Who is Edith Piaf?

It seems that there is a little bit of a chill coming from the south as they look on to see how this year's Sydney Film Festival fares. Festival executive director, Clare Stewart, who was previously Head of Film Programs at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne is under the radar from many of her contemporaries south of the border.

The Sydney Film Festival which has had a lot of problems keeping its head above water, finally managed to turn a profit last year and the initial response to her appointment was one of surprise as ACMI was brewing its own financial woes.

Even ex-Telstra chief Ziggy Switkowski resigned as board president of ACMI as it recorded a $5 million loss in its first two years. It is clear that the Sydney Film Festival cant afford many more deficits, so hopefully Stewart can keep last years Sydney Film Festival finances going.

This year's programme again centres around the State Theatre, Dendy Opera Quays and Greater Union Cinemas on George Street. There was talk that Chauvel Cinemas in Paddington would also share in the programme which would add another feather to the cap of the Sydney Lord Mayor's City of Villages plans. But again that appears to have been squashed by a presentation partner.

The programming for this year appears to be very engaging with strands in locally made films, a special array of films from Turkey and Brazil, combined with the regular genres of 'red hot' documentaries, world cinema and gala events. There is also a particularly unique strand that deals with Accessible Cinema covering a range of topics from autism to blindness.

Melburnians, are however, curious about the opening night film La Vie en Rose, a film about Edith Piaf. They have already started heckling Sydneysiders resident in the southern capital with one source reporting the taunt "Hey! You're from Sydney aren't ya? Don't you know who Edith Piaf is?"

One thing about this festival is certain, our cousins down south are looking on with a watchful eye.



Disclaimer: I worked for the Sydney Film Festival last year for three months and I am a member of the Sydney Film Festival.

Those naughty, naughty film-makers!

In today's Sun-Herald, Miranda Devine turns her attention to the Office of Film & Literature Classification with the heading Censors fail to give the true picture.

She wraps the Office and the film-makers over the knuckles with her opinionated wooden ruler, saying that The History Boys is "a fraud. It is a pederastic fantasy about teachers who fondle their students' genitals in the nicest way and the boys don't mind at all."

She goes on to say that, "it's about a British boys' school in the 1980s where all the students are openly or latently gay." Then stating that it's "not a bad movie for a niche gay agenda market".

But what about those dastardly censors? How could this film be let out of the Oxford Street centre for debauchery and let loose on that upstanding community in Baulkham Hills or Castle Hill.

Devine refers to a friend of hers who is "no prude, reeling out of a suburban theatre with his wife and two preteen children. They had walked out of The History Boys just as straight boy Dakin asks his teacher Irwin, "if there was any chance of your sucking me off"."

The Office of Film and Literature Classification has classified this film as M. According to the Office's website, "M is an advisory classification. This classification advises audiences that a level of maturity is required in relation to the film. While anyone can gain admission to an M film, material classified M is not recommended for under 15s."

What were Devine's friends doing taking their pre-teen children to this film? The Office had clearly advised that it was not recommended for under 15's and that a level of maturity was required to watch the film. How clearer does Devine require the office to be?

She then blames reviewers and advertisers for portraying the film as "a modern-day Goodbye, Mr Chips." I can assure Devine that all-male schools are no-longer a walk in the park as in the days of Mr Chips or even Tom Brown.

There is a larger question here which highlights that "them-and-us" mentality used by both heterosexual and homosexual communities. What exactly does "niche gay agenda market" mean? Do we, as a rule, watch something because of our sexual orientation? Should over 15's be protected at all times from literature that deals with sexuality, homosexuality and paedophilia?

There are plenty of films with an M rating that deal with the issues of sex, sexual leering, heterosexuality, physical abuse and extreme violence. Just look at the latest Pirates of the Caribbean films that are exposing under 10's to extreme physical violence.

I suggest that the Office deems it necessary and appropriate for members of our community who are in their puberty to be able to make judgements about their sexuality, not only in relation to films such as The History Boys, but through textual studies and other more heterosexual 'agenda markets'. As the Office's website says - "there must be some way that society can examine and discuss issues of paedophilia... through film". These teenagers are intelligent enough to be able to distinguish between the reality of what was being said in the film and what is acceptable.

If Devine wants to open up a discussion about the role of film and literature and how we should use classification and censorship, it would be more constructive to move away from an example of friends who took their pre-teen children to The History Boys.

What Devine is proclaiming is a more stringent use of classification, removing the vital and imperative use of judgement by guardians and individuals in making decisions about what film and literature they and their charges consume.

Devine was just as vocal about censorship during the Ken Park incident in 2003. I totally support her in her condemnation of paedophilia, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it, shouldn't consider it through art and film. Devine, as her article about Ken Park clearly shows, prefers to see a discussion of taboos as a gradual acceptance of taboos.

In today's article she refers to the elephant in the room (paedophilia) that marketers and reviewers of The History Boys ignored. There is another elephant sitting in that same room. That elephant is the push of mass media commentators like Devine using examples like those of her friends to inflict us all with a nanny like commentary on who should make judgements on what literature we wish to engage with. That is a dangerous path to take and a more constructive debate that steers away from this sensationilism would be healthier for us all.

Image: drooker.com

Review: Das Leben der Anderen

Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)
A film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Dendy Opera Quays
26 March 2007

About ten years ago, before the world turned itself on its head after a bombing in New York, I was a student studying theatre theory in a university in England. It was the first time that I had been out of the country on my own, leaving the safety of Sydney in summer and arriving in the rainy industrial north of Manchester.

Wide eyed and bushy tailed, I made myself at home in a dormitory on the road south towards Old Trafford. Students from all parts of the UK and the continent had converged on this small part of the world in the middle of a bitter winter.

My time there was spent traversing between the dark lecture theatres of the university filling my head with Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett and loitering in the public houses.

While gallivanting, I met an East Berlin girl who had come to do a masters in accounting. At the time, my naive thoughts of East Berlin were centred around an imagination that everything in that part of the world was still in black and white.

We fell in love and I travelled with her to her city, since unified. The architecture, the atmosphere, the people, the smell of the streets are something that I will never forget and it gave birth to a fascination I have had with central and eastern Europe ever since.

A decade later and I suddenly find myself at a film that captures East Berlin in all its shadows and humanity with a scent that is as unique as going there yourself.

Fleeing the circular quay tourists with their heads buried in pasta, pizza, mussels and chenin blanc we escape into the basement cinema of Dendy. The place is packed and we manage to squeeze into a space a couple of rows from the front.

Every now and again, you enter the world of a movie that takes you completely by surprise. And its fair to say that Das Leben der Anderen is a film that I will recall for a very long time.

It's the atmosphere of the film that captures you first. The colour of the people, their clothes, the seats and furnishings. It's 1984.

Centred around a senior Stasi agent assigned to spy on a successful playwright and his actress girlfriend, this film gallops between the world of personal responsibility and political suspicion and comes crashing down into an engrossing world of thrilling passion that is disarming.

It is the power and belief of the individual that takes you most by surprise. From the Stasi boss, to the theatre community around the playwright to the self serving government ministers.

It is believed that around 100,000 people within the East Berlin populus were employed by the Stasi to spy on das leben der anderen. This backdrop allows von Donnersmarck to explore a depth in the journey of character that is one of the finest I have seen.

The script is tight, the original score compelling, the synopsis devastating and the Brechtian elements fascinating. It engages with you at once emotionally and the tension that builds is quiet but constant. It shifts between the power brokers inside the regime and seeps back to the commune of the society it is watching.

It says more about the post New York bombing world than any political satire or opinion piece could ever hope to capture. It's a film that you must go and see on the big screen.


English version website here.
Deutsche offizielle webseite hier.


Photo: Ulrich Mühe as Captain Gerd Wiesler
Image Credit: Hagan Keller, courtesy of Buena Vista International