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.
The Japanese Film Festival is back for its 24th year in 2020 with this virtual edition streaming online from December 4 to 13, 2020.
In the South Korean zombie classic TRAIN TO BUSAN, there is a scene where the zombies are locked in one train compartment with the uninfected humans doing all that they can so these zombies can’t escape. It is a natural human instinct for survival, to not die, and the zombie film is probably the most existential of the horror genre to embody this.
