Screen Machine

To-do: Week Starting Thursday, August 19: MUFF, Russian Resurrection, Indonesian Film Festival

Only a couple of weeks after the end of MIFF, and another barrage of potentially-somewhat-interesting film events is upon us. The Melbourne Underground Film Festival kicks off on Friday, with an opening night screening of El Monstro del Mar, directed by Stuart Simpson, who MUFF claims is “a major new player in Australian genre cinema.” Rather surprisingly, this opening night screening, along with several others over the course of MUFF, will be happening at the Classic cinema in Elsternwick. The rest of MUFF will be happening at bars in the city. Other events of note at MUFF include a screening of Bruce LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie, which was cancelled at MIFF due to censorship problems, and a “Bret Easton Ellis retrospective,” which will be showing various film adaptations of novels by Ellis.

Friday also sees the opening of what is apparently the fifth annual Indonesian Film Festival, which will be running at ACMI for a week. Opening night film is 7 Hearts, 7 Loves, 7 Women. One of the more interesting films looks to be Shackled Woman, from 1980, which will be screening on Wednesday evening. Wednesday also sees the commencement of this year’s Russian Resurrection festival, which features about twenty new Russian films, along with a fantastic program of classics as part of a “World War II Retrospective,” which includes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying and Larissa Shepitko’s The Ascent. Unfortunately, like so many of these national cinema festivals, this is all happening at Palace Cinemas, and mostly at the Como, the bourgeois-est cinema of them all. So just remember, if that Tarkovsky’s getting to be a bit much for you, just lean back in your luxuriant lounge chair and take another sip of wine, and it’ll all be okay…

Apart from that, we’ve got Phillip Noyce’s Salt, starring Angelina Jolie, opening on Thursday. The Canadian film Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson, also opens this week. If you haven’t seen them yet, Splice, The Ghost Writer, Greenberg and The Expendables are all hereabouts as well.