Alternative Film Guide

World Cinema Clips: Before Peter Weir went Hollywood in the mid-1980s, he actually knew how to make solid, complex films in his native Australia. Gallipoli (1981) is a well-crafted anti-war drama while the subtly haunting The Last Wave (1977) may well be the best The End Is Near film ever made.
Below is a clip from [...]

Writer-director Jane Campion’s Gothic drama The Piano, the best of the 1993 Best Picture Oscar nominees and one of the greatest — and greatest-looking — films of the 1990s, will be screened as the first feature in the fifth and final season of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ "Great To Be Nominated" [...]

World Cinema Clips: Written by Riwia Brown (from Alan Duff’s novel) and directed by newcomer Lee Tamahori, Once Were Warriors (1994) was a huge box-office hit in New Zealand.
This socially conscious drama is set in the outskirts of Auckland, where disenfranchised Maoris have to struggle with poverty, alcoholism, crime, and other ghetto issues. In [...]

Australian Film Institute Awards - 2007
The 2007 L’Oréal Paris 2007 Award nominations were announced on October 24, 2007. Deborra-lee Furness, Sibylla Budd, Marny Kennedy, and James Hewison made the announcements.
The 2007 L’Oréal Paris 2007 Award winners were announced at two ceremonies: Dec. 5 ("industry" categories) and Dec. 6 (top categories), 2007.
Note: The AFI International Awards [...]

Tomorrow, Tuesday, Oct. 9, the Cinekink folks will screen Michael Ney’s documentary feature Liberty in Restraints, about recently deceased sex fetishist [see Ney's comment below] Noel Graydon, at 7 p.m. at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in New York City.
Ney’s Australian-made film is described as a "riveting documentary [that] introduces the mentors, muses and masochists [...]

Maxine Frith and Christine Sams in Melbourne’s The Age
"Australia’s most expensive horror film, Rogue, premiered in Darwin last night, with tourism bosses predicting its killer croc star would attract visitors to the Northern Territory rather than frighten them off.
"When Wolf Creek, the debut film from Rogue director Greg McLean, came out in 2005, the British [...]

Dennis Harvey in Variety:
"New Zealand playwright Toa Fraser makes a smooth transition to the screen directing No. 2, an adaptation of his 2000 stage work. This warmly observed drama about a Fijian-Kiwi matriarch [veteran American actress Ruby Dee] gathering her discordant clan around one last fete is formulaic at its core: One can guess grandma’s [...]

Press Release:
The 13th London Australian Film Festival
Thursday 15 March – Sunday 25 March
The ten-day London Australian Film Festival returns to the Barbican for its 13th consecutive year with the biggest and strongest programme yet of 25 new features (including for the first time this year all the 2006 Australian Film Institute award winners), eight documentaries, [...]

The San Diego Film Critics Society tends to go its own way when it comes to year-end film awards. For instance, last year most critics’ groups chose Brokeback Mountain as the Best Film of the year. The San Diego Film Critics opted for King Kong. Hardly a superior choice, but different nonetheless. Other more esoteric [...]

The winners of the 2006 Australian Film Institute Awards (AFI Awards), which cover Australian film and television, were announced in two stages: "industry" awards on Dec. 6, and the top awards on Dec. 7.
In the film categories, the top winner was Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr’s Ten Canoes, the tale of the ancestors of [...]

Australian Film Institute Awards - 2006
The nominees of the L’Oréal Paris 2006 AFI Awards were announced by Justine Clarke, Richard Roxburgh, and Robert Connolly at the Sydney Theatre in Walsh Bay on Oct. 19, 2006.
The winners of the 2006 AFI Awards were announced at two ceremonies: Dec. 6 ("industry" categories) and Dec. 7 (top categories), [...]

Via Australia’s ABC:
This evening — right now, in Australia, it would be "last night" — Canberra audiences watched a restored portion of what is reportedly the world’s first feature-length narrative film, the 1906 Australian production The Story of the Kelly Gang.
Shot on location outside Melbourne, Charles Tait’s* 60-minute "Bushranger" — the Australian Western — focuses [...]

For only the second time, the Stockholm Film Festival’s Best Film award was presented to a female director, Laurie Collyer, whose feature-film debut, Sherrybaby, took the festival’s top prize and brought star Maggie Gyllenhaal a Best Actress award. Earlier this year, Sherrybaby won those two honors at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
The U.S.-made Sherrybaby tells [...]

The Australian Film Institute’s 2006 AFI Award nominees include Candy, by Neil Armfield, with Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish, and Geoffrey Rush, Ten Canoes, by Rolf de Heer and Peter Dijigirr, with Jamie Gulpilil, Kenny by Clayton Jacobson, with Shane Jacobson and Ronald Jacobson, Suburban Mayhem by Paul Goldman, with Emily Barclay and Anthony Hayes, and Jindabyne by Ray Lawrence, with Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne.

“A Century Ago: The Films of 1906″ will have a New York City screening, presented by Randy Haberkamp. Among the scheduled films are Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by J. Stuart Blackton, Voyage autour d’une etoile / Trip Around a Star by Gaston Velle, Skyscrapers, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, and footage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

A Century Ago: The Films of 1906 is a special screening of short films from 1906, including Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, Voyage autour d’une etoile / Voyage Around a Star, In the Haunts of Rip Van Winkle, The Impossible Convicts, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, and others. Organized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Monty Lapica’s U.S.-made Self-Medicated, which has been winning assorted awards at various independent film festivals, was chosen Best Feature Film at the Australian International Film Festival, held in Melbourne this past October. The film also won the Best Actress award for Diane Venora, as the substance-abusing mother of a substance-abusing young man (Lapica).
In addition to [...]

A few picks for today at the AFI FEST:

Directed by Nicholas Hytner, and starring Richard Griffiths, Clive Merrison, and Frances de la Tour, the dramatic comedy The History Boys (12:30pm) was written by Alan Bennett from his own Tony Award-winning play about eight young students trying to get into college. The film has received 4 [...]

Based on Rupert Thomson’s novel, The Book of Revelation opened this week in Australia. This psychological thriller directed by Ana Kokkinos, and co-written by Kokkinos and Andrew Bovell (Strictly Ballroom), has engendered some controversy because it depicts the horrors faced by a man (Tom Long) who’s turned into a sex slave for three cloaked and [...]

The Australian Film Commission (AFC) has announced that Rolf de Heer‘ and Peter Djigirr’s Ten Canoes, filmed in the indigenous language of Ganalbingu, has been selected as Australia’s official entry for the 2006 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award.
Set in the distant past, Ten Canoes tells the story of a young man who is attracted [...]

The World’s Fastest Indian was the big winner in the film categories at this year’s Air New Zealand Screen Awards ceemony held in Auckland this past Thursday, Aug. 24.
Writer-director Roger Donaldson’s film about an ageing bike racer who set the land-speed world record at a bike competition in Utah won seven awards, including Best [...]

The Australian Government has withdrawn its financial support to the 7th Jakarta International Film Festival, reportedly because of the scheduled screenings of four controversial Australian films. One of those is Dateline video journalist David O’Shea’s Australian-Indonesian documentary Garuda’s Deadly Upgrade, about the case of an Indonesian airline pilot convicted of poisoning Indonesia’s leading human rights [...]

Australian Film Institute Awards - 2005
The nominees of the L’Oréal Paris 2005 AFI Awards were announced by Claudia Karvan and Alex Dimitriades at the Wharf Restaurant in Sydney on October 21, 2005.
The winners of the 2005 AFI Awards were announced at two ceremonies: Russell Crowe hosted both the L’Oréal Paris 2005 AFI Craft Awards [...]

The Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards will be presented this coming weekend. The AFI nominations cover a wide range of categories, encompassing feature narrative films, shorts and documentaries, and television programming. (Curiously, many categories carry the names of their sponsors, e.g., "Film Finance Corporation AFI Award for Best Lead Actor" or "Empire Magazine AFI Award [...]

The Australian Embassy in Beijing is sponsoring the 2005 Australian Film Festival, which has been scheduled on two consecutive weekends, November 4-6 and 11-13. The festival will feature several of Australia’s most important productions of the last five years, including Kevin Carlin’s The Extra, David Caesar’s Mullet, Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence, and Sue [...]