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listing-to-port · 5 years

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Happy birthday to this, again (part two)

Listing to port is THREE today so, as is traditional, here is a list of the posts from that past year, in two parts, of which this is the second. Once again facilitated by the R interface to the tumblr api. Previously on listing to port: year one part one; year one part two; year two part one; year two part two; year three part one.

On human mechanisms: Wakings; Nine things we have not done yet; On rewards; Ten things that the young folk are doing these days; Mothers; Eight activation energy problems; Ten rules of thumb; Some commonly-abbreviated names; Six other senses; Eight gender reveals; Fears; Eleven love letters; Personality traits; Nine eligible bachelors; Ten dubious schoolmates; Sleeplands; Ten sudden enthusiasms; Nine sense-memories transfigured for the modern spirit; Things I have sometimes mistaken for knowing what I’m talking about; Ten people who were at the buffet but left before the inevitable disaster; Nine feelings, repurposed; Ten more love languages; Nine replies from the diary; Nine blood oaths; Notions; Surprising intersections of personal obsessions; Eight prisons; Nine pointless battles; Hasty decisions; Eight reasons why the nursery is closed.

On myths and magic and stories: Seven reasons the giants have left this Earth and dwell in peace amongst the stars; Nine characters who have not yet found their trope; Six Shakespeare adaptations; Nine more muses; Eight rejected adventures; The presidential libraries of the old gods; Ten wizards at the door; The safer of the fairy fruits; Nine river spirits; Nine unseen alphabets; On that night; Nine reasons dragons hoard; Seven acts of sympathetic magic; Eight tiny dragons; Modern demons; Small myths; Seven sons; Seven castaways; Ten dryads; Seven vampires; Ten great reveals; Nine magic systems; Seven tales of nautical peril; Eight bookwyrms; What kind of monster does this? A case-by-case analysis; Eight fairy tails; Seven early ghost stories; Nine calls to kingship; Eight happy endings for birds; Waves; Eight inconvenient weres; Nine hybrid beasts; Omens from the flight of birds; Seven escalations in peril; Nine merthings; Eight unicorns; Eight fairy facts.

On puzzles, conundrums and games: Nine failed riddles; Nine Winter Olympic sports; The culprit; a list; Eight reasons why the chicken crossed the road; Eight ways to solve crime; Seven long balls; Eight solutions to various problems; Nine reasons why that baby never wore the shoes; Mazes; Ten answers; Investigators; Ten keys to uninteresting mysteries.

On technology and things arising from technology: Nine internet debating positions; Eight mystical programming languages; Six ways out of the bot factory; Crimes of the virtual world; Nine privacy policies; Seven sonic weapons; Seven safety announcements; Eight signs that you are in a simulation; Nine secret lairs; Ten renewable energy sources; Seven future bugs; Eight mystical files; Seven things that will be gamified; Nine stories of the death of websites; Bugs.

On the natural world: Thirty pieces of silver; Seven things heard through grapevines; Nine promises pulled from the bark of a tree; Nine dawns; Deserts; Storms; Nine ways to get lost in the wilderness; Seven Springs; Seven moods of the sea; Falling water; Things in the heart of the rose; Types of bird; Things that have been melting; Seven British birds; Seven woods; Eight heavy plants crossing; Shorelines; Places the rain may carry you to; Seven archipelagoes; Clouds; Nine ways to the sea; Metals; Ten types of sunlight; Ten ways that birds find their way home; Trees; Autumns; Seven peaceful meadows; Nine ways that bees disrespect the laws of physics; Seven forests to get lost in; Nine habitats; Reasons why two or more trees may be standing together; Some other things that were beneath the volcano; Tree honorifics; Nine visits from Winters; Fields; Nine mountain passes; Nine unusual Winter weathers; Nine secrets of the uttermost depths.

On things (general): Advanced skills for modern generalists; Seven things that are small and drifting; Eight things that were what they were; Things that rock; Unknown things; Things it is bad to step on in the dark; Things in the margins; Ten things that go bump in the night; Nine dead things rising; Ten spirits of unremarkable things; Eight things that have been replaced with things that are approximately the same size; Things in the air; Things that have been swallowed by the sea.

On time and space: Space missions; Quotidian futures; Six incorrect theories proposed by aliens; Seven geometries of time; Fortunes; Seven true promises of eternity; Seven not-quite-dystopias; Timelines; Seven books that have yet to be written; Nine landscapes of the old world; What she says and what she means, women are from Venus edition; Seven solar systems; Seven things happening to the stars; Twelve great new jobs available to humanity after the arrival of the alpha centurans; Eight rovers; Twelve convenient apocalypses; Seven very specific dystopias; Ten ghosts of Winter nights to come; Futures; Nine tremendously welcoming planets that you should visit; Nine things to check should you find an empty world; Eight tales of the death of stars; Eight first steps on Mars; Products available seventy million years from now in the case that humans fill the marketing niche for the dominant species of the time that tyrannosaurus rex now fills for humans; Ten myths of the far future.

On transportation and infrastructure: Seven dread infrastructures; Ten roads less travelled; Places that the aeroplane went; Descents; Journeys; Seven views from an unfamiliar train; Seven mean streets; Int. the airport, night: scenes; Eight roads to ruin; Ten trains and the places they go; Waymarks; Nine cartographers; Six live cables; Eight marketplaces, and what may be bought there; Ten signal fires; Eight reviews of the facilities; Buildings in the distant mountains; Maps; Ten ways to stop people crossing the edge of the map; Twelve lovely villages out on the old moor that are absolutely worth a visit; Seven pumpkin modes of transportation; Nine submariners; Fifteen faces that have launched things; Hinterlands; Twelve train stations; Seven roadside attractions.

Poems and suchlike: Let us have less Winter; Six complete poems; A villanelle; On queues.

Short stories and suchlike: Miranda come at last to dust; The interlibrary loan; On light’s many lovers and your mayfly lives; The originals; Ten things the city takes; Sunday chain #30; Sunday chain #31.

#lists #writing #birthdays #three #listing to port

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photographasdocumentspring14blog · 7 years

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Essay by Michael Almereyda, Filmmaker

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out. —Martin Scorsese

We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

In Cameraperson (2016), Kirsten Johnson has made a buoyant film about the weight of the world.

She lays out her process in a paragraph presented up front. What we’re about to see, she explains, has been patched together from material she has shot as a cinematographer for films directed by other people, in the course of a career spanning twenty-five years. “I ask you to see it as my memoir,” Johnson insists.

A memoir, yes, but one that is scant on autobiographical facts. You have to turn elsewhere to learn that Johnson studied painting and literature in the late 1980s at Brown University, where she had a political awakening, stirred by the anti-apartheid movement roiling the campus. Upon graduation, making an uncommon move, she transplanted herself to Senegal and interned there on a film written by the great Ousmane Sembène. In 1991, she was the first American to enroll at La Fémis, the French national film school, where she entered the camera department and discovered a vocation. She landed early cinematography jobs in France and Brazil.

Evolving from this global trajectory, Cameraperson is a nonchronological collage of raw and repurposed footage: forty-four distinct episodes (by my count) made up of sounds and images gathered for (but generally not appearing in) twenty-four separate projects. Most of the episodes are bridged by breaks of black frames, during which anticipatory sounds prepare for oncoming images. Locations are identified by title cards, and eleven people are given names and job descriptions, ranging from “Jacques Derrida / French philosopher”—a quick cameo, as the famous man impishly holds forth on a Manhattan street—to “Aisha Bukar / nurse, midwife,” a more substantial, recurring presence, granting us access to a natal unit in a Nigerian hospital, where the film arrives at one of its most harrowing sequences. We get scraps from high-profile documentaries—Laura Poitras’s The Oath and Citizenfour, on which Johnson served as a principal shooter, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, for which she received an “additional camera operator” credit—but most of the movies cannibalized here are not especially well-known, and Johnson accomplishes her most probing portraiture by focusing on people encountered as strangers. Her inclusion, at regular intervals, of her own home-video footage confirms an impression of inspired and intimate rummaging. (This is a memoir that blurs the line between professional and private experience.) Ultimately, like a lavish quilt, or a bird’s nest, the film subsumes its source material on the way to becoming a complete and organic new thing.

More often than not, Johnson’s work takes her to places stamped by violence, death, and destruction, sites of collective grief and dread. Even if the worst of the mayhem has occurred in the past, she’s there to absorb and collect the residue, talking to survivors, bearing witness. Johnson supplies a few grace notes, musical interludes, flashes of scenic splendor, but for a film made by a cinematographer, there are bracingly few images that are merely pretty or picturesque. People are plainly what Johnson cares about most, and in this film she candidly prizes and examines her ability to use her camera to get close to whoever is in the frame. “Gettin’ close to everybody,” she murmurs, disarmingly, to an initially wary man in a Brooklyn boxing gym. The man smiles and relaxes, as if Johnson has cast a spell. She coaxes equivalent looks of complicity and acceptance from a boy in Kabul whose left eye has been blinded in a bomb blast; from an elegantly wizened Muslim woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina who, with a tight, tart smile, denies that the Serbs’ campaign of mass rape ever affected her family; and from her own mother, diminished by Alzheimer’s, regarding Johnson—and Johnson’s camera—with a mix of tenderness and fright.

The film has been crafted with self-reflexive knowingness. Shots that feature fumbling and reframing are integrated the way a confident painter builds a picture around bare canvas, loose brushwork, spattered drips. And there’s a steady pressing of a central nerve, a nagging question implicit in the most searching documentaries as well as the most trivial: At what point does the camera’s scrutiny become exploitative, invasive, voyeuristic, damaging? The question hovers throughout the film, despite Johnson’s evident gift for putting people at ease, respecting the pressure and pain of true confession. In sequence after sequence, she invites and captures intimacy, even or especially when her subjects don’t want their faces shown. (In these cases, Johnson’s camera follows their uneasy hands, and we see Scorsese’s axiom at work; what’s not in the frame adds eloquence to what is.)

As a self-portrait, Cameraperson is intriguingly elliptical, oblique. Early on, we see Johnson’s striding shadow, her camera rising from her shoulder like a jagged branch, an extension of her body, but in the course of the film she appears full-on only briefly, near the end. She doesn’t spell out a credo, or spill any outright confessions of her own. (In an overconfiding age, this may account for a good deal of the film’s power.) But Johnson’s overheard voice—a quick, open, guileless voice, quintessentially American—is there from the start, behind the lens, giggling and almost giddy. When her camera catches lightning slicing down from a wash of blue-gray Missouri clouds, she gasps, then stays steady and silent enough to take in the emptiness—a crash of thunder, its echo, a defiantly serene bird—then Johnson sneezes, twice, jostling the frame, undercutting any self-important claim to authority as the film’s title comes up.

Soon after, in Sarajevo, speaking offhandedly to an unseen collaborator, the cameraperson sketches her MO, talking like a teenager: “I always try to have some kind of relationship with people, like I’ll look them in the eye like ‘You see me shooting you, don’t you?’”

She shows us her twin toddlers in her Manhattan home (without giving a glimpse of a significant other) and spends time with her parents, inevitable augurs of mortality. Johnson’s father, on a casual walk, cheerfully displays a dead bird to the grandkids, while images of Johnson’s mother give way to shots of a container holding her ashes. (For the latter, Johnson keeps rearranging objects in the frame, adjusting the composition, as if trying to come to terms with the unadjustable limit of her mother’s life.)

In interviews, Johnson has expressed guilt and self-reproach about photographing her afflicted mother against her wishes. Yet, as she must know, some of her film’s most poignant moments emerge from this betrayal. How could Johnson resist recording her mother’s stunned face, trying to hold on to an identity slipping away before her eyes? Circling back to Scorsese, we can recognize that Johnson is confronting a larger fact: human presences are always fragile, fleeting, on their way to being out of the frame.

*****

You can entangle across time. You can entangle into the future, into the past. You can entangle through space. That’s what quantum entanglement means. It means that there’s another underlying layer of nature that we haven’t discovered yet. —Dr. Eric W. Davis, in Cameraperson

At some point in the editing process, Johnson seems to have taken her cue from the astrophysicist quoted above, riffing on the notion that we’re all entangled; time and space can’t always be taken literally; recorded reality can be reorganized to comply with memory and imagination. By this logic, less scientific than intuitive, people and places in Johnson’s memoir become entangled in occasional shared chapters, tethered by free-associational edits. The harsh wind in Wyoming, flashing through tall grass on the Johnson family ranch, makes Johnson’s mother stagger, wince, and seem to dwindle into a Giacometti figurine. With the grace of a cut, the same wind sweeps through a yellow hillside in Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the rural village where a Muslim family has returned to their farm while contending with memories of genocide and war.

Similar associative links and leaps flicker throughout the film, but, halfway in, there’s a sequence that’s starkly explicit in its insistence on interconnectedness. Johnson serves up a series of landscapes where historic atrocities have occurred, now mute and tranquil crime scenes, mundane places conjoined by invisible carnage and, for the most part, a shared look of dreary ordinariness. The sequence includes sites of mass execution, torture, and rape, plus forensic shots of the drab interior of a pickup truck identified as the vehicle that dragged James Byrd Jr. to his death in the otherwise unremarkable town of Jasper, Texas. In this stretch, Johnson expresses a sustained note of anguish, like a war correspondent admitting to a case of secondhand PTSD, but she’s stoic about it, and, as her film offers a range of locations and perspectives, she’s irrepressibly alert to the bigger picture—a picture that includes antic dancing in Uganda, a woman embracing a fierce and humiliated young boxer after a lost match in Brooklyn, the flow of life around a roadside market in Liberia. It’s fair to say the “wonderful” God hailed by nine-year-old Kirsten in a preserved handwritten poem—“Your love never ends! / And my love to you will never end!”—has been displaced, in the grown cameraperson’s mind and eye, by a pantheistic understanding of the world, a sense of immanence and mystery that competes with evidence of unrelenting bad news. And so Johnson counterbalances bitter and abject scenes with proofs of compassion, consolation, even joy. And it’s no fluke that many of the film’s brighter moments involve children.

*****

Down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios . . . Long live life as it is! —Dziga Vertov

Cameraperson has been showered with sympathetic and insightful reviews, and hailed as a film without precedent. It doesn’t diminish Johnson’s work—its integrity, freshness, and force—to recognize that antecedents do exist. Dziga Vertov, the pioneering Soviet director of newsreels and kaleidoscopic documentary features, would not be spinning in his grave to consider his legacy extended and fulfilled in Johnson’s audacious and self-aware doc/essay/travelogue/memoir. Indeed, Cameraperson would make a provocative double bill with Vertov’s equally unclassifiable Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a dazzling chronicle of urban life channeled dusk to dawn through the lens of an itinerant cameraman, a tale told without intertitles or narration. (Vertov’s spectacular “day” was in fact filmed in four cities over a period of three years.) Man with a Movie Camera’s propulsive editing and hyper-aestheticized photography don’t jibe with Johnson’s levelheaded approach, but her anchoring ambition is aligned with Vertov’s: to record and elevate common experience, to uphold film as a reflection of reality rather than an escape from it, and, further, to create movies that open idealistically outward, providing a means for people to see their lives valued, honored, and in effect returned to them, even as they become part of a larger collective story.

In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), we can find another singular, self-defining, soaring hybrid “documentary” experiment, a collage of fragmentary episodes candidly jigsawed together from a cinematographer’s accumulated outtakes. Marker uses magisterial narration to explicate his images, to question them, to expand their reach, constructing a philosophical inquiry into the nature of seeing, memory, time, consciousness; but strip away the voice-over and you can still take in Marker’s generous regard for the people he encounters, respect for their vulnerability, their otherness, their unique place within a vast human family.

All the same, Vertov and Marker, assigning their authentic, unstaged images to fictional cameramen, avoid the level of personal risk embraced by Johnson, who unabashedly (if incompletely) reveals her history, her unmistakable self, as the source of every frame. By the time we catch sight of her in Cameraperson, we can be forgiven for presuming to know her. She aims the camera at herself, standing beside her unsteady mother, sharing the older woman’s worried smile, and her eyes look haunted. The image emerges within a flashback, an editorial surprise, and it suggests that Johnson would agree with a primary Marker aphorism: “Being a photographer means not only to look but to sustain the gaze of others.” The gaze of others, we can see, carries a corresponding weight.

*****

I said to the wanting-creature inside me: What is this river you want to cross? —Kabir

Voyeurism is related to cinema as lust is related to love. You can separate them—you can try to separate them—but to what end? The urge to look, to see and share private experience—whether displays of intimacy, acts of violence, the urgent facts of another person’s pain—is seldom pure and simple. How do we, filmmakers and film viewers, transcend voyeurism? How can a filmmaker’s craft and conscience elevate images from voyeurism to revelation?

Cameraperson reaches a kind of climax back in Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the place Johnson visits most within the braided strands of the film’s structure. She documents her return five years after her initial journey, with music from the resulting 2011 film, an episode of the PBS series Women, War & Peace, brimming over into Cameraperson, the movie we’re watching while the gathered family watches themselves on a laptop screen. Johnson, of course, records this rapt audience, their charged attention, then the rich homemade meal that follows, coffee, a cigarette. The Möbius-strip circuit of giving and taking and giving back—the process of seeing, sharing, and accepting—brings Cameraperson to an ideal summit of reconciliation, peace, hope for the future. “We hope someday she can come back with her son and daughter,” a woman tells Johnson’s translator, “to see how peasants live.” Exactly the response Vertov was hectically hungering for.

One of the film’s most arresting and resonant images, for this viewer, occurs earlier in Foča, when an unnamed Muslim woman lifts a bowl high above her head, confidently spilling berries into another bowl held below her waist. The free-falling fruit makes an ecstatic blur, and the next cut shows the berries as they’ve landed and settled, as if artfully prearranged: a ready-made bouquet of whorled color—red, black, white, yellow—an instant metaphor for plenitude and renewal, raw experience transformed into poetry.

“Wow,” says the woman behind the camera. “It’s like magic.”

Yes—wow—it is.

Michael Almereyda’s documentary films include This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World, Paradise, and the forthcoming Escapes.

I have copied this essay from the site linked above.

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funnythingshere0-blog · 6 years

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Breaking Up is Easy for Rising Kiwi filmmakers

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/breaking-up-is-easy-for-rising-kiwi-filmmakers/

Breaking Up is Easy for Rising Kiwi filmmakers

The comedy, which opens the Sydney Film Festival next month, centres on two best friends and roommates, Jen (van Beek) and Mel (Sami), who provide a professional break-up service to partners not brave enough to dump their unwanted lovers. For a fee, they will act out a fake pregnancy or lie about a drowning to end a relationship.

But their cold-hearted business is threatened when Mel falls for a client – a handsome but not-overly-bright rugby player (James Rolleston, the now-grown-up star of New Zealand hit Boy) who has been trying to break up with his passionate girlfriend (Ana Scotney✓) by emoji.

Van Beek, 42, and Sami, 38, co-wrote, co-directed and co-star in the film that casts Celia Pacquola (Rosehaven) in her first feature film.

The Breaker Upperers open the Sydney Film Festival next month.

Photo: Abigail Dougherty

Given their very Kiwi sense of humour, the multitasking duo was were quickly described as a female Flight of the Conchords✓ – a comparison they don’t mind in the least given Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie are “dear friends”. Another friend with similar comic talent, Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi✓ – a high school friend of van Beek’s – is executive producer of their film.

Seizing a moment when the New Zealand film industry was looking to encourage female directors, van Beek and Sami have delivered their own version of a buddy comedy.

As the partying continues around them in the bar, the duo banter on the phone about their background together that includes various theatre productions together over 20 years. Van Beek has previously written and directed a more serious film, The Inland Road, and appeared in the TV series 800 Words; Sami was in Top of the Lake and directed van Beek in the TV series Funny Girls.

“We actually met when I was 14 years old,” Sami says. “I was in the national theatresports improv competition and Jackie was a tutor.”

Van Beek chimes in: “A very young tutor.”

Sami: “Yes, very young.”

Van Beek: “I was 17 or 18 and I identified Madeleine Sami as one to watch. You did pretty well in that competition. Did you win?”

Sami: “There were no winners.”

Van Beek: “No winners? What a lame competition.”

Some filmmakers make sure they have a memorable story but, with an endearing New Zealand directness, van Beek says the idea for the film just popped into her head while ambling around her kitchen one morning.

“I was reflecting on all those conversations I’d had with people about how awful it is having to break up with your partner and how you dread it and there’s a lot of fear and angst involved,” she says. “I just thought, ‘wouldn’t it be funny if you could outsource the responsibility [to] a company?’. I thought, “I’ll never start that company because I’m way too lazy and not interested enough but it would make a very funny film’.”

Sami not only liked the idea but suggested the title.

“I thought it was a stupid, stupid, silly title that made me laugh,” she says. “It was a working title for a long time then it just kind of stuck.”

Van Beek: “It was perfect because it really set the tone for the film … Very Kiwi.”

They spent four years on-and-off writing the film, enjoying inventing comic methods for breaking up couples.

“That was the fun part of the writing, coming up with ways the job could work,” Sami says. “We wrote a big $50 million version of the film which was completely unrealistic for us to make because we were never going to get that sort of money – speedboats and scuba diving, like James Bond meets The Idiots✓.

“Once we had the premise, it was really about telling a story about some characters that were true to us and that we felt people could relate to – getting a buddy comedy element in there.”

The duo surrounded themselves with an experienced team – largely women – so they could focus on their performances in the film.

“We left a lot of room for improvisation,” van Beek says. “Sometimes Madeleine and I would tangent into what we considered comedy gold …

Sami: “But some people might consider comedy poo. We’ve edited a lot of the comedy poo out.”

The duo saw their film as subverting the romantic comedy genre, with Bridesmaids as a reference for its ensemble female cast and The Wedding Crashers as “a concept cousin”.

“It feels like a premise for the times,” Sami says. “The way young people – and I say young people because Jackie and I are both happily married older women – now connect with each other on Tinder and things like that. It’s a far more brutal world that we live in with technology in the way it allows us to step back from the confrontation and the responsibilities that we’ve had in the past. We actually had to talk to somebody to break up with them.”

While the likes of Hunt for the Wilderpeople✓ , What We Do in the Shadows✓ and Flight of the Conchords✓ suggest there is a particular quality to New Zealand comedy – deadpan, warm-hearted, down to earth and mumblingly self-effacing – the duo feel their film has a similar sense of humour to Australian comedies.

“There was that era of Australian film that just was so influential for me in wanting to be an actor – Muriel’s Wedding, Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, The Castle,” Sami says.

Van Beek: “Then later on Chris Lilley’s stuff. And Kath and Kim.”

Sami: “And the Comedy Company. My first gig was when I was eight years old at a family Christmas in Taranaki and I did Kylie Mole impressions; ‘She goes, she goes’. I got my mum to put my hair in pigtails. I can still quote Con the Fruiterer. “

With the soft shell crab and broccoli bites having been swept away, it’s time for the duo to head around the corner for the screening. Having already been to Hollywood to discuss future projects, they plan to co-direct again.

“It’s lovely that people do seem excited that we’re new female film directors,” van Beek says.

Sami adds: “We barrelled ahead with this project and we just convinced everyone else and ourselves that it was possible. And it totally is.”

Sydney Film Festival runs from June 6 to 17. Tickets are at sff.org.au. The Breaker Upperers is in cinemas from July 26.

WOMEN AT THE FESTIVAL

IN COMPETITION

Daughter of Mine

Italy’s Laura Bispuri✓ , who made her name with the 2015 transgender tale Sworn Virgin, directs a drama about a 10-year-old girl torn between two very different mothers in a small Sardinian community.

Leave No Trace

Debra Granik✓ , who launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career in Winter’s Bone, directs a tender drama about an army veteran and his 13-year-old daughter who live off the grid in a public park in Oregon.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Iranian-American director Desiree Akhavan✓ won the top prize at Sundance with a touching coming-of-age drama about a high school girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) who is sent to a gay conversion camp.

The Seen and Unseen

Indonesia’s Kamila Andini✓ (The Mirror Never Lies) centres a meditative dreamlike drama on a 10-year-old Balinese girl who is dealing with the loss of her twin brother.

DOCUMENTARIES

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Photo: Supplied

A Murder In Mansfield

Barbara Kopple✓ , the two-time Oscar winning director of Harlan County USA and Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, looks at the human cost of a vicious murder in Ohio in 1989, through the eyes of a troubled man still trying to deal with his father killing his mother.

On Her Shoulders

A Sundance prizewinner, Alexandria Bombach’s documentary is about a 23-year-old woman who survived genocide and sexual slavery at the hands of ISIS Islamic State to become the courageous voice of her people.

Half the Picture

Through interviews with Ava DuVernay✓ , Lena Dunham✓ and Catherine Hardwicke✓ among others, Amy Adrion looks at why there are so few women directors.

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

You Were Never Really Here

Lynne Ramsay, the uncompromising Scottish director of Ratcatcher and We Need to Talk About Kevin, has Joaquin Phoenix as a traumatised hitman in a thriller that won screenplay and acting awards at Cannes last year.

The Kindergarten Teacher

Maggie Gyllenhaal shines as a primary school teacher who believes one of her students is a child prodigy in a Sundance prizewinning drama from Sara Colangelo✓ (Little Accidents).

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN

My Brilliant Career

A new digital restoration of Gillian Armstrong’s breakthrough film from 1979 features Judy Davis as a headstrong young woman determined to be a writer and Sam Neill as her beau.

Piercing

A long way from Alice in Wonderland, Mia Wasikowska plays a prostitute who disrupts the plans of a would-be murderer (Christopher Abbott from Girls) in what is described as a bold S&M comedy.

Chocolate Oyster

Anna Lawrence✓ and Rosie Lourde✓ are two waitresses wanting bigger things in a so-called mumblecore comedy set in Bondi that is directed by Steve Jaggi✓.

Terror Nullius

New York-based sisters Dominique and Dan Angeloro✓ , who make up the video art collective Soda_Jerk, repurpose shots from Australian films for a savage satire about the state of the country.

REAL LIVES ON SCREEN

Bad Reputation

The life story of Joan Jett, founding member of the Runaways and later frontwoman for Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, in a documentary from noted director music video Kevin Kerslake✓ .

Whitney

A candid portrait of Whitney Houston, from triumph to sad decline, as told by Kevin Macdonald✓, the Oscar-winning director of One Day in September and Touching the Void.

Garry Maddox is a Senior Writer for The Sydney Morning Herald.