We Don’t Need a Map (2017 Australia)
Documentary, Genre
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Director: Warwick Thornton
Starring: Â –
Genre: Documentary
Duration: Â Â Â 87 mins
The Southern Cross is the most famous constellation in the southern hemisphere. Ever since colonisation it’s been claimed, appropriated and hotly-contested for ownership by a radical range of Australian groups. But for Aboriginal people the meaning of this heavenly body is deeply spiritual. And just about completely unknown. For a start, the Southern Cross isn’t even a cross – it’s a totem that’s deeply woven into the spiritual and practical lives of Aboriginal people. One of Australia’s leading film-makers, Warwick Thornton, tackles this fiery subject head-on in this bold, poetic essay-film. We Don’t Need a Map asks questions about where the Southern Cross sits in the Australian psyche. Imbued with Warwick’s cavalier spirit, this is a fun and thought-provoking ride through Australia’s cultural and political landscape.
Pavarotti (2019 Italy)
Documentary, Genre
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Director: Ron Howard
Starring: Â Luciano Pavarotti, Andrea Griminelli, Nicoletta Mantovani
Genre: Â Documentary
Duration: Â Â Â 114 mins
From the filmmaking team behind the highly-acclaimed documentary The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years, Pavarotti is a riveting film that lifts the curtain on the icon who brought opera to the people. Academy Award winning director Ron Howard puts audiences front row center for an exploration of the Voice…the Man…the Legend. Luciano Pavarotti gave his life to the music and a voice to the world. This cinematic event features history-making performances and intimate interviews, including never-before-seen footage.
The County (2020 Iceland)
Comedy, Drama, Genre
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Director: GrÃmur Hákonarson
Starring:  ArndÃs Hrönn Egilsdóttir, Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson, Þorsteinn Bachmann
Genre: Â Drama, comedy
Duration: Â Â Â 92 mins
After the death of her dairy farmer husband, a middle-aged woman courageously sacrifices her livelihood to speak out against the corruption and injustice at work in her community. It’s all anchored in a riveting, urgent performance by ArndÃs Hrönn Egilsdóttir as Inga, the widowed farmer left to face the prospect that her husband died by suicide to leave her to pay their large debts to the local co-op. The more she comes to realize the extent of her financial predicament, the greater she discovers the “mafia-esque†tactics of the co-op to benefit themselves at the expense of the workers who supply them. Like writer-director GrÃmur Hákonarson’s previous film Rams, it probes a deeply rooted rural culture that is closely connected to the Icelandic national spirit, while championing traditional Icelandic values over the exploitive underside of capitalism.
Anthropocene: the Human Epoch (2018 Canada)
Documentary, Genre
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Director: Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky
Starring: Â Alicia Vikander
Genre: Â Documentary
Duration: Â Â Â 87 mins
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch puts a frightening twist on the standard nature documentary. Rather than exalting the awesome beauty of landscapes or animals, it captures alarming ways in which that beauty has been disturbed. The movie takes its cues from the research of the Anthropocene Working Group, a team of scientists who in 2016 recommended a formal declaration of the end of Earth’s Holocene epoch, which began as many as 12,000 years ago. They argued that we are now in a new geologic phase, the Anthropocene epoch — a time when humans now change the Earth more than all the planet’s natural processes combined. The film hops from continent to continent to depict the scale of those disruptions, which at times have an almost science fiction quality.
Bacurau (2019 Brazil)
Genre, Sci-fi, Thriller
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Directors: Juliano Dornelles, Kleber Mendonça Filho
Starring:  Bárbara Colen, Thomas Aquino, Silvero Pereira
Genre: Sc-fi thriller
Duration: Â Â Â 132 mins
Set a few years from now Bacurau begins like one of those feel-good movies white people enjoy watching about poor-but-noble brown people surviving against the odds. We couldn’t imagine ourselves managing in such circumstances, but god bless them for their courage. Deep in the north-eastern Sertão – the Brazilian outback – it mashes up many themes and influences, but is chiefly a scream of satirical defiance against new president Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right globaliser famously promising to make the country more open to foreign trade. This movie’s closing credits pointedly note that the production created 800 jobs.
Woman At War (2018 Iceland )
Black comedy, Genre
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Director: Benedikt Erlingsson
Starring:  Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, Jóhann Sigurðarson, Juan Camillo Roman Estrada
Genre: Black comedy
Duration: Â Â Â 101 mins
Having conquered the theatre stages and TV screens of Iceland as a writer, director and performer, Benedikt Erlingsson turned to feature films in 2013, where his brand of deadpan tragicomic humour once again struck a national nerve. His directorial feature debut, Of Horses and Men earned several Icelandic academy Edda awards. Here choir teacher by day, green renegade by night, Halla takes up this vital mantle on her quest to rid the Icelandic highlands of a Rio Tinto aluminium plant. When her long-forgotten application to adopt a child is suddenly approved, the down-to-earth insurgent must reconsider her notions of motherhood, civic duty and heroism.
Buoyancy (2019 Australia)
Genre, Thriller
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Director: Rodd Rathjen
Starring: Â Sarm Heng, Thanawut Kasro, Mony Ros
Genre: Â Thriller
Duration: Â Â Â 93 mins
Australian drama directed by Rodd Rathjen. It was selected as the Australian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. Inspired by the real-life plight of workers sold into Southeast Asia’s fishing industry and featuring a powerful performance from its first-time star, this gripping high seas drama was awarded the Panorama Prize by Berlinale’s Ecumenical Jury. Tired of toiling in the rice fields, 14-year-old Chakra (a magnetic Sarm Heng) leaves Cambodia in search of a Bangkok factory job. After paying smugglers to ferry him over the border, the boy is instead traded to a seafood trawler where violence and murder are a routine occurrence, all under the watch of ruthless and sadistic captain Rom Ran. Filmed on location in Cambodia with a cast of non-actors who lend the work a vérité feel that underscores the real-life urgency of its message.
Dancing The Invisible (2017 Australia)
Genre
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Director: Axel Grigor
Starring: Â Jill Bilcock, Cate Blanchett, Baz Luhrmann
Genre: Â Documentary
Duration: Â Â Â 78 mins
Dancing the Invisible is an unprecedented feature documentary about one of the world’s leading film artists – Australian film editor Jill Bilcock. Her work on beloved films such as Strictly Ballroom, Romeo+Juliet, Muriel’s Wedding, The Dressmaker, Road To Perdition, Japanese Story, Moulin Rouge!, Red Dog and Elizabeth, has established her as one of the world’s most daring and in-demand editors, highly sought after by leading international film directors and top film studios – yet she remains relatively unknown. Interviews include luminary directors Shekhar Kapur, Baz Luhrmann, Fred Schepisi, Jocelyn Moorhouse and Ana Kokkinos together with actor Cate Blanchett. This, combined with rare and previously unseen footage of Jill’s process in the editing suite provides an utterly captivating insight into the artistry of film editing.
Monos (2019 Colombia )
Genre
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Director: Alejandro Landes
Starring:  Sofia Buenaventura, Julián Giraldo, Karen Quintero
Genre: Â Drama
Duration:    102 mins                Rated R
Winner of a Sundance Special Jury Award, Monos is a visually astounding, thrillingly original fever dream situated somewhere between Lord of the Flies, Apocalypse Now and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Deep in the remote mountains of somewhere that might be South America, a troupe of barely adolescent soldiers for a shadowy guerrilla organisation are guarding an American hostage. While awaiting orders that may never come, they run drills, tend to a cow, and do what teens everywhere do – get high, have sex, hang out. That they have loaded guns and zero supervision or accountability works out exactly as well as you’d imagine, but in the hands of director Alejandro Landes it’s an extraordinary descent into surreal savagery, on steroids.
My Masterpiece (2018 Argentina )
Genre
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Director: Gastón Duprat
Starring:  Andrea Acatto, Lucas Aranda, Raúl Arévalo
Genre: Â Â Â Â Thriller
Duration: Â Â Â 100 mins
Following on from his 2016 Goya Award-winning The Distinguished Citizen, director Gastón Duprat delivers this crowd-pleasing comedy-thriller that follows the complex relationship of a cranky painter and a crafty gallery owner in Buenos Aires. Self-fixated artist Renzo and sly art dealer Arturo have worked with each other for a very long time. From Renzo’s best days in the 1980s to the present, where he’s behind on the lease of his bedraggled home, littered with the vast, beautiful canvases he continues creating. An accident brings them closer together again, triggering a string of forgeries, friendships and fatalities that will culminate in a twist no one could anticipate.