Check out these three documentaries competing for the Documentary Australia Foundation Award as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2020 On-Demand program.
DESCENT
“When you learn to cope with cold water immersion, it’s going to help you cope with stress, fear, anxiety, and all other kinds of negative emotions.” This is a quote from this healing film that pushes your limits on comfort, tolerance, endurance, pain, and danger.
THE PLASTIC HOUSE
A hypnotic contemplative reflection of the past through the present. This is quite a very quiet film as it painstakingly plows through the garden of familial memories of an Asian-Australian upbringing.
A HUNDRED YEARS OF HAPPINESS
Starts with a humble slow cooking of sour eel vegetable stew and fried fish by the mother of the bride-to-be and culminates with a Vietnamese wedding to her Korean husband. Along the way is a fascinating portrait of countryside Vietnam with all its dainty and exotic customs, colours, and flavours.
Filmmaker Lin Jianjie’s uneasy piece depicts a sombre modern China moving from its one-child policy to embracing its now two-child and more policy. It dwells on sibling rivalry between two sons, one biological and the other adopted.
You know you are watching a film from a master perfectionist when everything is seamlessly interconnected and plausible no matter how improbable and far-fetched it could have been. In PARASITE, South Korean auteur filmmaker Bong Joon-ho has just done that.
