Keywords: Sydney Film Festival
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Sarah Klenbort
- 01 August 2023
5 Comments
When a comedic story is withdrawn from a literary contest for referencing Putin, it bears reflecting on various shades of censorship. In an interconnected world where social media storms can shape the narrative, what does freedom of speech mean for writers today?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 05 October 2016
1 Comment
At the opening of the Environmental Film Festival Australia in Melbourne last week, festival patron and former Greens senator Bob Brown highlighted the movement against oil drilling in the Great Australian Bight. He painted a picture wherein a major spill in the region could lead to an environmental disaster stretching as far from the site as the NSW coast. His words make the release of Deepwater Horizon, about the disaster that led to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, even more timely.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 02 June 2016
2 Comments
It's the last chance for Ricky, who has been through a lot of other foster homes before winding up at Bella and Hector's. We don't know the detail of these experiences, but it is telling that the natural nurturer Bella's smallest gestures - cooking breakfast for Ricky, or putting a hot water bottle in his bed at night - are kindnesses like none he has ever known. It contrasts with the child welfare worker''s mantra of 'No child left behind', which on her lips becomes menacing, or at best a bureaucratic inanity.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 30 October 2014
1 Comment
Orphan Abdul loves Fatemeh, but her father is demanding a prohibitive dowry for her hand. The financial wrangling between Abdul's guardian Mahboba and Fatemah's father Nik, and all this implies about the ways in which young women's futures can be sold and traded as part of an archaic cultural norm, seems crass and is more than a little disturbing to witness.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 31 October 2013
2 Comments
On the eve of taking her vows as a nun, 18-year-old novice Ida learns that she is Jewish. This sets her on a journey of self-discovery as she seeks to, literally, uncover the bones of her past, which has its roots in the Holocaust. It is timely to reflect on these matters in the wake of last weekend's anti-semitic violence in Bondi. It is better to grasp the bones of truth than walk in pious ignorance past the mass graves of history.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Matthews
- 24 May 2013
2 Comments
One of the great monuments to the 'Dunstan Decade', the Adelaide Festival Centre marks its 40th birthday next weekend. It was the first capital city complex devoted to the performing arts, before even the Sydney Opera House. For me the anniversary triggers a flood of memories, including a theatrical encounter with Dunstan himself.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 01 March 2013
37 Comments
There is a temptation to see justice, compassion and transparency as the obsessive concern of western liberals. They are much more universal than that; they are the contemporary, institutional rendition of gospel values. The unaccountable hiddenness of Vatican clericalism has reached its use-by date.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 12 August 2010
1 Comment
Aaron initially rationalises his sexuality as
a test from God, a test that priveleges him, as it gives him an
opportunity to prove his resilience. Ultimately his affair with a younger man is rather more serious than
simply a rebellion against an oppressive ultra-orthodox society.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 05 August 2010
6 Comments
Mother Fish recreates the journey by sea of a group of Vietnamese refugees. During an election campaign where both major parties are trying to win votes
with prejudicial rhetoric about 'border protection', a bit of truth and
humanity is just what's needed.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 15 July 2010
3 Comments
Sydney filmmaker Claire McCarthy spent two months working among
Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. Like many Westerners with egalitarian pretensions, the characters in her film The Waiting City arrive in India bearing a
tourist's naivety.
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EUREKA STREET TV
- Peter Kirkwood
- 14 August 2009
4 Comments
Attempts by the Chinese Government to stop a documentary about Uighur activist and leader Rebiya Kadeer from screening in Melbourne remind us that China is a vast country governed by very different values to our own.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 22 June 2009
1 Comment
Controversry over the documentary Stolen at this month's Sydney Film Festival underlined how difficult it is to even acknowledge that slavery exists. Suppression of information about slavery in Australia allows the slave trade to continue.
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