“One of the things I love about cinema is that you can travel to another part of the world or try on someone else’s clothes for a couple of hours and see the world through their eyes,” says Adelaide Film Festival CEO and creative director Mat Kesting.
He’s taking InReview through the program – launched last night – for the October 23 to November 3 festival and has stopped at a page featuring a black and white image of a young woman sitting on a large snow-capped rock in the Himalayas.
The still is from Indian director Subhadra Mahajan’s debut feature Second Chance, about a heartbroken 25-year-old who retreats to her family’s summer home in the mountains after having an abortion and ends up finding solace in relationships that blur age and class divides.
“It’s extremely cinematic… and with a backdrop like the Himalayas, you kind of need it to be big,” Kesting says.
Second Chance is screening as part of the AFF’s spotlight on India.
Second Chance is one of five films that will be shown as part of a spotlight on India that highlights how the country’s cinema industry encompasses a diversity of stories and styles that go well beyond the Bollywood spectacles with which many would be familiar. Others include the Mumbai-set romantic drama All We Imagine as Light (the Grand Prix prize winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival), and In the Belly of a Tiger, which tells the story of an elderly farmer who decides to make “the ultimate sacrifice” to secure the future of his family.
“It’s really an allegorical critique of capitalism, but an absolutely gorgeous story,” Kesting says of the latter, one of five films in the festival’s Feature Fiction Competition. “When I saw this film for the first time, it had a really big impact on me emotionally.”
In its third consecutive year as an annual festival, the AFF has announced SA director Sophie Hyde (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) as its new patron and unveiled a line-up of 112 films – including 15 world premieres and 34 Australian premieres.
Among the South Australian films premiering in 2024 are Kangaroo Island, directed by Timothy David, which will be the closing night gala presentation. One of eight Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund (AFFIF) features on the 2024 program, it stars Erik Thomson, Rebecca Breeds and Adelaide Clemens in a story about a struggling Hollywood actress who returns home to KI to confront “the love triangle that tore her family apart”.
Also made in SA is Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs’ animated tale Lesbian Space Princess, which sees an introverted space princess embark on an “inter-gay-lactic” mission to save her kidnapped ex-girlfriend from the Straight White Maliens.
“It’s pretty wild to have an animated feature come out of South Australia like this,” says Kesting. “And when we took it to Cannes this year [as part of the Adelaide Film Festival Goes to Cannes showcase]… everyone gravitated to it, all the sales agents, there was this buzz about it. I mean, the title itself just hooks you in.”
SA-made ‘inter-gay-lactic’ space adventure Lesbian Space Princess.
As previously announced, the festival will launch with an opening night gala on October 23 featuring the world premiere of The Correspondent, a movie based on the “Kafkaesque nightmare” endured by Australian war correspondent Peter Greste after his arrest in Egypt in 2013. It stars Richard Roxburgh as Greste and is directed by Kriv Stenders, whose previous features Boxing Day (2007) and Lucky Country (2009) also had their world premieres at the Adelaide Film Festival.
Greste, Stenders, Roxburgh and producer Carmel Travers will be attending the premiere at the Piccadilly Cinema, as well as a talk the following day at the Capri Theatre titled The Correspondent and the global war on truth.
Richard Roxburgh in The Correspondent.
“I think it is really exciting to see cinema respond to a real-life event like Peter’s imprisonment in 2013,” says Kesting.
“The story is a really important story, and I think particularly in the year that Julian Assange was released, it’s a topical issue. If we can use the platform of the festival to draw attention to journalistic freedom and freedom of speech and the issues that the film really spotlights, then it can only be a good thing.”
In stark contrast to The Correspondent – which is described as “a highly contained film” encompassing Greste’s 436 days in jail – the film being showcased at the festival’s opening weekend gala on October 25 is a colourful, expansive musical drama. Emilia Pérez, the latest film from Palme d’Or-winning French director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, The Prophet), stars Zoe Saldaña as a lawyer in Mexico who accepts a lucrative offer from a cartel boss to help him retire – and fulfil his dream of becoming a woman.
Emilia Pérez’s ensemble cast (which includes Selena Gomez) won the best actress prize at Cannes and has been variously described as “a fabulous queer crime musical” (The Hollywood Reporter), “a musical story of rebirth” (Netflix) and a melding of “pop opera, narco thriller, and gender affirmation drama” (its producers).
Kesting says the film, which will be followed by an after-party at Ayers House featuring Mexican dancers and Latin DJs, is exquisite.
“I love it so much – that’s why we’ve put it in the gala position. At first when you’re watching it you’re thinking, ‘Oh yeh, this is a gangster kind of cartel drama’, but then there’s the unexpected twists and turns, and the scripting is brilliant. It’s a big production.”
The line-up of AFFIF films premiering at the festival also includes Make it Look Real, which goes behind the scenes of the Australian film Tightrope to look at the role of intimacy coordinators in film production; We Bury the Dead, a zombie survival thriller set in Tasmania and starring Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley; and One Mind, One Heart, the latest documentary from Larissa Behrendt (After the Apology).
Behrendt’s new film follows the repatriation of the Yirrkala Bark petitions, which were presented to the House of Representatives in 1963 in an attempt by Yolngu elders to have Aboriginal land rights recognised and to stop mining in Arnhem Land. Kesting believes it’s a particularly timely film following last year’s Voice referendum.
“I think it’s a really important film culturally for our country, and it contextualises some of the really key political moments in Aboriginal history, or post-Colonial history, and resistance.”
Capturing a different aspect of Australian history is director Wendy Champagne’s Aquarius, a chronicle of the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin that draws on a treasure trove of archival material and has proven a hit at film festivals across the country. It is part of the Feature Documentary Competition, as is the US film Homegrown, which offers a chilling insight into American politics through the story of three alt-right men who were dedicated to Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020.
Other films highlighting the diversity of the festival’s program include the Australian-New Zealand ghost story Went Up the Hill; 2024 Palme d’Or winner Anona (described as a tragicomic reimagining of Pretty Woman); Steve McQueen’s Blitz (set in World War II London and starring Saoirse Ronan); a LEGO-animated story about music producer and singer Pharrell Williams; Australian director Ian Darling’s The Pool (celebrating Sydney’s iconic Bondi Icebergs), and Sasquatch Sunset – a “creature feature” starring Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough that’s described as “part Thoreau, part Harry and the Hendersons, all sasquatch”.
In partnership with the Samstag Museum of Art, the AFF will also be presenting a new moving image work from Queensland artist Archie Moore – the fifth iteration of his installation series Dwelling. It was commissioned before Moore won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2024 Venice Biennale with his installation work kith and kin.
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Kesting says the films in the 2024 AFF reflect the interesting times in which we live.
He tells InReview he likes to curate the festival not by setting a theme, but by “letting the artists speak for themselves”. And while some of the aforementioned films go to dark places, the creative director says there’s plenty of fun to be had, too.
“I think there’s a shift towards a bit of humour, finally, post-COVID. So I think the line-up is pretty entertaining this year – the serious is offset with the light.”
The 2024 Adelaide Film Festival will run from October 23 to November 3.
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