By FilmInk Staff
“This year’s 68th Sydney Film Festival arrives at a historic and celebratory time for the city, as we come together again with people we have desperately missed, and in the places we yearn to return to – cinemas!” says Sydney Film Festival director Nashen Moodley. “With major disruptions in cinema releases, the festival selection brings together some of the best films of the last two years; extraordinary works from major award-winners to some of the most anticipated films of the year.”
Set to kick off in August earlier this year, The Sydney Film Festival – like so many other things – was cruelled by the emergence of the Delta strain of COVID, and forced to postpone. With NSW set to reopen to a large extent on Monday (and that includes cinemas!), The Sydney Film Festival has now confidently announced a new run from November 3-14, as well as providing an in-depth look at the huge array of films that audiences will be treated to. “The Festival opens with Here Out West, stories from eight talented Western Sydney writers, directed by five powerhouse women directors, and closes with Wes Anderson’s comedy-drama The French Dispatch,” says Nashen Moodley. “From Venice Best Director prize-winner Jane Campion with The Power Of The Dog, to Denis Villeneuve’s star-studded reimagining of Dune, to the incendiary shock of 2021 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Titane, this year’s program has one of the most diverse and exciting line-ups in SFF history.”
The Sydney Film Festival is always big, but this year’s list of films feels almost like it’s making up for lost time, with a stunning array of major players and anticipated titles on offer. There are high profile feature films (King Richard with Will Smith, Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, Mia Hansen-Love’s Bergman Island; Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers; Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, Zhang Yimou’s One Second); Aussie premieres aplenty (Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife The Legend Of Molly Johnson is a guaranteed highlight); loads of documentaries (from both Australia and abroad); music flicks (including docos about The Smiths and Courtney Barnett); fascinating sidebars (the now infamous Freak Me Out programme of wondrous oddities and confrontational cinema will shock again with titles like The Spine Of The Night and The Beta Test); and special programmes, panel events and Q&A sessions.
“It is extremely unusual and fantastic to have in a single festival program the works of so many of the great, distinctive filmmakers of our time: Pedro Almodóvar, Wes Anderson, Jacques Audiard, Jane Campion, Mark Cousins, Ildikó Enyedi, Asghar Farhadi, Miguel Gomes, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Mia Hansen-Løve, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Oliver Hermanus, Heddy Honigman, Avi Mograbi, Jafar Panahi, Rachel Perkins, Christian Petzold, Mohammad Rasoulof, Paul Schrader, Céline Sciamma, Paolo Sorrentino, Denis Villeneuve, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Frederick Wiseman, Jasmila Žbanić, Zhang Yimou and many more,” says Nashen Moodley. “Following close to two years of extremely challenging times for the film industry, The Sydney Film Festival is proud to be able to bring these superb films to cinemas. To make the program as accessible as possible, the festival will also present a bespoke program online through SFF On Demand from 12-21 November.”
With audiences obviously desperate to get back out and into cinemas, The Sydney Film Festival has never been as utterly essential as it is right now…
The Sydney Film Festival runs from November 3 – 21. For all information about The Sydney Film Festival – including the film programme and ticketing and venue information – click here.
