Discoveries from Australia World Cinema

Photography and music by Michael Lee.

Kurtal – Snake Spirit tells the story of Spider, a sprightly 80 year old Aboriginal elder who travels from Fitzroy Crossing into the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia to visit a jila - a sacred waterhole. Spider is one of the main custodians responsible for the practices that take place there. For the first time, he is taking his family and community elders back to his birthplace, where he will communicate with their ancestors through Kurtal, the Snake Spirit in an ancient ritual. This unique documentary examines the ongoing change faced by a remote Aboriginal community and their determination to maintain their close links to birthplace and country. It shows the passing on of traditional knowledge from father to son and grandson, and the vital and sustained connection to ancestry and customs. It is a celebration of strong tradition and culture thriving through the spirit and willingness of the next generation.

A classic superhero story about love, redemption and Christ.

An outgoing New York City art student falls for an introverted photographer who happens to be deaf - and living on the other side of the world.

Kaylee Desmond is losing her identity. She refuses to acknowledge her family history of trauma. Her current partner is never happy with who she is. And then there’s her job. Kaylee is a frontline therapist who performs a unique form of treatment- she dresses as the lost loved one of her clients, so that they can say goodbye

Dave Thornton is tall, he's pointy and he'll tell you everything that's happening in his life. Laughter is a meal best served in a pair of skinny jeans and a half ironed shirt.

William, a young adult in his early 20's has just purchased a new house. Whilst becoming comfortable with his new home, William begins to hear disembodied footsteps that stir his stomach as he is the only resident home...

Frida is excited about a date with a hot young spunk, but her friend accidentally gives her the wrong Ned's number. A creepy old man shows up who won't take no for an answer, he is a stalker and becomes obsessed with her.

Siblings Andy and Zach are stuck in lockdown in two different houses, and the only thing that connects them is their phone calls. Each trapped in their own heads, they're forced to come to terms with themselves before their relationship collapses under the weight of their neuroses.

A self obsessed social media celebrity couple camp out in the Adelaide Hills on Christmas Eve only to stumble onto a community hiding a secret tradition to protect the 25th of December.

Emotionally numb, Matthew goes through the motions, day after day, when one afternoon he finds a bloody, unconscious body on the floor of his home, and, in shock, he dials the emergency line.

Young Violet Daniels recalls her relationship with her best friend following her sudden disappearance

Pickle Richard is a psychological, character study, period piece, thriller experimental film which follows a damaged and despondent individual, seemingly obsessed with a jar of pickles.

This account of the cattle industry in northern Australia includes such aspects as mustering, dipping and droving, together with some description of a typical outback station.

An isolated boy invites a friend to stay for pizza, with sinister intentions.

Much of the romance associated with the development of the gold industry is to be found at Kalgoorlie on the golden mile, that rich strip of Western Australian territory. This film illustrates life in the town and the work of the miners: the school of mining, the vast store of mining tradition, the old-time prospectors who still search the surrounding countryside for new and fabulous strikes. It takes the viewer underground, deep into the galleries where the gold holding rock is blasted out, and shows the intricate business of separating the valuable metal from the rock that is undertaken on the surface.

A documentary about fruit growing and canning in Australia.

In the wake of World War Two Ukrainian Olesya, living in a migrant camp in the Australian bush with her husband, struggles to come to terms with her pregnancy as she relives the trauma of losing her first child.

From the Film Australia Collection. Made by The National Film Board 1947. Directed by Eric Thompson. Ipswich, Queensland, Australia, is very unlike Ipswich, England, after which it was named.

EPILEPSY WARNING! A 16mm erotic trip about two friends who play a game where each rule prescribes them to act out their most violent and perverse private fantasies.

Presented by Visit Victoria, Courtney Barnett takes the MTV Unplugged stage to perform a stunning set at howler.

Presented by Vodka O, darling of aussie indie-pop Amy Shark performs stripped-back versions of acclaimed hits like 'Adore' as well as some brand new tracks from her album 'Monster Love'.

A documentary film about a special kind of friendship - the age-old relationship between gay men and straight women, as told by Monica Davidson, a self-declared “fag hag”.

Made during the COVID-19 pandemic, this film is a play on ‘winner winner, chicken dinner’, a phrase often used by Australians to celebrate personal victory. It reflects on the selfishness that was prevalent in Melbourne as we headed into each lockdown. With panic-buying stripping supermarket aisles bare, even those who wanted to take the moral high ground began to think - if you can’t beat them, do you join them?

A lyrical montage of juxtaposed street-art images, set on rotating surfaces and against a percussive soundtrack, to hint at the tribal nature of street art.

Caden, a disturbed loner whose girlfriend has recently died, takes his anger out on an unknown victim. As he buries the body in a seemingly empty location - everything doesn't go according to plan.

Guts and glory are at stake in the Saturday recreational soccer league. This hilarious animation perfectly captures the highs and lows of coaxing together a motley crew to show up on time and game ready every week, but at the end of the day it's all worth it for the beautiful game.

“I lived in Darlinghurst [central Sydney] at the time. The hustle and the bustle of that section of the city intrigued me. I used a hectic camera, grainy newsreel film, a 75mm lens and a long matte box to create four intersecting segments…a degraded symphony of the city. Building facades, people and traffic variously interlocking and going their separate ways, across the grid of the Square.” (Paul Winkler)

3DME is an exploration of gender construction in the form of a journey through space and time (real + imagined). The artist confronts her parents about the way in which they have dealt with her sexuality. Their terrifyingly naive responses reflect the all too common, conventionally held conceptions around homosexuality and transgenderism.

A short documentary on a Sydney gay icon, Troughman.

This observational documentary follows an episode in the routine life on Collum Collum cattle-station in northern New South Wales. But, as the filmmaker notes, it's a story that could have occurred anywhere.

Jandamarra's campaign against white settlers in the Kimberleys in the north of Western Australia in the 1880s remains a source of pride and inspiration for the Bunuba people. A book, a play, and now a documentary film, are helping to bring the story to a wider audience and a new generation of Bunuba people. A feature film is also in development.

An ethnographic documentary directed by Roger Sandall, recording the construction of a bark canoe by two Aboriginal men, Djurkuwidi and Wangamaru, on the north coast of Arnhem Land. Filmed in the coastal swamps of Buckingham Bay near the end of the wet season, the film follows the process from the selection and stripping of a stringybark gum tree through to the completed canoe in use for hunting magpie geese and collecting eggs. Sandall’s narration explains the techniques involved and notes changes from earlier practices.

Tnorala is the Aboriginal name for Gosse's Bluff, a dramatic meteorite impact crater set in a vast plain 175km west of Alice Springs. This significant dreaming site for Western Arrernte people is steeped in mystery and tragedy. The story of its creation and the events that occurred there are narrated to the camera by Aunty Mavis Malbunka, one of the traditional story-tellers for the place.

Doris's mind is slipping. She is not only haunted by the death of her beloved husband James, but she is also struggling with the re-emergence of Ruth, Doris's sinister alter-ego.

The Australian edition of Remedies casted Mildura natives to contribute eucalyptus tree related unwritten narratives and oral histories for an individual and collective portraiture. Earth bound clay object-action cements the liminal stories and realities around the complex legacy of postcolonial wake into a collective stem. The project was conceived by the Finnish-Swiss artist duo Sasha Huber and Petri Saarikko and consisted of a series of filmed sessions around Mildura. During each session, participants were invited to share eucalyptus tree related remedies, these were choreographed and edited into an installation piece.

KIN is a modern day retelling of the biblical story Kane and Able, set in a zombie apocalyptic world. When Kane is attacked by a Zombie, 'Adam' jumps to his defense, and is bitten in the process. Kane locks his brother up in an abandoned warehouse where they nervously wait to see if the infection will take hold and transform Adam into a zombie. But Adam has a plan of his own which ultimately asks the question: if you had to, could you kill your own brother?

After reading over 300 self help books, Jordan Shanks (Friendlyjordies) has condensed the best from hundreds of authors who have already condensed the wisdom of thousands of years of thought and research on personal development. He’s crammed it all into a one hour show, with sides of paying out hipsters and Coffs Harbour…So not nearly enough time to cover everything, but LOOK! You’ll get something valuable out of it, alright? What do you care?

In this fifth and final film in the Doon School quintet, MacDougall focuses on the life of one student whom he discovers at the school. The film was made in parallel with 'The New Boys' and intersects with it at several points. However, instead of looking at the group, it explores the thoughts and feelings of Abhishek, a 12-year-old from Nepal, during his first days and weeks as a Doon student. This is at once the story of the encounter between a filmmaker and his subject and a glimpse of the mind of a child at “the age of reason”. This is the most intimate and interactive film of the series.

Francesca Curtis and Phyllis Papps are many things. Researchers. Writers. Ultra-Feminists. Partners. They are also the first lesbian couple to come out on national television almost fifty years ago. Putting everything on the line, Phyllis and Francesca appeared on ABC TV This Day Tonight’s interview about lesbianism in October 1970. Now in the final years of their lives, the couple open up about love, loss and political change, solidified inside a fifty year relationship. A powerful and inspiring film about acceptance set against Australia’s fight for marriage equality.

“Some had given me an iris—a little gadget which opens and closes—they were used a lot in silent movies to indicate the beginning or end of a scene. And that got me thinking about how we actually see, and how, though we barely notice it, every time we blink our own irises close down to black, and then open up again. Black and image. Black and image. I wanted to do something with time…with time as an iris closes and an iris opens. The name Traces refers to the traces we leave in time as, say, we walk across footpath, or traces on buildings, paint peeling off, or windows being dirty and being cleaned again…everything to do with time lagging. To show traces within traces within traces I put irises in many parts of the frame.” (Paul Winkler)

A short surrealist drama that follows the story of a young woman who is desperately trying to reconnect with her strange and distant father who talks only to trees.

A mix between live action and animation tells the story of an adolescent boy’s journey towards his long lost love. A cigarette.

“The destruction of trees in Sydney...chainsaws, the trees really screaming out. Rapid zooming, often close up shooting. In Edgecliff and Paddington, near where I lived, I'd travel around with the council workers as they lopped established trees, made way for progress...power lines, new buildings. On the Cahill Expressway, across from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, huge old Moreton Bay Figs were being butchered. As they were ripping and cutting into the trees, I was ripping into them…very physically, rapid zooming. I wanted a very strong message. It was way over the top, really…screeching chainsaws and woodchip machines. There was no real Green Movement in those days. When I showed the film, people came up to me and said I’d made them feel guilty for lopping down trees in their own yard. The aggression of the film still causes people trouble.” (Paul Winkler)

“I was in Germany again because my father had died, and I was at his grave. Flashes of terror struck me for fractions of a second, which I immediately tried to forger. I wanted to film my state of mind, my thoughts, my relationship with my father now that he lay below. I wanted to live. Once I conceived the treatment, I shot the film in two days. I wanted the camera to go very loose...off the tripod...I was zooming rapidly and running around the cemetery. I wanted the gravestones to disappear and dance...and I wanted to stay out of there, myself. I began to understand that if you want to interpret feelings you have to look for and create filmic images beyond simple photographing. I used the sounds of the graveyard and sometimes no sound.” (Paul Winkler)

“By this time we had a Filmmakers' Cinema here in Sydney. I made the film on the spur of the moment...to go over a band. Red and green leader was very cheap—you got it for a cent a foot or something. Scratching and 'injuring' the flat colour of the leader . . . I interspliced it with old 16mm footage, breaking up and creating tension between the shots...you know, a native in Papua New Guinea was shooting an arrow, and just as the arrow leaves, the film cuts back into red and green 'travelling' lines (the scratching on the leader). For quite some time this line is running, then the next minute it stops and you see the arrow actually hitting a target. So it gives the impression the arrow is travelling for a long time, on red leader toward the target. The film was shown with different bands, and each time the film looked different.” (Paul Winkler)

“I was playing with colour, and its emotional effect...green for hope, red for violence, blue for a bit of mystique—a very dark purplish orange blue...but very basic. For instance, the only way I could think to convey jealousy, on film, was by shooting through a blob of yellow. Of course I knew all about Eisenstein’s dialectical montage. I intercut my own footage with old 8mm stuff. I kicked off with an innocent image...just white, then a stuffed toy dog. Later a red colour then an image of a warship coming into Sydney harbour...a primitive metaphor for war. This was some of my first film in a more abstract style, and it was greatly discouraged at the time...everyone was heavily under the influence of British documentary filmmaking. People said, ‘this isn’t really how films ought to be made.’” (Paul Winkler)

Victoria, Australia, 1854. Prof. Jason Crest III is dispatched to the new colony to covertly field test his experimental invention for producing kinetic pictograms (ie moving pictures). On arrival, he hears of a miner's uprising on the goldfields and is eager to document the events. He is annoyed to be ordered by the Governor to stay in town and produce pornographic films of the Governor's courtesan, the dancer Lola Montez. Unbeknownst to them both, Lola Montez does not actually exist but is a collective identity used by gold-diggers; a ruse that was easier to carry off in days before photography was widespread. The Governor's "Lola Montez" is in league with a mysterious German exile Frederick de la Vern for potential political blackmail, but he is currently occupied organising the goldfield resistance.

Do Black Lives Matter? Tyrone, a homeless Aboriginal boy is arrested by the LAW...Again !. But this time - It's going to take his uncle Lucky's traditional LORE to fix the mess.

In The Shadow It Waits is a psychological horror film performed, shot, and edited live with actors performing from their own homes in different states across Australia. The audience is witnessing a film being made as they watch. 61 Scenes, 58 Camera Setups, and everything LIVE - this is definitely not a zoom call. The film tells the story of four twenty-something co-workers, bored with their day jobs and sick of being locked up in isolation, who play a silly online game and unwittingly prove the truth of an urban legend. However, whilst they may not be able to get out, that doesn't mean that something can't get in.

Two young men come into conflict when they attempt to rob a house, with devastating consequences.

A visual piece based on the second track "Yurusa Rezaru Mono-tachi" from Keiji Haino's first album titled "Watashi dake?"

Ok, Trendsetters! This is Rodney Rude blazing across the stage and coming at you live in your lounge room with a huge crock of over the top comedy, served up with generous lashings of verbal manure and good old bad taste. And he’s brought with him his side-kick mate Rodney Half-Rude followed up the rear by Harry Muff, the Diver.

Meth Kelly explores how Australia’s colonial frontier narrative has been shaped by the imaginary heroic actions of the cult figure Ned Kelly. Through a video work projected in one of the shadowy tunnels of the ex-convict structures at Cockatoo Island, this work questions the legitimacy of Kelly’s hero status through a modern reinterpretation of his moral persona. Thornton skews the national narrative rooted in the romance of a Western, by transforming Kelly into a “meth head robbing a 7 Eleven”, placing him in a banal (sub)urban delinquent realm, far removed from cult status. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney.