Venice at Home – Day 3: From Galleries to Gangsters

by Cláudio Alves

Day 3 at the Venice Film festival finds a nonfiction master dipping his foot into the murky waters of fictionalized narrative. Frederick Wiseman's A Couple purports to dramatize the correspondence between Leo Tolstoy and his wife, starring Nathalie Boutefeu, working from a script made from documented letters. Elsewhere in the official competition, Luca Guadagnino helms Bones & All, a cannibal romance starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell. Finally, Romain Gavras brings Athena to the festivities, working alongside Ladj Ly, who co-wrote the film.

As we wait for these movies to become more readily available, let's consider their directors' previous works, including an ode to museums, a fashionable short, and a Scarface revision…

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Venice Diary #02 - BARDO and other self-reflecting movies

by Elisa Giudici

Two men focusing on their own identities. Two women speaking to their relationship with their husbands. For day two of the Venice film festival it was a quartet of movies featuring personal intimate stories...

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Doc Corner: 'Free Chol Soo Lee'

By Glenn Dunks

Whether he liked it or not (most certainly the former), Chol Soo Lee was a pivotal figure in the history of the Korean people within the United States—as well as for the broader Asian community. His name came to symbolise many things, most significantly the inherent racism of anybody who wasn't white that was found within the justice system. His story was a tragic one, struggling as he did to overcome the lasting effects of what happened to him. But his plight as a man wrongly jailed for a crime he didn’t commit brought Asian and Asian-American people together and to the political forefront in ways that meant things wouldn’t be the same ever again.

In Free Chol Soo Lee, Julia Ha and Eugene Yi’s quietly damning documentary about his life inside (and perhaps even more importantly, outside of) prison, we get to reflect on a case that many may have forgotten or which they never knew about in the first place.

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Doc Corner: Bowie and 'Moonage Daydream' at Melbourne International Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

Moonage Daydream is unlike any other Brett Morgen film. If you expected the same stately warmth that imbued Jane or even a tragic rock and roll epitaph like Cobain: Montage of Heck, then you would be wrong. This is evident immediately into its 140-minute runtime, beginning as it does with not just any David Bowie song, but the (incredible, it must be noted) Pet Shop Boys remix of “Hallo Spaceboy” from 1996. I love a bit of trolling the rock crowd, so I was instantly on board. The mere inclusion of this song—to say nothing of the kaleidoscopic, tie-dyed montage that accompanies it—keyed me in that Morgen wasn’t just going to do what a Bowie fan may expect from a biography documentary.

These high-octane opening minutes don’t exactly let up, either. Moonage Daydream is a work of documentary that is almost as exhausting as it is exhilarating.

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Doc Corner: Melbourne International Film Festival shows documentary’s many different forms

By Glenn Dunks

Two years ago (!) I mourned the absence of my local film festival. After another year off in 2021 due to Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns, the Melbourne International Film Festival has finally returned to theatres this month. It has been such a wonderful feeling to sit down and watch films with other movielovers that we will quite likely never have another opportunity to see projected so big.

The festival runs for another week and a half yet, but let's talk about a few of the documentary titles screened so far. They are all extremely different and formally bold takes on the medium that deserve celebrating. From an experimental tour of America to an equally experimental tour of the human body, these have all been films I can't imagine having missed in the cinema. They won't get a sniff of Oscar buzz, but who cares?

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