to the Christmas Island detention centre and locating relatives...
Józef makes the reluctant journey to a country insane asylum and to visit his father, committed there many years earlier. Not merely has any treatment...
The Story of Film: 1930s examines what the coming of synchronised sound did for cinema, especially to emerging genres such as the gangster film and,...
The Story of Film: 1895-1918 begins predictably enough with Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers, and the development of both the technologies and...
It’s 1972, and after 50 years of knowing where all of Washington’s bodies are buried, FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover finally lies on his deathbed. An...
The latest in the NFSA/Currency Press Australian Classics monography series comes from Dr. Larrisa Behrendt, Professor of Law and Director of Research at...
Whilst fighting at the Battle of Saragossa during the Napoleonic Wars, a Spanish army officer stumbles on a manuscript detailing the exploits of his...
A perfect way to close the festival – this inspirational Australian film has it all – comedy, cricket and Bollywood music. Teddy (Steven Curry) is a...
Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of metaphysical terror remains a horror movie classic and a brilliant example of Kubrick’s...
Wacky, jaw-dropping and frequently hilarious, this documentary takes a look at some of the more bizarre interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining....
Dress for the end of the world and come see one of the best worst sci-fi monster films ever made. Made in four days for a budget of $US16,OOO, Robot...
Toby Jones gives an inspiring performance as a timid sound engineer sent to Italy to work on a mysterious and exotic horror film. A smash hit at the...
With opinions from people such as Julian Assange and Dan Rather, this hard-hitting documentary takes a critical look at the impact of corporate control...
A smash hit straight from the Edinburgh International Film Festival, this sci-fi comedy sees a small Irish town invaded by creatures who can’t kill you if...
With a surprising twist and music you will surely remember, this documentary follows two filmmakers who set out to find their rock hero from the 197Os – a...
This taut psychological thriller, set in the mysterious world of genetic engineering, sees one man on a dangerous journey of discovery and redemption....
In this intimate portrait of a legendary singer-songwriter, Neil Young returns to his hometown to sing many of his classic songs and talk about his...
Full of great songs and a star-studded line up of musicians, this inspiring fly-on-the wall documentary follows the eccentric Dave Stewart as he records...
The extraordinary rise of a homeless soul singer who, at 62, made his recording debut, resulting in one of the most electrifying albums of the year....
This prize-winning biopic charts the turbulent life and extraordinary legacy of Chilean musician and folklorist Violeta Parra, whose moving songs...
Five stars? Four and a half? Your chance to discover everything you ever wanted to know about film critics and the state of a vanishing profession. In...
A giant flying lizard is brought back to life to terrorise New York in this highly original, classic 198O’s monster movie. Resurrected by followers of a...
In a rollicking female version of Conan the Barbarian, Laurene Landon jumps, swings and battles it out as Hundra, a warrior protecting her desperate...
A taut, futuristic thriller that follows a group of soldiers sent to an underground military research facility, where they meet more than their minds can...
Introduced by Larry Cohen himself, this is one of the most sought after B-grade horror/sci-fi flicks of all time. You may never eat ice-cream again. A...
About to be remade by Nicolas Winding Refn, this classic 198Os action-horror film sees innocent people murdered on the streets of New York by a man...
Adapted from the novel by Colin Thiele, Storm Boy would become the SAFC’s first successful family film, and has since stood as one of the defining films...
It’s the end of a very different 20th century. The Berlin Wall has certainly fallen, but it’s a sort of Gorbachovian North-Euro-communism that’s triumphed...
A loose collection of Russian settlers travel in the back of a truck crossing the dusty Kazakhstan steppes, swapping stories and tall tales as they go....
Marcello Mastroianni plays Mateo, a travelling salesman. And Sorbonne professor of negative anthropology Georges Vickers. And Luc Allamand, a shadowy...
The old East Prussian, now Polish-border district of Mazury, is one of the places where the tragic histories of Eastern Europe’s ethnic tensions are most...
As in all modern European nations, shopping malls are contemporary temples of consumerism. Milena and her friends hang out there like many teens. But they...
The Hall of Mirrors: a Festival is one of the best of the SAFC ‘apprentice’ films made by a now much better-known filmmaker, Shine director Scott Hicks....
Celebrity pianist Paweł (Artur Zmijewski) and his estranged teenage son Maciek (Krzysztof Chodorowski) rush to the hospital bedside of their father and...
A few days before his son’s first communion, thirty-something accountant Michal finds himself back in his hometown, asked by his boss to take care of some...
Paweł runs an import business with his father Zygmunt, once a Solidarity activist in Silesia; his wife Ewa, was the daughter of a miner killed during the...
Somewhere in mid-1950s, outback Australia, and over the six weeks of a typical shearing season, the lives of three shearers (a ‘Gun’ at his peak; an...
It’s the days before the convention at which a US political party will finally choice its presidential candidate (this is before the primary system was to...
A mother (Fatemeh Motamed-Arya, in her Montréal World Film Festival-winning performance) works hard in a factory to support herself and her two children,...
Couple Kamran and Sharareh are driving their young nephew back to Tehran for the funeral of his parents, killed in a car accident the previous evening....
A young woman fleeing Iran through Turkey as a transit country to the West will do whatever it takes to get there. One evening she meets a young...
Conservative young mother Rana has been secretly driving a taxi to support her family since her husband went to jail. Then she picks up Adineh, a young...
Rather than learn how to be its slayer, a hapless young 10th century Viking lad gets it wrong when he falls for a not-so-bright dragon rather like...
This ironic tale is narrated from beyond the grave by Khosro (Ali Mosaffa), who dies in a ridiculous accident, but lingers round his film star wife, Leila...
Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past has always been one of toughest cases in adapting modernist literature, defeating directors of the greatness of...
Crabby and lonely ‘tween Coraline does what storybook little girls have been doing forever: she finds a secret door from her house into another world. The...
Two young sailors are shipwrecked and washed ashore on a remote island in the Caspian Sea off Azerbaijan. Both instantly fall in love with the island’s...
Camille seems like a well-groomed mother’s boy. Then he turns nine – and begins to insist his name is Paul and his mama is really another woman from the...
Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez) finds his memory bouncing about 'like a game of marbles’; from his childhood in the 1940s to an unlikely present day where he...
A provincial village on the outskirts of Tsarist Russia greets the outbreak of World War I with resignation. But soon they are sitting cheek-by-jowl...
Adelaide-based director Craig Lahiff built a reputation with films such as Heaven’s Burning and Fever (seen in Arc’s Bill Hunter tribute in late 2011) and...
10 years has passed and the nearly adult Andy is about to leave for university. So what’s going to happen to Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the toys he’s...
Since 1960’s Primary and its epoch-launching look inside the Kennedy presidential campaign, documentary filmmaker D A Pennebaker has been filming the...
Star-struck Georgia girl Peggy Pepper works her way up the Hollywood food-chain, from taking custard pies on the chin at slap-stick factory Comet studios,...
Hat-check girl Rosalind is on a millionaire-hunt and her charm offensive manages to enlist three male admirers into her cause. Like many Warners Bros...
Dr and Madame Giraud are neighbours to Monsieur and Madame Lalle, nightclub performers. But once Dr Giraud and Madame Lalle were the lovers Paul and...
Russian director Boris Barnet’s early hit comedies celebrated the quotient society of Moscow’s crowded tenements. The comic elegance of Lubitsch and the...
Louise Lovely is an Anglo-Persian orphan, fleeing a strict Islamic upbringing and an arranged marriage; for Paris and the love of a handsome French...
Gentle giant Joe Easter runs the store in Mantrap, a sleepy Indian trading post in southern Canada. Fondly remembering the US city of Minneapolis was the...
Sometime in the Stone Age, unhappily newly married couple Adam and Eve are bickering again. Fashion and marriage advice from a snake is inevitable when...
The Governor and political boss of a small western state need to pick a replacement after the sudden death of one of their US Senators. A coin toss leads...
One of the most treasured films from the Hollywood director who – perhaps like his subject here – was more legend than historical figure (and the...
Filmmaker and writer Usmar Ismal (1921-1971) is a treasured pioneer of Indonesian national culture, one of the first great artists of the independent...
A country with an unenviable global reputation for exporting its labour must, of course, ‘manufacture’ that product somewhere. No surprises that some of...
Soft on the outside, but with a heart of steel, debt collector Sunny has a 100% perfect record in debt collection. Then a fortune-teller tells him it’s...
Fleeing an impulse killing, a student crosses paths with a drunken sailor. The sailor offers escape by swapping berths and identities on his next passage...
The devastation caused to dozens of Australian lives by the 2002 Bali bombings is acutely familiar. Less so is the damage done to Bali’s own community....
Underemployed and macho shopping mall locksmith Lek and newsstand clerk/aspiring writer Kong find the perfect partnership in the former’s lock-picking...
In the decadent, secretive, post-Napoleonic Lisbon of the early 19th century, orphan ‘João’ Pedro da Silva is protected by Father Dinnis, the master of...
The Indonesian Islamic State, or NII, is typical of a number of radical Islamists groups actively recruiting the angry, alienated and sometimes just...
Arc cinema’s 2009 screening of Sleepwalking Through the Mekong – a look at the US rock band’s Dengue Fever’s attempt to revive Cambodia’s 1960s pop music...
Paris-based Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh’s reputation was established with haunting documentaries like S21; which focused not on the Khmer Rogue...
For most western cinema mainstream moviegoers, Thai cinema is all – only – about kickboxing action. Whilst Regional Intersection audiences know that it is...
Two stories of tough and soft love on the Ho Chi Min City streets. The film’s original Viet title, translated as 'Rebellious Hot Boy and the Story of...
Ruiz’s collaboration with Pierre Klossowski – painter, art historian, de Sade biographer, novelist and occasional movie actor (in Bresson’s Au hasard...
Jakarta’s transgender community are being picking-off by the vigilantes of the religious extremist group Bogem, led by the villainous Mr Storm. Only...
The lovely man of Indonesian director Teddy Soeriaatmadja’s acclaimed and award-winning film is Ipuy (Donny Damara), Like many in modern Jakarta, he’s...
Three young upper-middle class Manila film schoolers aspire to make the hard-hitting digital movie exposé of life in the slums. The script’s well...
Ruiz’s first completed feature was part of a brief, late 1960s flowering of Chilean independent cinema (by some accounts all shot using the same 35mm...
Younger widower Shin-ae moves to the small regional Korean city of Milyang (literarily ‘Secret Sunshine’ – the film’s ironic Korean release title),...
The love story of Jong-du and Gong-ju is hard to watch. Jong-du is a witless and hopeless boy who’s done time for a hit and run accident. Gong-ju is the...
After a shoot-out goes wrong, rule-bending Sydney undercover cop Tony Burke (Jerome Elders) is banished to the outback town of Yabbabri to tidy up a...
Vietnamese-Australian university student May (Nammi Le) is intelligent, level-headed, practical and curious about the world. She makes what seems a...
A boat carries the coffin of a man back to the small Korean island on which he was born. But another group of islanders confront the boat as it lands,...
Set in Montreal, Monsieur Lazhar is a profoundly moving story about a group of young schoolchildren coming to terms with the adult world well before their...
It’s an extraordinarily specific moment in that most European of Chinese cities, Shanghai, and at the end of the 19th (and European) century. Four...
In the final of a series of live media events to mark our Extreme Film and Sound Exhibition, sound designer and film score composer Douglas Quin returns...
Hurrying to his next meeting, travelling salesman Dennis Weaver pushes past a semi-trailer on a mountain pass. Its driver seems to take it personally and...
Tony has just been released after six years of jail time. He’s managed to miss most of the best times of Australia in late 1960s and early ‘70s and...
A happy, unsuspecting couple, Max (Dan Wyllie) and Therese (Bojana Novakovic), buy a house in what appears to be a quiet, friendly neighbourhood. Settling...
The last act of the Nikkatsu ‘cinematic revolt’ was the 1971 move exclusively into making ‘pinko eiga’, or soft porn films. But the studio did this with...
Nouvelle vague Godfather Jean-Luc Godard has officially made his final feature film – at the same time his first specifically (only) for digital cinema. A...
Don’t miss your chance to be inspired by two extraordinary Australian adventurers, James Castrission (Cas) and Justin Jones (Jonesy) when the Extreme...
Screenwriter Ed Neumeier’s (Robo Cop) original take on Robert Heinlein’s SF ‘classic’ remains modern Hollywood’s most iconoclastic adaptation of a...
This was one of Finnish filmmaker Ari Kaurismäki’s ‘Working Class’ trilogy – a series which admitted and explored the debt to Bresson (that’s still...
Sembène’s first feature – based on one of the writer-turned-filmmaker’s own stories – was the breakthrough for Francophone African cinema and African...
Young marrieds Scott and Louise are out in their boat for a quiet weekend getaway. Suddenly enveloped in a strange mist, Scott is covered with a dust they...
Tokyo’s red-lit Asukusa district: sometime soon after Tashio-era Japan burst into superpower status in 1900s. Modern Yakuza in the making struggle to...
Tokyo engineer Kariya arrives on the secluded island of Kurage, tasked with drilling a well for the island’s sugar mill. Instead he finds a member of the...
Mysterious super-mind Exeter (Jeff Morrow) draws two of Earth’s top physicists into taking sides in a violent and total interplanetary war between the...
Our Nikkatsu retro is an excuse to open the NFSA vault and bring out one of the real oddities of Australian cinema history. Nikkatsu youth movie superstar...
By contrast to Intimidation, the genius of Kurahara’s Japanese new wave masterpiece screams like a Charlie Parker horn solo. Loosely just another of...
Causeless and clueless college boy Tetsuya meets poor little rich girl Eiko one afternoon on the Ginza. Both are cool and cashed-up children of Japan’s...
Shakespearian Tudor history drama is done over in the Universal house horror style, as Basil Rathbone plays the future Richard III of England with a...
e was to become the most occult of all of Nikkatsu’s cult directors and his work has come to embody Nikkatsu’s filmmaking revolt through stylistic excess....
Meiko Kaji is Mako – Queen of the all-girl Alleycats Speed Tribe. Fuji Tatsuya is Baron, king of the all-boy Eagles. Both are the royal couple of the...
Despite Egypt’s political transformation, there seems little hope of a revolution in social attitudes towards sexual harassment. Conservative and shy...
In the small, tightly knit city of Tripoli, Lebanon, family bonds run very deep. A 40-something man still lives with his elderly mother – until one day...
A 40-year-old divorced father discovers that he needs to undergo an operation within the next four days, which he can ill-afford. His quest to procure the...
Twenty-year-old Aya lives in the highlands of Morocco’s Rif Mountains. Her visiting cousin shows her a videotape of the Bizet’s opera Carmen. Aya begins...
Tunisia’s revolution as seen through the eyes of three members of the opposition. Lina Ben Mhenni as one of its leading blogger/activists. Lawyer and...
Asmaa has acquired HIV from her husband. After his death she lives in seclusion with her father and her teenage daughter, struggling to raise the money...
It’s 2001 and Qays and Layla are in the West Bank going to university. He’s studying literature, she engineering – but they are most of all involved with...
The defeat of Japan in 1945 left millions stranded on the outer reaches of its short-lived empire. Many wander the no man’s land of Burma, by-passed,...
As in so many great works of cinema realism, the story is basic and primal. A farmer loses the small inheritance that was the only tressure he had in...
James Whale’s Frankenstein sequel is now generally regarded as superior to the original. In many ways closer to Mary Shelley’s novel, it also feels deeper...
A dark and stormy Welsh night drives an assortment of weary and wary travellers (including Mervyn Douglas, Charles Laughton and Raymond Massey) into the...
Returning from years of training in Italy, Japanese operatic tenor Fujiwara attracts the attention of socialite Natsue, who launches his career as a...
The first ‘authorised’ adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel became the best known outing at Universal for Tod Browning – the most baroque director of...
In the seaside village of Vanimo, Papua New Guinea, the first national surf competition is about to take place. For the surfers of the village, this is a...
In 2006, the European Union gave the Romanian government money to facilitate the integration of the Romas, or gypsies, into Romanian quality schools. The...
The United Nation’s 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen is about to take place. Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed is campaigning for the world to recognise...
In 2007 dancer/choreographer Tanja Liedtke was near the top of her field. International acclaim had culminated in the announcement of her appointment as...
Perhaps the most surprising ‘new’ voice to emerge in recent Italian cinema is a mature and experienced one: veteran actor, screenwriter and producer...
Afghan refugee Mobarak Tahiri is living in Young, NSW, working at the local abattoir on a temporary visa. Local woman Lynn and her daughter Molly have...
The second of Kazan’s late 1950s Southern trilogy was another reunion with one his most significant writing collaborators, On the Waterfront’s Budd...
Kazan began the final major phrase of his career collaborating with close friends Tennessee Williams and actor Karl Malden, adapting Williams’ one-act...
The intense central focus here will always be on one single performance: James Dean, in his first, and legend-making, role. Screenwriter Paul Osborn cut...
It’s 2004 and both the Palestinian people and their long-standing leader are at a crisis point. For months the Israeli military have been blockading...