The 3 Rooms of Melancholia
(Melancholian 3 Huonetta)
Australian Premiere
Pirjo Honkasalo
Finland 2004
How many anti-war films can pack a punch without showing any war footage, explaining the politics, or relying on in-depth interviews, in fact barely using dialogue at all? With exquisite cinematography and music, Pirjo Honkasalo instead looks into the eyes and souls of Russian and Chechen children who bear the burden of the hatred generated by the Chechen war...More
10 on Ten
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran 2004
Distinguished Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami has generously decided to reveal his current ideas on the creative processes of his filmmaking by taking us on a road trip to Tehran and eloquently proffering wisdom from the wheel of his car (shot on his preferred mini DV camera)...More
Beyond Sorry
Australian Premiere
David Vadiveloo
Australia 2003
This moving documentary reveals the complex pressures that come to bear when an urban Aboriginal woman named Zita tries to return to the family she was taken from as a child 56 years earlier...More
Checkpoint
(Machssomim)
Australian Premiere
Yoav Shamir
Israel 2003
The West Bank and Gaza Strip, home to over three million Palestinians, have been under Israeli military authority since 1967...More
Delamu
Australian Premiere
Tian Zhuangzhuang
China 2004
With films such as The Horse Thief, The Blue Kite and Springtime in a Small Town, Tian Zhuangzhuang established himself as a major filmmaker in the Fifth Generation...More
Father to Son
(Isä pojalle)
Australian Premiere
Visa Koiso-Kanttila
Finland 2004
Father to Son is a personal exploration of the relationship between fathers and sons through four generations of the filmmaker's family, and the conflict that inevitably arises when subjective memories differ from "reality"...More
Final Solution
Australian Premiere
Rakesh Sharma
India 2003
This rigorous and at times distressing documentary is a study in both the politics of hate and the sort of terrorism that doesn't get enough attention in Western media...More
The Five Obstructions
(De fem benspænd)
Jørgen Leth
Denmark 2003
In 1967, Jørgen Leth made The Perfect Man, a favourite film of Lars von Trier...More
The Hidden History of Homosexual Australia
World Premiere
Con Anemogiannis
Australia 2004
This revelatory film dispels any myths that homosexuality is somehow a "new thing"...More
House of the Tiger King
David Flamholc
Sweden 2004
"Take one obsessive explorer, one hard-bitten Nam vet, and 17 weeks in some of the deepest jungle in the world...More
I Like Killing Flies
Australian Premiere
Matt Mahurin
USA 2004
With over 900 items on the menu, all conjured up in a Rube Goldberg kitchen the size of a walk-in closet, Kenny Shopsin, a self-taught chef in his tiny family-owned New York City restaurant, spends his days feeding his neighbours...More
Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust
Australian Premiere
Daniel Anker
USA 2004
Imaginary Witness explores the complex relationship between Hollywood and the Holocaust and considers the ways American movies shape our perception of World War II...More
Infidels
(Koffar)
Bahman Kiarostami
Iran 2004
The Godars are nomadic gypsies who migrated from India to Iran...More
Pilgrimage
(Ziarat)
Bahman Kiarostami
Iran 2004
As many as 3,000 Iranian pilgrims risk their lives every day to cross the Iran-Iraq border illegally to visit the holy shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala, Iraq...More
The Ister
David Barison & Daniel Ross
Australia 2004
At the height of World War II, influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger delivered a series of lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin's poem about the Danube river – addressing questions of home and place, culture and memory, technology and ecology, and politics and war...More
knot at home :Stories of Dreams (Episode 4)
BIG HART
Australia 2004
Sold Out
Young people who often go unheard tell their stories...More
The Ladies'
Australian Premiere
Mahnaz Afzali
Iran 2003
Directed by the acclaimed Iranian actress Mahnaz Afzali and filmed entirely inside a ladies' washroom in a public park in Tehran, this absorbing documentary shatters Western preconceptions of Iranian women...More
Maybe God Himself is Old Too
Katarzyna Sliwinska
Poland 2004
In a magical village near the Polish border, the youngest citizen is 68 years-old...More
Landmines - A Love Story
World Premiere
Dennis O'Rourke
Australia 2005
In the ruined city of Kabul, Shah, a former Mujaheddin soldier, noticed a pretty Tajik girl who had only one leg, and began to court her...More
Peace One Day
Australian Premiere
Jeremy Gilley
UK 2004
Is the idea of lasting world peace one day an impossible dream? In war-torn 1998 one long-haired young Londoner, former sci-fi actor and filmmaker Jeremy Gilley, decided that it would be a step in the right direction to get national leaders to commit to a cessation of hostilities for one designated day each year at least...More
Repatriation
(Songhwan)
Kim Dong-won
South Korea 2003
Of the thousands of spies sent between North and South Korea since their separation at the end of the Korean War in 1953, many of those captured in the South remained long term "unconverted" prisoners...More
Shape of the Moon
(Stand van de maan)
Australian Premiere
Leonard Retel Helmrich
Netherlands 2004
In this follow up to The Eye of the Day (AFF 03), Leonard Retel Helmrich again visits Indonesia through three generations in one family...More
Tarnation
Australian Premiere
Jonathan Caouette
USA 2004
Talk of the town at Sundance 2004 for reportedly costing a mere US$187 to make, Tarnation is Jonathan Caouette's inspiring and intimately personal documentary self-portrait chronicling his chaotic upbringing in a dysfunctional Texas family, his coming out experience and the unexpected relationship that develops with his mentally-ill mother Renee...More
The White Diamond
Australian Premiere
Werner Herzog
Germany 2004
In 1992, legendary nature documentary filmmaker Dieter Plage was tragically killed when he fell from the prototype airship made by his friend, the British scientist Dr Graham Dorrington, while attempting to film wildlife in the canopy of the Amazon...More
Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
Australian Premiere
Xan Cassavetes
USA 2004
From 1980 Jerry Harvey's visionary programming of LA based Z Channel - the first all-movie cable channel - embraced the New Hollywood and the best of European cinema, from Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ingmar Bergman to Oliver Stone, Sam Peckinpah and Michael Cimino (see Heaven's Gate)...More