The 12th London Australian Film Festival
Thurs 2 March – Sun 12 March

barbican.org.uk/australianfilm

The hugely popular London Australian Film Festival at the Barbican is now in its 12th frame. This year’s event kicks off on Thursday 2 March with a Gala Screening of The Proposition (Australia/UK 2005), the hugely anticipated collaboration between director John Hillcoat and writer/musician Nick Cave, who wrote the original screenplay. With a stellar cast of Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Danny Huston, Emily Watson and David Wenham this epic Western, set in 1880s Australia, was shot in blistering 50 degrees celsius in the unforgiving Australian outback of remote north-western Queensland. The festival is delighted to announce that John Hillcoat, will attend the Gala Screening. The ten-day festival brings to London 18 new feature productions, 7 documentaries plus the return for the 3rd year of Sony Tropfest , Sydney’s outside short film festival, brought inside at the Barbican, a selection of 18 Flickerfest short films, as well as Anthony Lucas’ BAFTA and Oscar nominated animated short The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (Australia 2004), and the Down Under edition of Family Film Club.

THE NEW FEATURES:
Every year the Festival showcases the best of Australian talent through a broad programme of features from established and first-time directors, and this year is no exception. Sarah Watt’s debut feature Look Both Ways (Australia 2005) swept the Australian Film Institute Awards winning Best Film, Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay, and the festival is delighted to present this intimate and imaginative film that mixes live action with animated sequences, as the Closing Gala.

Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving won Best Actress and Best Actor for their parts in Rowan Woods’ Little Fish (Australia 2005, 114mins). Blanchett plays Trace, a recoverying heroin addict whose attempts to start a new clean life are hampered by her dealer brother Ray (Martin Henderson) and ex-boyfriend (Dustin Nguyen). Turning to troubled ex-football start Lionel (Weaving) for support, Tracy finds herself drawn bck to her past. Also starring Sam Neill and Susie Porter.

Robert Connolly (The Bank) directs a provocative tale of love and moral decency in Three Dollars starring David Wenham (Lord of the Rings) and Frances O’Connor (The Importance of Being Ernest) and Sarah Wynter (24), and comedian Jimeoin gets behind the scenes in The Extra (Australia 2004) to uncover the wannabe, bittersweet life of the movie extra.

A hit at the Adelaide and Cannes Film Festival 2005 where it played in “Un Certain Regard”, and triple winner at the Australian Film Institute Awards, Tony Krawitz’s Jewboy (Australia 2005) tells the story of a young man on a quest for his family, his faith, and his place in the world. After the death of his father, Yuri returns from Israel to the strict Hasidic community in Sydney. Losing his faith in Judaism, he rejects his former girlfriend Rivka and takes a job as a taxi driver. Yuri loses himself in his search for an identity... "Telling the story of a young man's struggle with desire and faith is what inspired me to write the story of Jewboy, Tony Krawitz told the Cannes Film Festival. I wanted to make a film filled with conflict, emotion and ultimately hope set in a world rarely seen in Australian films."

This year’s Festival Focus is given to director Kriv Stenders who first picked up a camera at twelve years old and has collected many awards for his short films and music videos since. The festival is delighted to present this up-and-coming director’s debut and follow-up features. Stender’s debut feature, The Illustrated Family Doctor (Australia 2005) stars Samuel Johnson and Colin Friels in a surreal and bleakly funny personal disaster movie, about illness, work, death and a young man dealing with the monotony of contemporary working life. His improvised and dramatic follow-up Blacktown (Australia 2005) is a raw, Dogma inspired, verité-style digital film based on and starring Tony Ryan, an Aboriginal bus-driver and musician.

Other festival highlights include: Opal Dream (Australia/UK 2005) from The Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo;.Scott Ryan’s no-budget debut The Magician (Australia 2005) which has all the hallmarks of a cult classic; Mark Lee (actor Gallipoli) makes his directing debut with The Bet (Australia 2005) a contemporary morality tale set in the cut-throat world of Sydney stockbrocking; and Kieran Galvin’s debut feature Puppy (Australia 2005), an off-beat romance with some thrilling twists and turns.

THE DOCUMENTARIES:
This year’s documentary strand boasts a selection of award-winning films which reveal the broad capabilities of the medium.

The Festival links with DocHouse to show the extraordinary Rash (Australia 2005) (Film Critics Circle of Australia Best Australian Feature Documentary 2005), a celebration of contemporary urban expression, of an unsanctioned kind. Against a pulsating soundtrack by True Live’s Ryan Ritchie, the graffiti artists’ poetic brilliance is passionately uncovered by director Nicholas Hansen who exposes the talent and wealth of key players in Melbourne’s street art scene.

A double-bill celebrates two women who challenge conventional norms: Janet Merewether’s Jabe Babe: A Heightened Life (Australia 2005) uses a fusion of 50s B-movie aesthetics with provocative realism to capture the spirit of Jabe, a six foot plus dominatrix who suffers from a rare genetic disorder, Marfan Syndrome. Winner of an Australian Film Award for Best Direction in a Documentary, this dazzling inventive film challenges assumptions about what it is to be feminine. Kathy Drayton’s stylistic Girl in a Mirror (Australia 2005) (winner of Australian Film Commission Award for Best Documentary) is a poetic and powerful tribute to photographer Carol Jerrems, creator of some of the most iconic images of 1970s Australian counter-culture. Interviews with Jerrems’ friends and subjects are juxtaposed with a cinematic use of her photographs to tell the story of this groundbreaking and adventurous feminist who became the victim of a fatal blood disease at the age of 30.

Jane Jeffes’ enlightening Silma’s School (Australia 2005) gives insight to the Australian Muslim community and one woman’s ten-year struggle to establish and keep open one of the country’s first Muslim schools in Sydney. In Land Mines: A Love Story (Australia 2005) award winning documentary filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke (Cunnamulla) puts a human face to the statistics: every 22 minutes someone is wounded or killed by a land mine. Habiba, a girl from Afghanistan, is one of many who have been injured. O’Rourke delves behind the surface of her situation to discover a cross-cultural love affair with fellow sufferer Shah, a soldier from Taliban-rule Kabul.

Two provocative films question the cost of war. Wayne Coles-Jones’ gained unsupervised access to Baghdad to shoot In the Shadow of Palms: Iraq (Australia 2005) in the weeks before the US-led invasion in 2003. The result reveals the lives of ordinary citizens in the lead up to the bombing. David Bradbury, Australia’s most challenging documentary maker, returns with Blowin’ in the Wind (Australia 2005), a disturbing and unflinching exploration of the issue of depleted Uranium weapons. Through interviews with those already affected, including seriously ill Gulf War soldiers, this stimulating report examines the impact depleted uranium can have on the environment and our bodies.