OLGA Australian Premiere
Using real-life gymnasts to land his debut on solid ground, director Elie Grappe presents a compelling psychological portrait of a dedicated young athlete on the cusp of great success. Olga, which played at Critics Week in Cannes, packs in too much plot – the film would have vaulted home with far less. But there’s a grounded authenticity in this hermetically-sealed world of elite sports which should see the arresting Olga travel through festivals, making a name for its director and co-writer on the way. Perfectly timed with this year’s Olympics and the well-documented mental issues affecting the gymnasts there, Olga could catch itself on the bars of the zeitgeist and make a bid for theatrical exposure. Grappe’s film doesn’t feel a world away from last year’s Cannes Label title Slalom, although the threat to the lonely female athlete here – 15 year-old tough-as-nails Ukrainian gymnast Olga (Anastasia Budiashkina) – isn’t a sexual predator. Instead it’s her very identity: who is Olga, and what will she lose in order to take her shot at success? She’s so absurdly dedicated, and so breathtakingly talented, her teammates call her a robot. But she drives herself too hard, and there’s a breaking point.
Trailer viewable HERE
Trailer viewable HERE
PAMFIR Direct from Cannes 2022
Leonid, nicknamed “Pamfir” – ‘stone’ – is a family man trying to live an honourable life in the Carpathian forest borderland between Ukraine and Romania, where smuggling seems to be the only real living. From working in Poland, Pamfir returns to his home village during the Malanka festival to see his wife Olena and teenage son Nazar, who misses him so much that he commits an act of extreme vandalism to keep his dad around. Now Pamfir’s in debt to the mob – and as he embarks on a fateful ‘last’ job, things are about to get primal in this Wild West–like corner of Ukraine. Coming to Melbourne from its stunning Directors’ Fortnight debut at Cannes, Pamfir announces a startling new talent in Ukrainian director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk. Combining sardonic humour with oppressive atmosphere, the film skilfully borrows from the western, neo-noir and action genres. But it’s the specifically local textures – the children’s folk choir, the straw costumes, the scary wooden masks – that make it so much more satisfying and cinematically magnificent than your average Euro-crime thriller, presenting an unvarnished view of the country we’ve not seen until now.
Trailer viewable HERE
Trailer viewable HERE
107 MOTHERS Direct from Cannes 2022
Merging reality with fiction, this Venice prize-winning film captures the challenges of life and motherhood as experienced by a Ukrainian prison’s female inmates, who are separated from their young children. Pregnant Lesya kills her husband and enters Odessa Correctional Facility Number 74 to serve a seven-year sentence. She gives birth inside, where the law permits her to keep her son, Kolya, for three years, after which he’ll be sent to an orphanage or to live with a willing relative. As Kolya’s third birthday approaches, a sympathetic prison warden – relentlessly criticised by her mother for being single and childless – encourages Lesya to mend her relationship with her own mother to avoid losing her son forever. Premiering to acclaim at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Orizzonti Award for Best Screenplay, this startling film is built on the real-life stories of 107 incarcerated women; Maryna Klimova, who plays Lesya, is the only professional actor in this female-only space. Blending documentary with performance, director Peter Kerekes (Velvet Terrorists) reveals a world of quiet routine that is authentic and uncompromising. 107 Mothers is bold and visionary, never sacrificing the human story at its core: one of maternal devotion, in its many guises, and the essential power of love.
Trailer viewable HERE
REFLECTION Direct from Cannes 2022
Ukraine, 2014. In the wake of the Maidan Revolution and the retaliatory Russian occupation of Crimea and the Donbas, taciturn surgeon Serhiy signs up to fight on the front line alongside his ex-wife’s macho new husband. On the battlefield, Serhiy attempts to use his medical expertise to save his comrades – often in vain. And after he is captured by separatist forces, he must bear witness to a waking nightmare of violence. When he is eventually released, Serhiy must reconcile his traumatic experiences with a return to everyday middle-class comfort and parenthood. Nominated for Venice’s Golden Lion, Valentyn Vasyanovych’s exquisite follow-up to his award-winning film Atlantis (MIFF 2020) is rendered through a series of vivid tableaux, whose splendour is tempered by the potent subtlety of lead actor Roman Lutskyi’s performance. While the film was completed prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is nonetheless achingly relevant to the country’s current plight, unflinchingly confronting the lingering psychological scars inflicted by war and its accompanying brutalities.
Trailer viewable HERE
Trailer viewable HERE
HOME GAMES
With her addict stepfather spending his child support money on alcohol, 20-year-old Alina shoulders the responsibility for her young half-brother and half-sister. Alina’s mother and grandmother aren’t in any state to help, either. There’s never any cash, and they all live together in a shabby, cramped apartment in Kiev. Alina is a talented soccer player who practices in worn-out cleats that she’s sewn back together herself. When her mother dies, Alina’s cherished dream of a place on the national women’s soccer team becomes even more remote. Director Alisa Kovalenko skillfully maneuvers her camera around the apartment, staying close to this incredibly resilient young woman. Given the circumstances, it’s astonishing how much patience Alina has for her family, and how lovingly she cares for her little brother and sister—even when she has no choice but to take them with her to a training camp, or sell her own belongings to support them. Despite it all, she fights to keep her soccer dream alive.
Trailer viewable HERE
With her addict stepfather spending his child support money on alcohol, 20-year-old Alina shoulders the responsibility for her young half-brother and half-sister. Alina’s mother and grandmother aren’t in any state to help, either. There’s never any cash, and they all live together in a shabby, cramped apartment in Kiev. Alina is a talented soccer player who practices in worn-out cleats that she’s sewn back together herself. When her mother dies, Alina’s cherished dream of a place on the national women’s soccer team becomes even more remote. Director Alisa Kovalenko skillfully maneuvers her camera around the apartment, staying close to this incredibly resilient young woman. Given the circumstances, it’s astonishing how much patience Alina has for her family, and how lovingly she cares for her little brother and sister—even when she has no choice but to take them with her to a training camp, or sell her own belongings to support them. Despite it all, she fights to keep her soccer dream alive.
Trailer viewable HERE
MR. JONES
1933: Gareth Jones is an ambitious young Welsh journalist who gained fame after his report on being the first foreign journalist to fly with Hitler. Whilst working as an advisor to Lloyd George, he is now looking for his next big story. The Soviet “utopia” is all over the news, and Jones is intrigued as to how Stalin is financing the rapid modernisation of the Soviet Union. On leaving his government role, Jones decides to travel to Moscow in an attempt to get an interview with Stalin himself. There he meets Ada Brooks, a British journalist working in Moscow, who reveals that the truth behind the regime is being violently repressed. Hearing murmurs of government-induced famine, a secret carefully guarded by the Soviet censors, Jones manages to elude the authorities and travels clandestinely to Ukraine, where he witnesses the atrocities of man-made starvation – millions left to starve – as all grain is sold abroad to finance the industrialising Soviet empire. Deported back to London, Jones publishes an article revealing the horrors he witnessed. But the starvation is denied by Western journalists reporting from Moscow, all under pressure from the Kremlin, including Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Duranty. As death threats mount, Jones has to fight for the truth. Meeting a young author by the name of George Orwell, Jones shares his findings to inspire the great allegorical novel Animal Farm.
Trailer viewable HERE
Trailer viewable HERE
NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN
One grey, foggy morning, a mysterious young man, Zhenia (Alec Utgoff, Stranger Things), crosses the border from the Ukraine into Poland, carrying only a massage table. When faced with a staid official at Warsaw’s immigration office, he secures the necessary residence permit by simply taking the man’s head in his huge, soft hands and massaging him into a trance. Zhenia soon establishes himself with the well-to-do residents of a suburban gated community of identical white McMansions, where his unique talents quickly become in demand. Among the clientele are Maria (Maja Ostaszewska), who finds a calm in Zhenia that her hostile children and husband don’t provide; derisive widow Ewa (Agata Kulesza, Ida) who lusts after the masseur in more ways than she’ll dare admit; a woman obsessed by her three bulldogs who pleads for them to also be treated, and Wika (Weonika Rosati), who has invested the last hopes for her cancer-stricken husband (Lukasz Simlat, Corpus Christi) in Zhenia’s seemingly magical fingertips. But as he navigates through the affairs, drinking, drug-taking and games of neighbourly one-upmanship, no one thinks to ask Zhenia about his own concerns, least of all his mysterious origins… Anchored by Utgoff’s utterly magnetic central performance, Szumowska and Englert’s study of class and modern malaise astutely blends magic realism with dark humour and stunning production design to often jaw-dropping effect. Following Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War and Jan Komasa’s Corpus Christi as Poland’s official entry to the Academy Awards, NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN is a striking jewel worthy of equal attention.
Trailer viewable HERE
Trailer viewable HERE