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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Entertainment
Luke Buckmaster

From The New Boy to Asteroid City: 10 films to see at the 2023 Sydney film festival

Clockwise, top left: The New Boy, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Sisu, and Asteroid City.
Sydney film festival offerings including (clockwise from top left) The New Boy, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Sisu and Asteroid City. Composite: New Boy Productions/Sydney film festival/Focus Features/Lionsgate via Everett Collection

In decades to come, when historians reflect on a bygone form of social recreation known as “cinema-going”, I hope they’ll find room to include examples of film festival programs. They’re such wonderful snapshots of art, expression and the breadth of human experience.

As usual, the program for this year’s Sydney film festival – running from 7 June to 18 June – is packed with treats for cineastes, containing more than 200 films screening across the city. Here are 10 suggestions.

The New Boy

Director: Warwick Thornton / Country: Australia

‘Thornton is the multi-hyphenate par excellence’: The New Boy.
‘Thornton is the multi-hyphenate par excellence’: The New Boy Photograph: Supplied

The Indigenous auteur Warwick Thornton – whose work includes Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country and The Beach – is one of Australia’s greatest film-makers, here teaming up with one of our greatest actors: Cate Blanchett. In the 40s-set The New Boy, which opens this year’s festival, Blanchett plays a nun running a remote monastery where a young orphan boy (newcomer Aswan Reid) arrives late at night. A rare example of a major writer/director who is also a cinematographer, Thornton is the multi-hyphenate par excellence.

General release: TBC

Asteroid City

Director: Wes Anderson / Country: US

Wes Anderson’s 11th feature film is set in 1955 in a fictional desert town

Self-plagiarism is style, as Alfred Hitchcock famously said. Few directors are as distinctively stylish as Wes Anderson, whose 11th feature film is set in 1955 in a fictional desert town that hosts a Junior-Stargazer-slash-Space-Cadet convention. As usual, his cast is stacked with stars keen to be playthings in the kitschy Anderson dollhouse – including Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Margot Robbie, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum.

General release: 22 June

No Bears

Director: Jafar Panahi / Country: Iran

No Bears stars film-maker Jafar Panahi as a fictionalised version of himself

Speaking of auteurs: another of the greats is the Iranian writer/director Jafar Panahi, whose films are playful, personal, political and coyly self-referential. The Iranian government banned Panahi from directing in 2010, but he’s found ways to sneak his work through the censors, including secretly filming Tehran Taxi in a cab and smuggling This Is Not a Film out of the country on a USB stick hidden in a birthday cake. His latest is No Bears, which collected the special jury prize at last year’s Venice film festival and stars Panahi as a fictionalised version of himself, remotely directing a film about a couple in Turkey attempting to acquire fake passports and flee the country.

General release: TBC

Hello Dankness

Director: Soda Jerk / Country: Australia

Hello Dankness repurposes footage from old and new films to reflect on the election of Donald Trump

The two-person collective Soda Jerk (Sydney-born siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro) create highly original work that, paradoxically, is almost entirely comprised of pre-existing materials. As I wrote in my review, Hello Dankness “uses remixing and reappropriation to jokily ponder the end of consensus reality – the idea that dramatic events of recent years have not just changed the course of human history but destroyed general agreement about what is real and what is not”. It repurposes footage from old and new films to reflect on the election of Donald Trump and the madness of a global pandemic.

General release: TBC

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Director: Anna Hints / Country: Estonia, France, Ireland

Who knew the world needed a film about woodland smoke saunas?

I never realised until now that the world is terribly bereft of films about woodland smoke saunas in southern Estonia. This is one of the great virtues of cinema: to bring to the big screen visions of exotic places and situations. In this case, the hot and steamy kind. Anna Hints’ documentary visits a log cabin sauna where a group of women sweat, chat and bond, exchanging stories and secrets.

General release: TBC

20,000 Species of Bees

Director: Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren / Country: Spain

20,000 Species of Bees stars Sofía Otero as Cocó

I also never realised until now that the world is terribly bereft of films set among beehives near the border between France and Spain. Peter Bradshaw observed a “gentleness and delicacy in this heartfelt family drama” starring Sofía Otero as Cocó, an eight-year-old who comes to realise her true gender identity. At nine years old, Otero became the youngest ever recipient of the Berlin film festival’s silver bear award.

General release: TBC

Sisu

Director: Jalmari Helander / Country: Finland

Sisu: ‘pure cinema run through a Nordic meat grinder’

Action-movie trailers don’t get much more badass than the extremely violent sizzle reel for this cranked-to-11 Finnish spectacle about a gold miner in the second world war who “lost his home and his family in the war” and “became a one-man death squad”. One critic entertainingly described it as “something akin to pure cinema run through a Nordic meat grinder”. Sold. Also: gross.

General release: 27 July

Reality

Director: Tina Satter / Country: US

The dialogue in Reality is taken from FBI interrogation transcripts

In 2017, Reality Winner was arrested for leaking to the media a top-secret document detailing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The dialogue in Tina Satter’s film is taken entirely from FBI interrogation transcripts: a strange and interesting way to draw connection to real-life events. Winner is played by Sydney Sweeney – best known as Olivia, the snooty college sophomore from the first season of The White Lotus, as well as her award-winning turn as Euphoria’s Cassie.

General release: 29 June

Jane Campion retrospective

Jane Campion will be in conversation with David Stratton

Jane Campion’s magnum opus remains her 1993 masterpiece The Piano, which explores a recurring theme in her work: women on the fringes of social norms. But the New Zealand auteur has crafted many other fine films including Sweetie, In the Cut, Bright Star and An Angel at My Table. This year’s festival includes a retrospective of her work, with Campion appearing in person for a conversation with David Stratton.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Director: Daniel Goldhaber / Country: US

How To Blow Up a Pipeline, in which activists assemble to sabotage an oil pipeline

Director Daniel Goldhaber has described his fictionalised adaptation of Andreas Malm’s provocative nonfiction book as “Ocean’s Eleven about environmental activism”. A group of activists come together to sabotage a Texas oil pipeline, aware that their actions will blur the line between activism and terrorism. Wendy Ide called Goldhaber’s second film, following up his brilliant debut Cam, a “nervy thriller” that will act as “a lightning rod for the mounting anger of climate-conscious audiences that feel let down by government inaction on a looming global crisis”.

General release: TBC

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