On Screen Revelations
The Revelation Perth International Film Festival promises another feast of original and oddball cinematic gems this year.
The Revelation Perth International Film Festival has unveiled its 2012 program, with a typically eclectic bevy of films, an inaugural academic summit, and notable special guests.
The festival has demonstrated its strong cultural clout by attracting three world, and twenty Australian, premieres for its fifteenth year.
Revelation, which runs from July 5 to 15 based out of Perth's Astor Theatre, will also welcome renowned Hollywood icon Crispin Glover as their international guest to participate in proceedings.
The inimitable Glover, best known to greater audiences for his turn as the ‘Creepy Thin Man' in the popular Charlie's Angels films, will make a special appearance to introduce his personal film projects, It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine! and What Is It? (pictured), both set to highlight Glover's emerging status as a truly unique auteur.
Joining Glover as esteemed guest is venerable Australian comedienne, and the Perth born-and-bred, Judith Lucy, who will arrive as the festival's inaugural Patron.
The festival has maintained its commitment to honouring films based on merit rather than theme or genre, with mainstream offerings tempered by a range of more independent and out-there flicks. Standouts of the former include Lynn Shelton's tale of romantic entanglement, My Sister's Sister, starring golden girl Emily Blunt, which is set to open the festival. The brilliant Michael C. Hall will also turn heads as a forlorn slacker waiting for his life to happen in The Trouble With Bliss. Alternative cinephiles will also be fittingly satiated: the Australian premiere of the Slovenian experimental narrative, Archeo, is one such oddity, which has even received the glowing approval of none other than notorious philosopher Slavoj Žižek, praising its gritty descent to the core of the family unit.
Festival founder and Chairman, Richard Sowada, has hailed 2012 as "the year of the documentary", and Revelation has certainly risen to meet this assertion. The documentaries on offer stretch across all terrain imaginable, quite literally in Last Days of the Arctic, tracking Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson's journeying portrayal of the frozen north. Even the medium itself is given polarised treatment, from a longingly retrospective examination of the once blooming film industry of Cambodia in Le sommeil d'or (‘Golden Slumbers'), to a more upbeat celebration of modern film fandom with Buff, featuring interviews with bastions of the filmic community including cultural mainstays Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton.
Revelation Director and curator of five years, Jack Sargeant, feels that the festival has a creative edge that sets it apart from the pack. "Our commitment to unique and signature driven works means that there are numerous voices being heard here that rarely get a look in elsewhere. We're also screening more familiar works, even an Oscar winner, so we've really got something for everybody," he notes, in reference to the screening of 2012 Best Documentary recipient, Undefeated, a tale of a coach's effort to overturn a US high school football team's 110-year losing streak.
Outside of the films themselves, Revelation will also host a variety of special events. The George Méliès Project marks a celebration of the esteemed film pioneer's work that carries on from its wider dissemination in this year's much-acclaimed Hugo, with seven of his films to screen accompanied by a live performance of original scores. This year also marks the introduction of RevCon Academic, a two-day conference drawing both local and international intellectuals in a discussion and analysis of the current and future states of cinema.
To see the full program, and purchase tickets for the festival, head here.
