Where the cool people go
The Girlfriend Experience
Melbourne's hippest film festival is back with more cinematic gems from here and abroad.
Swine flu? Pffft. The swine is nothing compared to the bout of NBS (Numb Bum Syndrome) that plagues Melbourne every winter. And we hear it's going to be worse than ever this year. That's because the 58th Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is back and chock-a-block as ever with Australia's largest film festival program.
Always a favourite, this year's 'International Panorama' includes Philippe Grandrieux's A Lake, which wowed audiences at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, Bahman Ghobadi's No One Knows About Persian Cats, winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, and The Girlfriend Experience, the latest offering from Steven Soderbergh starring porn vixen-turned-good girl Sasha Grey.
Other regular streams such as 'Homegrown' and 'Neighbourhood Watch' are back, as is 'MIFF Shorts', the country's biggest international short film competition. Fans of the nouvelle vague (French New Wave) will love the Anna Karina retrospective, while aficionados of the nuberu bagu (Japanese New Wave) will get a kick out of 'Eros + Massacre', an eye-opening - and often confronting - collection of films that question, analyse and criticise social mores and conventions.
Whatever your taste in film, you're sure to find something over the next 17 days to make you chuckle, weep, squirm, pound your fist in fury or just leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling inside. Vitamin D pills, a cushion and sunglasses (to minimise BLS - Bright Light Syndrome) are recommended.
Published Thursday, 23 July 2009
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