Festival Reviews

RECOMMENDED FILMS IN COMPETITION AT THE 2022 SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL

The biggest film festival in Australia is the Sydney Film Festival which was held for twelve days last 8-19 June 2022, with so many film premieres from prestigious film festivals such as Berlinale, Venice, Cannes, and Sundance, among others. Twelve films vied for competition and the following are my favourites.

https://sff.org.au/

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This Cannes 2022 Grand Prix winner gets my vote to win the Sydney Film Festival 2022 Official Competition (and finally enough, it did!)! Wow! What an emotional, cathartic experience! So well done from the story, acting and musical score. The audience just lost themselves in awe. What applause!!! The story focuses on an innocent childhood friendship that was needled to the brink of a breakdown. The aftermath is deftly handled regarding the authenticity of its emotional journey. The strength of this film is the delicate portrayal of loss and grief that is full of honest reality. Excellent performances, deft direction, and superb writing make this a worthy movie to watch for the savvy, sensitive audience.

BURNING DAYS

This dark small-town crime mystery unravels in a provocative illusory mix of homoerotic memory fragments and Polanski-style paranoia as it builds suspense from the pitiless carnage of wild boars to that jaw-dropping persecutory ending. Its plot treatment is an inimitable mix of suspense genres from mystery whodunit to remote Oriental European mysticism. From imagined intimate moments to the forewarning touching of a hand, feared metaphors abound in this stoic portrait of an outsider transplanted into the dark world of small-town darkness.

UTAMA

Solitude and seclusion are tenaciously explored in this powerful tale of ageing, mortality and a changing climate in the Bolivian highlands. This Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner explores indigenous resilience among the resolute Quechea community. Amidst pink-horned llamas and a dying condor, an elderly couple ekes out a living despite the confounding drought and the encumbrance of struggles with old age and a changing environment. The arrival of their grandson eventually brings conflict as they resist an existential threat to their tradition and lifestyle.

THE BOX

With the same detachment as FROM AFAR, this slow build psychosocial study of Mexico creeps into the audience’s psyche without fanfare or music but with a suspenseful omissive narrative that ultimately chokes you and stabs you in the gut. The choice not to use a musical score is quite brave and works well in establishing the internalised drama of the characters. This quest for family kinship unravels into a loss of innocence for a boy exposed to Mexico’s underbelly of expendable lives within an exploitative industry of sweatshop labour.

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Rolmar Baldonado

Films for the cineaste. Were you moved, transported? Did you laugh, cry? Was it cathartic? Were you disturbed, affected, riveted? Did it make you think?Freelance film editor, cineaste and cinephileTwitter: @film_critik Twitter: @rolmar Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/filmcritik/

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