SUAJANA is comprised of four landscapes, four shorts from filmmakers that share the heart of Borneo.
Stories nestled within multifarious strands of situations, singularly different from the other, yet each a reflection of the relationship between humans, their natural environment, and the culture that cemented them. From the predicament of parting with one's heritage, a telltale of old adage, the story of a local hero, and the insular intimacy between newlyweds -- this is Saujana.
Selected by Afifah Tasya
You sound lost
Where are you going?
Is it in your papers?
What are you carrying?
Body
Memories.
Home.
Hope.
Home.
— Akram Khan, “Bahok”
“Here, for now” presents five evocations of movement and home. From roots to routes, these works navigate an embodied, mobile geography through memory, migration, environment, dance and survival.
Curated by Sam Soh
The best films exist somewhere in limbo between escape and reflection. Through a juggling act of real and imagined experiences, our perspective of the world around us begins to shapeshift. Bad films are nothing more than a mirage. Good films take me places.
A selection of work from Melbourne’s Head Back collective.
“There’s no rules. Be yourself. Burn the flag”
Curated by Damian Kane
When I began my journey as a Producer I didn't quite understand what the role was, beyond building and managing projects and relationships; Fast forward to now and through my work I have not only expanded and explored my own creative voice, but contributed to building a collective of talented and diverse filmmakers who share my passion for increased diversity on Australian screens.
My priority when choosing which projects to support is always authenticity, and good intentions. I want to see characters that look like real people, that speak to real issues, and don't ignore the reality of the day-to-day for a diverse range of cultures, and social classes. Everyone deserves to see themselves represented on screen, and in the media they consume. Represented in this collection of short films is factual and narrative work created by multiple directors within the collective, with distinct and varying perspectives.
I acknowledge, and pay my respects to the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation whose land we have used to develop and produce our work. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
“The present moment increasingly imposes itself on consciousness as a moment in extended crisis” – Lauren Berlant
Through remix and reinterpretation, this program explores the intersecting tensions between crisis/ ordinary and real/ imagined. Each film engages with crisis as it’s embedded within the ordinary: travelling as a woman alone, Murdoch media, rising nationalisms, and the ecological emergency unfolding within nonhuman experience.
Program curated by Taylor Mitchell
Indonesian translation and subtitles by Afifah Tasya and Dilail Abimanyu
Amiel Courtin-Wilson is an acclaimed, multi-disciplinary Australian artist and filmmaker whose practice pursues the breakdown between creator and subject through an expansion of the possibilities of film language incorporating documentary portraiture, genre and experimental film practices. Centring on immersive, long-term collaborations with individuals including musicians, performers, poets and ex-inmates, Courtin-Wilson works across film, video, sound art, installation, theatre and performance.
Curated by the artist himself, this selection of early works shows Courtin-Wilson probing the boundaries of the short form, whether by re-framing the ontological fabric of documentary portraiture (‘The Death of a King’, ‘Charles’) or by radically imploding the conventions of the coming-of-age film ('Pash', 'On the Other Ocean') through a lens of visionary, extra-realist and para-cinematic formal gestures drawn from Materialism and the lyrical avant-garde.
From the use of a singularly non-linear, repetitive editing rhythm in 'Pash' to the prolonged minutiae of the sculpting of a radiant face around the nocturnal ambience of musician Eliane Radigue, the films evince a level of rigorous yet playful formal investigation and breadth of attentive curiosity that works to constantly rework our assumptions around what we're seeing - pulling us into, out of, and around our own subjugated subjectivity in order to reorient us to the possibilities of the sublime.
Startling as a collection of individuated projects, Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s body of work, here as elsewhere, also functions as a serialised ‘cosmology’ - a living, breathing corpus of impressions, experiences, sensations, and memories.
Cumulatively, a picture emerges of urgent compassion, a restless exploration of embodied experience through radical portraiture, crystallising Courtin-Wilson as one of the most prolific, innovative and critically acclaimed Australian artists and filmmakers of his generation.
Curated by Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Notes by Chris Luscri
This programme brings together a selection of tongue-in-cheek contemporary video work with a shared employment of humour in approach - an exploration into the playful psyches of these women and artists.
Themes of identity, societal expectations, self-image, gender, variations of female experience and our inner most thoughts are all observed in these lively pieces.
Communicating their places within the worlds around them, by constructing their own visual universes for us to peer into, using the mediums of Sims, karaoke, workout videos and dress-up to show us snippets of their thoughts.
Curated by Morgan Massey
Indonesian translation and subtitles by Afifa Tasya and Dilail Abimanyu
In celebration of their new film clip 'Gemini', Hexdebt are proud to present a curated program of film clips, short films and video art by local favourites and friends! Bizarre, entrancing, and eerily familiar - each work captures the absurdity of everyday life.
We are ecstatic to present a special retrospective of selected works by revered Melbourne animator Dennis Tupicoff. Sincere, graceful and energetic, Tupicoff’s oeuvre spans nearly 40 years. His films, often experimental in form, delve into fiction, documentary, animation and live-action. Sublime!
Indonesian translation and subtitles by Afifah Tasya and Dilail Abimanyu.
Eclectic Visions presents a collection of experimental films created solely by female artists that span from across the globe. Each share vastly different approaches to their work; with concepts ranging from the elusiveness of dreams, to documenting the everyday, they all however equally present a unifying force that is the expansiveness of filmmaking. These women of multi-faceted practices, ages and backgrounds share a deep connection to the moving image, whether that image is captured through super 8, 16mm or digital.
In their own way filmmakers Audrey Lam, Lynne Sachs, Azucena Losana, Adelaide Norris, Barbara Meter and Eliza Roberts aspire to dismantle conventional forms of narrative by blending together techniques from both cinema and video art, and it is through their own explorations and experimentations that we become accustomed to the notion that the ways of seeing and viewing the filmic image can be reborn.
Selected by Veronica Charmont and Lola Hewison
Indonesian translation and subtitles by Afifah Tasya
Dogmilk is proud to present a selection of ruminations in landscape filmmaking by artists Polly Stanton and Matthew Berka. The somewhat romanticised idea of the solitary artist in nature has been so prominent a figure of the cultural imagination that it has endured across numerous centuries. By contrast, and with its own sense of romance, the history of cinema tells a narrative overwhelmingly characterised by ideas of collectivity and collaboration. As filmmakers, the thing that makes Polly Stanton and Matthew Berka most similar is not simply the fascination with natural environments, but their uncompromising sense of autonomy; creating every aspect of their films independently, across concept, camera and sound. Landscape Suicide(s) contrasts a dynamic selection of resourcefully made audio/visual works, exploring how a range of aesthetic possibilities can arise from seemingly similar creative approaches.
Headphones are most definitely recommended for this viewing and listening experience.
Selected by Paddy Hay
Indonesian translation and subtitles by Afifah Tasya
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Fleeting is comprised of four works that illustrate film’s capacity to explore the ephemeral notion of memory. Its gravity, nostalgia and delicate immortality.
Programmed by Fraser Pemberton
Indonesian translation and subtitles by Afifah Tasya
OF AGE offers various moments of coming of age, centring the female experience. Led by Australian and New Zealand directors, we access moments of exploration, curiosity, crystallisation, and play. Moments that may seem somewhat minor, but which shape us and inform our entry into adulthood. Ranima Montes’ Mestiza (2018) offers a question of identity. Nora Niasari's Waterfall (2017), presents the struggle of a merging family. Alice Englert’s The Boyfriend Game (2015) invites us to join a game where lines between real and pretend are blurred, and Dannika Horvat’s Triple Swear (2019) paints the moment a sister realises her brother is not who she thinks he is.
OF AGE was programmed by Dannika Horvat
Indonesian translation by Afifah Tasiah
MEMORIES OF MEDIA brings together two short films by Mparntwe (Alice Springs) based filmmakers to explore the history of Aboriginal media and representation from two very personal perspectives. Both films were made to explore and document the histories of family members.
Josef Jakamarra Egger and Viviana Petyarre were trainees at CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) when they made these films, their debut efforts. CAAMA has kickstarted the careers of some of the most well known Aboriginal filmmakers across the country; Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton, Beck Cole, and Erica Glynn amongst many others. Founded by Freda Glynn, Phillip Batty and John Macumba in 1980, CAAMA has been a central force in creating Indigenous media and promoting Indigenous voices.
Jupurrurla and Petyarre both look back at the archives of CAAMA and Warlpiri Media Association (founded in 1983, now PAW Media), re-contextualising this media history in the current age. Both films are also incredibly personal stories; Viviana searches for the caves that her grandparents used to inhabit while Josef searches for answers about his fathers pioneering career.
The films offer the possibility of an emerging new-wave of young Central Australian filmmakers, determined to present the stories of their people.
To find out more about, and support both CAAMA and PAW Media, please follow the 'Support the Artist' links.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that the following program may contain images and voices of deceased persons.
Indonesian translation and subtitles by Afifah Tasya
Digital artists as pioneers, as experimenters, as deconstructivists, as system hackers, as activists, as revolutionaries, as anti-capitalists, as proletarians, as philosophers, as poets, as filmmakers, as avatars, as Harry Dean Stanton, as Jenny Agutter, as adventurers, as cartographers, as geographers, as space explorers, as psychedelic time travellers, as physical dematerialisers, as metamorphers, as dream mappers, as mind mappers, as mind fuckers, as motherfuckers, as culture regurgitators, as conspiratorialists, as satirists, as humorists. If there’s anything I’ve forgotten please let me know. This program offers fragments of all these to form a weird, beautiful and hopefully interesting (or confusing) w/hole.
Et øje Blik, the blink of an eye.
Selected by Alex Walton.
This selection of short films is put together loosely to represent some time that Alex spent in Scandinavia. Artists and ideas that she has come across in this time are shown in three beautifully diverse short films. Each intrinsically different from the others, together they show a cross section of formal cinematic elements that expand the horizons of contemporary cinema. Featuring personal journeys, ideas relating to identity, class, science, trauma and the future of media formatting are entangled to represent a small pocket of the current work that is coming from young artists both in Scandinavia and Europe.
SIPAKATUO is the first VODmilk program offered by Dogmilk Films with guest programmers 180 Dalam Kota, a young filmmakers collective based in Makassar, Indonesia. 180 Dalam Kota provides local filmmakers and film enthusiasts the opportunity to exchange ideas and enrich their perspectives through films that focus on the complexity of urban issues. Films about discrimination, civil rights, autonomy, economy, and gender issues contribute to creating a cartography of the challenges facing modern Indonesian society, and help re-wire peoples minds about equality and social justice. The three films selected are short documentaries about extraordinary women, living and surviving in Makassar.
Sipakatuo, glorify one another.
