Source : the age
The trauma of two devastating floods in Lismore still hangs over the northern NSW town three years on.
“Some days I’m still on the roof hearing the screams,” says Eli Roth, who was rescued with his dog when floodwater submerged his home, in the emotional new documentary Floodland. “I’ve seen people drown. I’ve dug graves. You don’t really forget that.”
Jordan Giusti in Lismore.Credit: Elise Derwin
Directed by Melbourne filmmaker Jordan Giusti, Floodland will have its world premiere at the 72nd Sydney Film Festival next month. Director Nashen Moodley announced the program, which runs from June 4 to 15, at the State Library of NSW on Tuesday night.
Giusti, who started travelling to Lismore with a girlfriend who grew up there, realised the 2022 floods built on residents’ deep anxiety from earlier floods.
“I could see that the people who lived there were struggling to reconcile this place that they love with the harsh reality that they’re hit intermittently with these flooding events,” he says.
As he spoke to more people about the floods, Giusti asked whether they wanted him to come back with a film crew to tell the story of how they and the town had been affected. “They agreed, then they were surprised that I actually came back,” he says.
The festival opens with Australian director Michael Shanks’ body horror film Together, and includes a retrospective on dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi, whose acclaimed work includes The White Balloon, The Circle, Offside and This Is Not A Film.
Panahi’s latest film, It Was Just An Accident, will screen in the festival’s $60,000 competition for “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous” cinema that includes a record eight titles that will debut at Cannes later this month. It is described as “a devastating emotional rollercoaster” about a family having an accident while driving on a remote road.
“Some days I’m still on the roof hearing the screams”: Eli Roth and his dog in Floodland.Credit: Sydney Film Festival
Other international directors in the competition are well-known to festival audiences, including the Brazilian former competition winner Kleber Mendonça Filho (political thriller The Secret Agent), American Kelly Reichardt (art heist drama The Mastermind) and German Christian Petzold (drama Mirrors No. 3).
Lesser known are American Cherien Dabis, who chronicles the life of a Palestinian family over seven decades in the occupied West Bank in All That’s Left Of You, and Akinola Davies Jr, whose drama My Father’s Shadow follows two boys during a chaotic day in Lagos, Nigeria.
Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident is screening in the festival’s competition.Credit: Sydney Film Festival
While the appeal of the festival is often foreign-language films, there is some Hollywood star power sprinkled around the program.
Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon stars Ethan Hawke, Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley in a story about lyricist Lorenz Hart agonising about his failing career on the opening night of Oklahoma!; Rebecca Zlotowski’s Vie Privee has Jodie Foster as a psychiatrist investigating a murder; and Carey Mulligan plays a feuding musician in James Griffiths’ comedy The Ballad Of Wallis Island.
Jodie Foster in Vie Privee.Credit: Sydney Film Festival
Among the most intriguing-sounding films in the program are Joshua Oppenheimer’s “post-apocalyptic musical” The End, which has Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon as a couple cheerfully surviving in an underground compound, and Australian actor turned director Christian Byers’ Death Of An Undertaker, described as “docufiction” and featuring real life morticians, set in Norton Street, Leichhardt.
Then there are Japanese director Neo Sora’s Happyend, about Tokyo high school students revolting after their school introduces intense surveillance, and Islands, which is described as “a psychosexual mystery” set on a luxurious island resort from German director Jan-Ole Gerster.
Journey Home: David Gulpilil.Credit: Sydney Film Festival
Floodland will screen in the $20,000 Australian documentary competition. Social worker Carlie Atkinson, who appears on screen and co-wrote the film, saw how much the threat from Cyclone Alfred revived old traumas in March.
“It triggered everyone left, right and centre,” the Bundjalung and Yiman woman says. “[But] Floodland is not just a story about disaster. It’s about returning to what has always sustained us, and connection.”
Also screening in the documentary competition are Kriv Stenders’ Joh: Last King of Queensland, about former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s tumultuous 19 years in office, and Maggie Miles and Trisha Morton-Thomas’ Journey Home: David Gulpilil, about the great Indigenous actor being laid to rest in Arnhem Land after his death in 2021.
Other Australian documentaries include Jennifer Peedom’s Deeper, about Thai cave rescuer Dr Richard Harris attempting the world’s deepest dive, and Justin Kurzel’s Ellis Park, on musician Warren Ellis’ passion for a wildlife sanctuary in Sumatra.
Margaret Qualley and Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon.Credit: Sydney Film Festival
Among the international documentaries screening are Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe’s Prime Minister, which is described as an intimate portrait of former New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern; and Mstyslav Chernov following up his Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol with 2000 Metres To Andriivka, about Ukranian troops attempting to liberate Russian-occupied territory.
Compiling the program, Moodley was struck by the numerous films being made about resistance.
“With the rise of authoritarianism in many places in the world, we’re seeing … this idea of rebellion, of resistance, of rebuilding perhaps,” he says. “And we have a lot of films about family this year – about the importance of family and how families deal with really difficult circumstances.”
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