Sydney Underground Film Festival is a celebration of the most subversive, experimental, controversial and generally hard-to-find cinema.
This year, there are more than 100 films screening over four days in between the opening and closing night parties. “You’ll come out a little bit shell-shocked, in a good way,” predicts festival director Stefan Popescu.
Timed to run alongside the Sydney Fringe, Sydney Underground Film Festival “sits in a historical tradition of underground cinema … [which] was always about independent filmmaking, provocation, just general weirdo cinema, experimental stuff – some of it was just home artists,” says Popescu. The overarching aim of the festival is “to find films that are a bit more adventurous and push boundaries, whether it’s aesthetics, storyline, political – some sort of provocation”.
The intention to provoke and challenge viewers will be established from this year’s opening night party, which commences with a 3D screening of Love, written and directed by Gaspar Noé. “We love Gaspar Noé, and we screened his last film Enter The Void, and we were tracking [Love’s] release for a while, and we’re also seeing the difficulties other festivals have,” Popescu says. “We always love a challenge – whenever there’s a film that no-one can get, we work really hard trying to get it.
“[Noé is] really the highbrow version of underground cinema. He’s quite eccentric in his form and how he puts his films together, and he’s also on the margins of the mainstream.”
However, what will probably be the most discussed aspect of Love is its inclusion of non-simulated sex scenes. “It is pornographic, but he contextualises that pornography – I guess that’s the difference between something that wouldn’t be shown in public and something that is shown in public,” says Popescu. “With this particular film, you really do understand why he used unsimulated sex, and his character, because it tends to be autobiographical, is the character in the film – [that] contextualises [it] as well.”
This year’s Sydney Underground Film Festival has scored several Australian premieres. Popescu points to highlights like Deep Dark, We Are Twisted Fucking Sister!, Digging Up The Marrow, Dude Bro Party Massacre III, Hellions and Knock Knock. The latter is the latest directorial offering from exploitation maven Eli Roth (Hostel), starring Keanu Reeves as an ‘everyman’ husband and father who is seduced and then tormented by two beautiful young women.
The program also includes a series of themed short film sessions. Popescu points to the return of the regular Love/Sick event, alongside the increasingly popular WTF Shorts. “I think that people know our type of short films – we’re quite selective about our short films,” he says. “We’ve gotten a bit of a culture of people knowing that we screen really weirdo, cool stuff.
“We’ve always screened short films and we really like to support up-and-comers, but beyond that there’s a lot of freedom in short films, especially now with technology. And it shows too that a lot of the works that are in there are from students or from people who just graduated, because I think they don’t have the normal boundaries. These shorts are really liberated – they just kind of go all-out. Some of them are actually really, really controversial, some of the ones that I’m worried could well get banned.”
Less likely to be controversial – though Popescu expects them to be just as popular – are the screenings of older classics. “[It’s] the 20th anniversary of Kids, and we love Harmony Korine – we’ve shown her before – and Larry Clark as well, so that was just a no-brainer. And of course Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”
For the first time, the 2015 program will also feature a series of masterclasses. “Some of the filmmakers will be running classes, and there will also be Q&As after their own films. We sort of decided this because a lot of our patronage have usually got some interest beyond watching films.”
Specific aspects of filmmaking will be covered, such as independent film distribution, drone cinematography and special effects. “We’ve got the filmmaker from What Lola Wants, so he’ll be there to present that. There’s the filmmaker from Alvin’s Harmonious World Of Opposites and [Suzanne Crocker] from All The Time In The World is coming out from Canada as well.”
The message is clear: it’s time to explore the underground.
[Pictured – Digging Up The Marrow]
Sydney Underground Film Festival 2015 runs Thursday September 17 – Sunday September 20 at Factory Theatre.For the full program, visit suff.com.au.
