Bill Mousoulis is an Australian indie film veteran with approximately 100 films credited to his name. Mousoulis first picked up a camera in 1982 and he hasn’t looked back since - also founding an online journal, a film group and a film website. His latest film, My Darling in Stirling, follows a young woman studying at university, quite bored with her life. When she falls in love with a charming young man from the picturesque town of Stirling in the Adelaide Hills, she finds herself enchanted by both him and the town itself. But there’s a twist: every line of dialogue in this film is sung.“This film is really all about the form, the form of the musical,” says Mousoulis. “And there's something so strange about seeing ordinary people doing ordinary actions like asking each other to pass the coffee or the salt shaker and singing it,” Mousoulis draws inspiration from French director Jacques Demy’s groundbreaking 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which also features entirely sung dialogue.“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg inspired my film; it’s like a local Australian version. Essentially, this musical is alternative in a few respects: there’s music throughout the entire film, with no breaks. And the other is that the film is set in a very ordinary world, so - the Adelaide suburbs and Adelaide City, and then branching out to the Adelaide country town of Stirling,” says Mousoulis.Mousoulis says he had been living in Adelaide for a while when he found the small town called Stirling. He was drawn in by its beauty, its atmosphere and its people.“Stirling has a certain flavour to it, because it's also a little bit alternative. A lot of artists live there and it's got the bookstores and cafes, as can be seen in my film,” says Mousoulis.“It also has all these little laneways here and there, and a lot of trees and bushes and so, you don't know where anything is. Nothing looks plain and neatly laid out. It's a bit of a mix of things.”In the film Stirling is presented as some sort of magical town that has everything that our main character was looking for. All of her worries and anxieties are fixed by this magical town and it reflects poetically on that first love you have as a young person.But, of course, the town and the love she makes in the town come crashing down on her, which was always inevitable. Mousoulis says the film is about the idea of finding happiness and peace within.“It’s about your inner feelings and resolving them and being strong within yourself and not letting a place or a person determine how you feel about yourself or how you feel about life, and this is the lesson that the young woman learns, basically,” says Mousoulis.The film balances reality with a dreamlike quality, a result of its unique musical structure. Mousoulis believes this approach encourages viewers to perceive everyday life from a fresh perspective.“The fun of the film and the excitement in the film is in its form, is that the music and the singing creates this strange thing on screen. And a lot of people have found the film a little strange. And a lot of people who are familiar with this kind of alternative form love the film,” says Mousoulis.Bill Mousoulis. Source: ACMIUltimately, the film’s impact depends on the viewer's willingness to engage with its style. It might take time to adjust to what you’re seeing, but once you accept the film’s premise, you can easily become immersed in its world.And if you are to look at Mousoulis’ long career it is clear he is not going to change who he and his films are to fit everybody’s different tastes and preferences. Mousoulis is an artist who is going to make things that he is passionate about even if they aren’t going to be universally adored.“The important thing is to make the film you want to make, and make the artwork you want to make. I could be a different kind of person with a different set of cultural qualities to me, and maybe I'd be able to fit in and be more accepted,” says Mousoulis.“But because what I'm doing is a bit more alternative and experimental, it means that I'm not quite part of that, and that's okay. We do these things for the love of doing them. And so I'm happy.”My Darling in Stirling is playing at the Ritz Cinema in Randwick on Wednesday October 16 with a Q&A with Mousoulis himself. If you’re seeking a unique film experience, be sure to check it out.

The title of the song He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother by The Hollies is supposedly taken from an anecdote about a young girl. The story goes that she is carrying a big baby boy in her arms when someone, seeing her struggle, asks her if she needs any help to which she replies, “No, he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”Perth director David Vincent Smith’s new film — He Ain’t Heavy — and this anecdote resonate deeply with the themes of the film, which follows Jade, a young woman who kidnaps her drug-addicted brother, Max, and locks him in their grandmother’s house for seven days in a desperate attempt to force him into rehabilitation.The idea for the film came to Vincent Smith in a moment of desperation when he literally thought about kidnapping his own brother.“I was really desperate to resolve this problem within my own family. I got to the point where I literally came up with the idea of kidnapping my own brother. Most of the conversations, the language, the intensity, even the ending of the film are all real moments from my life,” says Vincent Smith.While the kidnapping itself is fictional, Vincent Smith strives to capture the intense emotions of trying to help a loved one struggling with addiction. The film began as a short titled I’m Not Hurting You, and after its success, he adapted it into a feature, enriching the narrative with additional characters and deeper exploration of existing ones.“In early drafts I wouldn't let the characters say certain things and that was because I wasn't ready to say those things,” he explains. “So part of the writing process when I was writing the feature film was also part of confronting my own chains and feelings.”Vincent Smith says he was inspired to make the story into a film after seeing some of the personal responses the short film evoked. At the Austin Film Festival, a transformative moment occurred when a 14-year-old girl approached him, sharing her struggles with her mother’s alcoholism.“She grabbed me by the arm and said, "My mom's an alcoholic. I've never told anyone before. Can you help me? What do I do?’”In He Ain’t Heavy, Jade takes her brother’s treatment into her own hands, reflecting Vincent Smith’s scepticism toward existing rehabilitation processes. “Unfortunately, we’re not getting to the core of healing. That’s why people keep getting reincarcerated—we’re not understanding why they’re angry and treating that,” he says. He believes the prison system should function more like a radical hospital, focusing on underlying issues rather than punishment. The film’s dark and raw portrayal creates an emotional viewing experience. Vincent Smith doesn’t use comic relief or stylised cinematography to soften its nightmarish themes. Instead, audiences, like the main characters, feel the isolation and desperation confined within the house’s walls.This rawness demands equally vulnerable performances from the cast. Leila George (Animal Kingdom) and Sam Corlett (Vikings: Valhalla) deliver powerful portrayals of Jade and Max, respectively. The film truly relies on their two performances, and they are sure to inspire some watery eyes and Vincent Smith emphasises the importance of creating a safe environment on set to facilitate these authentic performances.“We shared a lot of stories, and we formed a really important bond, so that we could always feel incredibly comfortable and honest and vulnerable with each other. And it’s not only just casting the cast, you’ve got to cast the crew to create an environment where actors feel safe and comfortable,” says Vincent Smith.He Ain’t Heavy releases in select cinemas on October 17. Dark, intense and emotionally gripping, the film explores the limits of care, the best ways to support someone battling addiction, and the significance of family.A preview screening with a Q&A session featuring Vincent Smith will take place on October 14 at the Dendy Cinemas in Newtown.

Ian Darling’s The Pool is a film about just that, a pool. It is a 90 minute examination of a singular place - its community, individuals, rituals, obsessions, stories, connections, quirks, emotions, history and much more. It is a film that aims to simply observe a place, a place which encapsulates so much of what makes life, life that it becomes much more than a place - it becomes a world.Ian DarlingSource Shark Island ProductionsThe world at the centre of The Pool is the Icebergs Ocean Pool in Bondi. If you were to visit the Icebergs Ocean Pool you would be given a small idea of this world - a mere outline in plain pencil. Darling’s film fills in these lines with intricate details, colour, dimension and ultimately life.The film grew out of Darling’s desire to create a documentary that would explore community—a theme that became all the more relevant during the isolation of COVID-19. Initially uncertain of the subject to explore, Darling’s inspiration arrived unexpectedly.“I was down at the pool having coffee one morning, after a swim, with one of the champion swimmers. And I said, I'm looking for this uplifting film about community. And she said, How about here? Sometimes the best ideas are right under your nose. I thought, actually, that's great. It’ll let me explore everything I wanted to—this beautiful location and a broad spectrum of community members. It was the perfect opportunity,” Darling says.The Pool is unconventional in that it doesn’t follow a traditional plot or focus on any one main character. The pool itself is the protagonist. As you watch, you find yourself sinking into the rhythms and patterns of the pool’s community.This is enhanced by the film’s unique structure, which doesn’t adhere to chronological order. Instead, the documentary is divided into sections that showcase different facets of the pool’s life. These segments are separated by meditative montages or continuous shots of waves, swimming, and water—a deliberate choice to create a calming atmosphere.“We thought, let's just make a film that encourages people to watch the waves and stop looking at their phones, just settle into it,” says Darling. “All of the films I’ve made have tried to get into the rhythm of the subject, and swimming is inherently meditative. The pool is such a beautiful place. We need to spend more time looking at the ocean. So we’ve incorporated a lot of moments where people can just dream about their next swim, or their next surf, or even reflect on their own lives. I want people to think about how they feel about their community, and what they’re yearning for.”Throughout the documentary, we meet several of the pool’s regulars: a group of squad swimmers who train every morning, a woman who is terrified of the water but keeps swimming, and another who swam daily during her cancer treatment, imagining that the bad stuff was leaving her body out of the top of her head. One of the most poignant moments features two friends who meet every morning for a swim and a coffee.“They’re a couple of friends who meet at the pool at exactly 6:47 every morning. They just came alive on screen. They represented everything we wanted. You couldn’t have scripted it. One says, ‘I like to use a bit of talcum powder after the swim.’ Then they both dive in at exactly the same time at opposite ends, get out at the same time, and head up for coffee—ordering exactly the same coffee every day,” Darling says.The touching exchange between Russell and Adrian encapsulates the film’s themes of friendship and routine:Russell asks, “Can you imagine a time when we’re not coming here every morning?”Adrian replies, “No.”Russell nods and says, “Good answer.”Darling reflects, “In that two-minute exchange, we captured so much about what we yearn for—why friendship is important, why routine matters. Swim squads exist because people don’t want to let each other down. Two friends rely on each other to show up at 6:47.”Darling says these types of moments weren’t scripted or anticipated - they just happened.“We didn't exactly know what we're getting on any day, but we just knew that we would keep coming back, and eventually we'd get what we wanted to tell the full, comprehensive story of what that consciousness was in the pool.”The Pool is a fascinating, feel good, beautiful documentary which simply observes and attempts to encapsulate a tiny, microscopic location on this enormous round sphere we’re all floating on. And it shows just how much life and energy and complexity can be held inside one tiny location.The Pool is showing in select cinemas around Sydney now, visit this website for all showtimes.Ian Darling and his crew. Source Shark Island Productions

The new Australian film Kid Snow begins with a boxing match that will echo through time. A loss for the titular character Kid Snow (Billy Howle) results in a crash on his way home from the fight that kills their father and cripples his boxing brother Rory (Tom Bateman).Ten years later, it’s 1971 and the Irish brothers are working in a tent boxing troupe, Rory runs it and Kid fights in it, and they both seem to have given up. “When we meet Kid he has kind of given up on life and he’s almost become like a performing animal,” says director Paul Goldman. “He is just trotted out to a tent boxing ring to punch and be punched. It’s pretty self destructive.”For those that don’t know, tent boxing was an Australian tradition going back as far as the late 19th Century up until 1971 when it was banned (although there is one still going). Tent boxing involves what the title refers to: a tent and a boxing match. Tent boxing troupes would follow agricultural shows, set up a tent and then allow any strangers to come up and challenge them to a fight - the winner taking the money.“I always wondered why no one had ever made a film about tent boxing in Australia given the enormous rich vein of folklore and mythology that surrounds it,” says Goldman.Set in the Australian Outback, one night the same man who Kid fought ten years earlier challenges him to a rematch for a large sum of money - all Kid has to do is fight and last at least three rounds. The only problem is, Kid is out of shape and his opponent is now the Commonwealth champion. The second only problem is, Rory has already accepted the fight for Kid.“He throws his brother into the lion's den, into a fight that he knows could well and truly destroy his brother’s physical life because he has to take on the Commonwealth champion. And he knows his brother is overweight and out of shape and has given up,” says Goldman.The two brothers have a very interesting relationship, it is clear that there is an intense love between them but, at the same time, also an intense hatred. Rory blames Kid for killing their father and crippling him, and Kid blames himself which means they have some sort of severed line in their relationship that never heals.This also leads to the third thread of the film which is led by the introduction of the female character Sunny played by Hollywood star Phoebe Tonkin. Sunny is a fierce character who has taken on the responsibility of caring for her young son on her own. She is hired by Rory as another attraction for the show, to dance. And she also begins a relationship with Kid.She comes between the two brothers and becomes a beacon of light for Kid, showing him a way out of the life he seems to be trapped in. The film smartly allows her her own character arc as well. She becomes a leg dancer for the troupe, but she does it on her own terms and Gladman says this was a huge focus for them as they made the film.“I’m sure for some people the scenes of her dancing will be provocative, the fact is that leg shows did exist and if you went to show alleys any time before the 80’s there were leg shows. She’s not stripping, there’s colour and movement. And I wanted her to have some sort of agency and we did a lot of work on that character to give her agency,” says Goldman.This definitely translates to the screen, and there’s a great moment where she tells a story of her step mother stripping for an audience in Sydney where a fight breaks out - and her stepmother is able to control the room with her power. Dancing is also such a great contrast to boxing. They are both ways for people to be physical and vulnerable, but also powerful. And this story about her stepmother is a great indicator for Sunny’s character - she may have to do things that she doesn’t want to to survive in this world but she is going to do these things her way, and use them to her advantage. The most interesting part of the film is the actual boxing. The interplay between the story and the sport of boxing is fascinating and impactful. It analyses the way boxers use their fights as ways of punishing themselves and this was a big theme for Goldman.“There’s moments I think in the final fight where it looks like Kid is almost willing to be punched. We know that's the history of boxing. Why does someone climb into the ring? Well it’s not simply to punish someone else, it’s actually to be punished. It’s a very very complex relationship that people have with that sport,” says Goldman.“I spent many many months, when I was living in Sydney, going to the Redfern gym watching Tony Mundine prepare for a fight - I just remember how often I would see him sitting in the corner after sparring for an hour and wondering to myself - why would you do this to yourself? What is it in your heart and soul that allows yourself to be punished like that? “And I think in the film Kid is self-destructive and he’s just lacerating himself until this woman walks in and says, You don’t even know what you're fighting for or what’s worth fighting for.”Kid Snow is ultimately a movie about family, relationships, the debts that we feel we owe people, and the complex ways in which we deal with these debts. The performances are great, the photography of the Australian outback in the 70’s is crisp and beautiful, and the film has a great energy to it. It is playing at Event Cinemas Shellharbour, Hoyts Cinemas Warrawong and the Gala cinemas also in Warrawong from Thursday, September 12. Go and watch it on the big screen.Become a Good Neighbour Support your local by giving great journalism a helping hand

In 2017 the General Motors Holden factory in Elizabeth closed down. It was the last large scale automotive manufacturing facility in Australia to close. Pete Williams, the director of the new feature film Emotion is Dead, is from Elizabeth and he marks this closing of the factory as a huge event in Australian history. “In 2017 that factory closed and that was the last car manufacturer in Australia. So after that factory closed there was a huge spike in unemployment, in depression, marriage breakups and even suicide. A lot of my family and mates from school worked in that factory and I saw the effects, socially and economically, of that closure. I was determined to tell that story,” says Williams.Thus, Emotion is Dead was born. The film follows an expressionless young man named Brock (Jude Turner) who lives in Elizabeth and regularly visits the closed down Holden factory. We know his father worked at the plant, and his mother is a die hard fan of Holden driver Peter Brock, but we are unsure of the complete effects that it had on the family.Brock is from a low socioeconomic background and he has his own company as a gardener whilst also studying at university. As the film progresses, Brock begins a scheme to steal money from the people whose gardens he tends to which sets off a chain of events that lead to an explosive finale.Williams says that one of the main themes that the film explores is generational inequality and you can see this clearly through the character of Brock.“How do young people buy their first house? How do they climb the social ladder in society? Is it possible to do it legally in this current situation? And Brock doesn’t think it is possible to do it legally. He’s a genius and someone at university but he doesn’t come from a family of wealth so what do you do?” Says Wiliams.The film also contains a plethora of emo music from the 2000’s and the music gives the film character and style. It also reflects the feeling of the characters and the atmosphere that Williams is trying to represent. “When I was Brock’s age I lost a good friend who took his own life in Elizabeth and the music that got me through that time was punk rock and emo music. It really made me feel because I think I went into a similar sort of stasis that Brock does where he pushes all of his emotion down and doesn’t feel anything because he doesn’t want to feel pain. And the only way I could feel was at punk shows or listening to that music,” says Williams.The film also does a great job at capturing the beauty of suburban Adelaide, as well as presenting real Australian characters. In a film culture that is populated by American and English productions, it is refreshing to see Australians accurately represented on screen.“I was away from Australia for 15 years and hadn’t visited much and when I came back I fell in love with the country again. I recognised how special some of our characters are and our people and our places. Even some of our low socio economic suburbs, working class suburbs I saw some beauty there and some authenticity. So I just wanted to capture that on screen,” says Williams.Ultimately the idea at the film's core is that Australia has fallen away from the heart and pride that we used to have in creating our own products. It uses the closing of the Holden factory to present this idea of depersonalisation in the working class. There is no self identity in our work anymore because we are so separated from it. The film explores the effects this has on our work, mental health and economy.“The pride in producing something of significant value, a physical thing, has been taken away from Australian society. And the film really wants to ask the question: How do working class people find dignity and pride in what they do in this modern economy, especially young people,” says Williams.Emotion is Dead is fun, stylish and well acted. All the different threads compliment each other very well and the film both feels Australian and comments on what we’re living through in Australia right now.The film is playing at the Ritz Cinemas in Randwick on August 29 and Williams will be there for a Q and A session afterward.

“There was this two hour period from 11:30pm at night, when they went missing, until the time of their death at 1:30 pm. It was like this hole opened up in the universe and swallowed them and then spat them out,” said The Speedway Murders co-director Luke Ryndermann.On the night of 17 November 1978 four young employees at the Burger Chef fast food restaurant in Speedway, Indiana went missing. Their deceased bodies were found two days later 32-km away from the restaurant. More than 40 years have passed and the case still hasn’t been solved. But Melbourne writers and directors Luke Ryndermann and Adam Kamien’s new film The Speedway Murders may just represent a huge step forward.“We found it (the case) on Unsolved Mysteries - the old TV show - and I’m a true crime tragic and obsessive. Adam’s background is in journalism and I ended up sending him an email asking if he thought it was something worth pursuing. He then used his skills and ended up in a Facebook group that had relatives of the victims and police officers and potential suspects,” says Ryndermann.“We eventually saved up $10 000, got ourselves a Director of Photography and went over there.”Being Australian gave the duo an advantage as they were investigators with zero ties to the existing case and became a light of hope for the families still begging for closure on the deaths of these young kids.“There was very little movement on the case,” says Kamien. “The strategy of the police was just to hold a press conference every year on the anniversary and hope that some more information would come in that would change the case. So I think the families were really pleased.”The film is structured in a way where you relive the night multiple times from the perspective of each different theory. Kamien and Ryndermann realised that a big issue with the case was that there were different groups of people with alternate theories of what happened, but someone had never collected all of these theories to possibly construct a bigger picture of the case. “We looked at it and thought, if we collated all the information, we could cross reference things then perhaps we could shed some new light,” says Kamien.As you journey through the film you are exposed to the different theories, one after the other, and each time you are convinced that this particular theory will be the one. But then there is always something that doesn’t add up.The film uses interview footage and it also, interestingly, employs actors to play the victims and basically help tell the stories of their own deaths. It is an ingenious device that also allows the victims’ personalities to shine through the screen so that by the end you feel like you know who these people were.“We decided early on that we didn’t want the victims to become footnotes in their own story and just mention potential perpetrators. So, the way we did that was to recreate the restaurant and have them inside there forensically trying to figure out their own murder. And that also allowed us to recreate the period and the actual building,” says Ryndermann.The duo found an old Chinese restaurant in Adelaide scheduled to be demolished and used it to reconstruct the Burger Chef restaurant. They based it on real blueprints for a Burger Chef restaurant, they found the real uniforms which would have been worn and found every American car from the 70’s in the area. Everything was as close to real as could be possible.The way the directors combine the documentary format with the scripted scenes give the film an emotionality that other documentaries just can’t have. It also creates a haunting atmosphere that permeates through the screen. Despite the case still not essentially being closed, the ending of the film allows for a sense of catharsis while simultaneously making a huge statement about the future of the case.“These kids should have gone to work and gone home and instead this terrible thing happened to them and it makes you think about your own mortality because anything can happen to anyone,” says Kamien.The Speedway Murders will be available to stream later this year.

We are 12 minutes into Australian directors Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s debut feature film Birdeater when the title finally appears on screen. In those masterful first 12 minutes we are introduced to a couple.Most nights he, Louie, lies and says he is going to his dad’s place when really he is going to a golfing range. And she, Irene, for some reason never leaves the house at all, and is sleeping most of the time.All of this is conveyed through little dialogue, repetitive sequences, montage and spectacular cinematography. And even though not much is happening in the film, you’re on the edge of your seat. Something is off here…“We started with this relationship. Having a relationship where the couple had separation anxiety … We have this couple that need to be around each other and eventually you separate them and see what happens,” says Weir.And what better way to separate a couple than at a buck’s party. So the main plot of Birdeater unravels as Louie, breaking tradition, invites girls to his bucks party. And the film basically roars on from there.“As soon as we had the buck’s party element then we had almost a new genre of film that we were looking at and that's when it really became what it is. Taking a close look at how groups of men behave and how groups of men react to bad male behaviour,” says Weir.In April, The Australian Institute of Criminology’s National Homicide Monitoring Program found that 34 women were killed by an intimate partner in 2022-23, an increase of 28 per cent on the previous year.And although Birdeater doesn’t concern itself with these extreme cases, it aims to explore the problem of toxic male behaviour at its root. With murderers, it is easy for men to detach themselves from the behaviour of those characters whereas with Birdeater the duo wanted to force men to confront themselves.“We wanted to try and hit closer to the bone, go after the more kind of insidious types of abuse that we think is actually common with guys that we grew up with and went to school with,” says Weir.“So we wanted basically a shifting scale of different kinds of men in our ensemble in a way where, hopefully, no guy watching this would feel totally safe. Everyone would be able to see themselves in some way depicted on screen and have to reckon with that.”Birdeater was filmed in the small village of St Albans in Hawkesbury, NSW and despite exploring such universal themes, the film still feels very Australian and this is a translation of the duo’s individuality and identity which is daring in a film culture that is led by other countries.“We have this idea of mateship in Australia which is something that we build a lot of our identity around,” says Clark. “But it does feel like it's somewhat exclusionary to women - it feels like it's structured around men being friends.”“So the film was a little bit about how that makes people outside of that circle feel, and people are able to really easily translate that into a similar part of their own culture. So by finding something specific to Australia, which I think it is, that specificity helps.”Weir and Clark met each other whilst studying at AFTRS, a film school in Sydney, and they say that it is through their collaboration, that this film was such a success.“Often we will be arguing about something and we essentially never compromise - we never really meet in the middle we try and work out which idea is better and quite often that means that there's actually a third idea that neither of us have thought of and it ends up being what we go with,” says Weir.The film will be released in cinemas on July 18. The characters are interesting, the ideas are thoughtful, the score is inventive and the overall look of the film is mesmerising. Even though it is Clark and Weir’s first feature film, Birdeater shows that they have a strong command of their ideas and know how to communicate them visually in creative and stunning ways.Birdeater

On February 16, 2013, writer and filmmaker Bill Bennett wrote this sentence in his blog: “I have a particular need to walk the Camino in Spain. And yet, I’m not sure what that need is.” Exactly 11 years and 3 months later, The Way, My Way – the film based on Bennetts’ experience of walking the Camino – was released in Australia.The Camino de Santiago, or The Way of St. James, is an ancient pilgrimage route ending at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. There are many different starting points but Bill, at almost 60 years of age, decided his route would be more than 800 kilometres long.Bennett completed the walk in May 2013 and then wrote a book on the adventure.“Writing the book was the completion of my walk,” says Bennett. “Because when I was doing the walk in Santiago I was so confused as to why I had done it. So, I wrote the book to make sense of it all.”The memoir The Way, My Way (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014), based on the walk, was a bestseller.Initially, Bennett had no ambitions of making it into a film. But a film distributor named Richard Becker, who had loved the book, brought it up with Bennett and wouldn’t take no for an answer.“It had a very, very deep impact on him and he came to me and said, I think there’s a movie in this, and I said, No, there’s not. I don't think enough happens. It’s just one bloke walking across Spain, that’s all. And he said, no, if you can get what's in the book into the film then it will find an audience,” explains Bennett.And Bennett ended up creating almost the exact same conditions of his walk. Every bit of Chris Haywood’s (who played Bill) costume was the exact same as what Bill wore. Every geographical location was obsessed over in terms of their accuracy and order in the story, and none were picked just for their beauty. And all of this authenticity ended with a fitting moment of catharsis for Bill as he watched himself (played by an actor), at the end of his walk, have a very vulnerable phone call with his wife (played by herself).“The conversation I had with my wife toward the end of the film. That was where I couldn’t separate myself from myself anymore – that was surreal. It was like I was standing outside of myself looking at myself,” says Bennett.The Way, My Way has been a big success, it just passed $2 million dollars at the Australian and New Zealand Box Office. And Bennett believes there are many factors contributing to this.“I think there's a confluence of factors that have a lot to do with the fact that people are searching for more meaning in their life at the moment. In the same way that the character of Bill is in the film,” says Bennett.And in the same way that Bill Bennett, the director, has been ever since he wrote those first words in his blog eleven and a half years ago. He is still exploring what compelled him to walk more than 800kms in a foreign country, even now as he begins work on the sequel ‘The Way, Her Way’.

The Sydney Film Festival, which went for 12 days, finished on Sunday 16 June and the Italian black and white comedy drama film, There’s Still Tomorrow, took out the prestigious Sydney Film Prize.Directed by Paola Cortellesi (her debut feature), the film is set in post-war Italy and follows a housewife who receives a mysterious letter which prompts her to face her abusive husband and hope for a better future.The Film Festival Jury said in a joint statement: “C’è ancora domani (There’s Still Tomorrow) deftly weaves humour, style, and pop music into a dazzling black-and-white cinematic event, then it delivers an ending that will take your breath away.”The film competed with 12 others for the prize, but overall there were 197 films from 69 countries including 28 World Premieres and 133 Australian Premieres, bringing together hundreds of new international and local stories.The Bugle attended some screenings (not all) of the festival, and these were the four standouts:I Saw the TV GlowTwo awkward and lonely teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Bridgette Lundy-Paine) bond with each other over a late night show to the point of obsession. And when it is canceled they start to question whether the things that happened in the show were fiction or reality.The film is beautifully constructed and shot by director Jane Schoenbrun with hues of pinks, purples, blues and greens invading every frame. And the performances from the two leads are both eerily affecting and devastating.The film also examines the sadness and depression which comes from the monotony of reality and the melancholy we feel when the life we are leading is not quite what we imagined as a child. The film is filled with a horrible sense of dread and anxiety and is quite scary at times. But ultimately it is a reminder of the dangers and importance of dreams and fiction.I Saw The TV Glow. Credit: A24.Kinds of KindnessAn anthology film by Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos about how far we would go for the people we love. The first chapter is about a man who is given a schedule by his boss each day which he mustn’t deviate from. The second is about a husband who is suspicious about the identity of his wife when she is found after being lost at sea. And the last is about a woman who has been given a mission to find a ‘special’ person by the cultish group she is involved with.Each chapter is filled with Lanthimos’ signature dry humour as well as his ridiculous and hopeless worldview. And each features the same actors; Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Defoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qulley, and others; performing different roles.  The film deals with individuals trying to make their way in the world through the connections they make with others. And it wonders what happens when these connections we rely upon so deeply are severed or tested. All chapters are shot sleekly, feature manic performances and have some spectacular needle drops. And they all induce a sort of discomfort inside you. As though the little things we use to survive reality are as fragile as glass.The BikeridersThe newest Austin Butler and Tom Hardy film follows the real Motorcycle club, Outlaws MC, which began as a social club and community for outsiders, but descended into violence.The film is told through the eyes of Jodie Comer’s character Kathy, who is the wife of Austin Butler’s Benny, as she recounts to a journalist (Mike Faist) what happened to the Outlaws. The film feels very inspired by mafia movies such as Goodfellas, but is also an ode to the 60’s and the motorcycle culture that blossomed in that time. The film is based on a book of photography of the same name written and photographed by Danny Lyon. Although the film is definitely an enjoyable watch, it lacks the cohesion and excitement of the films it seems to be inspired by. The characters are also a little undeveloped and as a result it is harder to be sucked into the emotional core of the movie. But the film's main theme does give it a point of difference. It seems to say that creation, after being given to the public, can morph into things that the creator did not intend it to. And this is definitely an interesting idea. A Different ManAn A24 film where Sebastian Stan plays a man with Neurofibromatosis who undergoes facial reconstructive surgery. When the surgery is successful he takes on a whole new identity only to meet a man, with the same condition he used to have, who is much more confident and happy then he is.It is a fascinating flip on the usual Beauty and the Beast type storyline. And it uses humour, meta commentary and actors to its advantage. The first third is a sad, almost meditative look at this man’s life with his condition. And then the last two thirds just observe him as he slowly descends into madness. And the film’s tone perfectly reflects these different stages. A Different Man. Credit: A24