By Travis Johnson
The Nightingale, Jennifer Kent’s long-awaited follow up to her acclaimed horror movie, The Babadook, will be making its Australian premiere at the 2018 Adelaide Film Festival, shortly after its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival.
Kent’s historical thriller joins Grant Sputore’s sci-fi drama I Am Mother, starring Hilary Swank, which will be screening as a work-in-progress, and the feature documentary She Who Must Be Obeyed, about the remarkable Freda Glynn.
This year also sees the premieres of Adelaide Film Festival FUND commissioned VR work The Waiting Room from Molly Reynolds and Rolf de Heer, and the extension to 2017’s VR commission The Summation of Force, the short documentary The Art of the Game from Trent Park and Narelle Autio.
Starring Aisling Franciosi (Game of Thrones) and Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games), Baykali Ganambarr (from the internationally acclaimed Djuki Mala dance group, pictured in character below), Damon Herriman (Justified, Breaking Bad), Harry Greenwood (Hacksaw Ridge) and Ewen Leslie (Sweet Country), The Nightingale follows a young Irish convict woman as she chases a British officer through the rugged Tasmanian wilderness, bent on revenge for a terrible act of violence he committed against her family. On the way she enlists the services of an Aboriginal tracker named Billy, who is also marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past.
The feature directorial debut of West Australian director Grant Sputore, I Am Mother tells the story of a lonely teenage girl, the first of a new generation of humans to be raised by Mother – a kindly robot designed to repopulate the earth after the extinction of mankind. Their unique bond is threatened when a blood-drenched woman
inexplicably arrives at the bunker, begging for help. Overnight the stranger calls into question everything Daughter has been told about the outside world and her Mother’s intentions.
Directed by her daughter Erica Glynn, She Who Must be Obeyed tells the epic life story of Freda Glynn – 78-year-old Aboriginal woman, stills photographer, co-founder of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) and Imparja TV, mother of Erica and Warwick Thornton, grandmother, great grandmother, radical, pacifist and grumpy old woman. The film also details what drove Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people to stake a claim to Australia’s media landscape.
A modern fable presented by Molly Reynolds (Another Country) and Rolf de Heer (Charlie’s Country, Bad Boy Bubby), The Waiting Room redefines the boundaries of VR by dispensing with conventional VR headsets. It is a cinematic installation in five dimensions, traversing the audio-visual realm through space and time. It speaks to the time in between the before and the after: the time before we, the real aliens on planet Earth, arrived; and the time after, once we are done colonising and have gone. What are the realities that we must transcend to avoid arriving at the inevitable?
The Adelaide film Fest FUND is also presenting the first two episodes of the six-part spy thriller Pine Gap. Starring Parker Sawyers (Southside With You), Jacqueline McKenzie (Romper Stomper), Steve Toussaint (Fortitude), and Tess Haubrich (Alien: Covenant, Wolf Creek Season 2), the series is set in the intensely secretive world of intelligence and the enigmatic US/Australia joint defence facility in central Australia.
Other highlights of this year’s FUND program include the perennially popular Art on Screen session, the Made in SA program of locally-produced short subjects, and, presented in conjunction with the Samstag Museum of Art, and Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits, a landmark photographic exhibition exploring striking portraiture from 100 years of Australian cinema.
Adelaide Film Festival CEO and artistic director Amanda Duthie said, “You Must See is the tagline for the 2018 Adelaide Film Festival. The highlights released today are just a glimpse of the multitude of YOU MUST NOT MISS delights coming to you in the full program. It has been a pleasure working with all these filmmakers and it is exciting to present them to audiences for the first time.”
The Adelaide Film Festival runs from October 10 – 21, 2018. for full info and tickets, head over to the official site.
