Podcasts
Podcast: Lynden Barber's Top Picks - Opening Weekend
Listen to the Podcast of Artistic Director Lynden Barber discussing his recommendations for the Festival's opening weekend. Click on the links below for more information on the Films and to book tickets.
Black Sun
A visually hypnotic film about blindness - from such a paradox does this highly inspired documentary derive part of its strength. Based on a best-selling autobiographical book by former painter and filmmaker Hugues de Montalembert, the film has its subject's voice at the centre yet only once do we see him. Montalembert recounts how, returning to his New York flat one evening, he interrupted intruders who threw paint thinner in his face.
Monday 12 June, State Theatre, 10am
Sunday 18 June, State Theatre, 2.20pm
Kidulthood
The tough, sometimes violent and sexually promiscuous lives of teenagers depicted in this dynamic feature have catapulted the film into the centre of a national UK debate about kids growing up fast in today's world. When a student commits suicide after being bullied and her father takes little notice, her school gives pupils a day off in remembrance. While one girl sells oral sex favours to fund her shopping habit and another is bullied by her boyfriend, parents are shown as hopelessly out of touch. Director Menhaj Huda will introduce the film and take questions afterwards.
Sunday 11 June, State Theatre, 7.30pm
Tuesday 13 June, State Theatre, 2.30pm
Adam's Apples
That this wicked black comedy is written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, the writer of Brothers (a SFF05 Urban Cinefile Audience Prize Winner) should be reason enough to recommend it. That it's an often side-splittingly funny - yet also thoughtful - fable on the nature of good and evil featuring a spectacularly grumpy Neo-Nazi (Ulrich Thomsen) and an irksome priest (the brilliant Mads Mikkelsen - virtually unrecognisable after his skinhead in the Pusher films elsewhere on our program) is yet another.
Sunday 11 June, State Theatre, 2.20pm
Monday 12 June, State Theatre, 6.40pm
Feast of the Goat
Based on the Mario Vargas Llosa novel and directed by the author's brother, Luis Llosa, comes a film, part gripping political thriller, part powerful drama, based around the chilling mis-rule of the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo in the 1950s. Isabella Rossellini makes a strong mark as a Manhattan lawyer returning to the country she fled 31 years earlier to confront her infirm father, one of the former dictator's sidemen.
Saturday 10 June, State Theatre, 4.25pm
Tuesday 13 June, State Theatre, 12pm
