‘Bigger than Barbie’ Italian movie wins Sydney Film Festival competition

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An Italian comic play that was a bigger deed than Barbie successful its location state has won Sydney Film Festival’s $60,000 contention for “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous” cinema.

There’s Still Tomorrow, an inventive achromatic and achromatic movie from fashionable Italian comic histrion and vocalist Paola Cortellesi, is astir a pistillate trapped successful a toxic matrimony successful Rome conscionable aft World War II.

What could person been a troubling play communicative astir a acheronian taxable has a astonishing airy interaction and lukewarm heart, drafting connected stories of Cortellesi’s grandma successful the 1940s.

A assemblage headed by Bosnian manager Danis Tanovic announced There’s Still Tomorrow arsenic winner, the 2nd consecutive movie directed by a pistillate to assertion the apical prize, arsenic the festival closed astatine the State Theatre connected Sunday night.

The $20,000 Australian documentary contention was won by James Bradley’s Welcome to Babel, astir Chinese-Australian creator Jiawei Shen coating an epic enactment astir the past of Communism.

In There’s Still Tomorrow, Cortellesi plays Delia, a parent of 3 whose maltreatment astatine the hands of her buffoonish hubby Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea) is physical, intelligence and financial.

The assemblage described the movie arsenic intensely relevant, adding: “We relive each woman’s conflict for equality done Cortellesi’s Delia [and] we look the brutal cycles of home unit with an immense empathy”.

The movie plays similar a transverse betwixt the Italian neo-realist classical Bicycle Thieves, the much caller Italian classical Life Is Beautiful and Mexico’s Roma.

It struck specified a chord successful Italy, wherever women being killed by antheral partners is arsenic overmuch of a situation arsenic it is successful Australia, that it sold much tickets than Barbie successful that state past year.

Elsewhere, 1 of the festival’s highlights was the satellite premiere of the documentary Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line.

Writer-director Paul Clarke tracked the large Australian stone band’s vocation from their aboriginal days connected Sydney’s bluish beaches to their last amusement successful 2022, showing their uncompromising cognition to euphony manufacture occurrence and clasp of Indigenous, anti-nuclear and workers’ rights and biology issues.

creator Jiawei Shen successful Welcome To Babel.

Another item was Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, a muscular play astir a 1960s Chicago motorbike nine that is told from the position of sassy Kathy (Jodie Comer), who meets simmering Benny (Austin Butler) successful a bikie barroom and marries him 5 weeks later. It shows however the Vandals turned from a nine of motorbike racing enthusiasts, founded by terse Johnny (Tom Hardy), into a drug-running, murderous gang.

With films screening successful 10 venues, everyone’s festival volition beryllium antithetic but here’s however I saw it:

Biggest disappointment - Yorgos Lanthimos was deservedly acclaimed for The Favourite and Poor Things, which meant expectations were precocious for the absurdist drama Kinds of Kindness, which stars Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley. While it was typically surreal and audacious, a trilogy of stories astir emotion and power was an unsatisfying mode to walk 3 hours.

Most astonishing trend - portion Hollywood has backed distant from baccy usage connected screen, determination was truthful overmuch smoking successful The Bikeriders and different festival films, and vaping successful disappointing contention movie September Says, that passive smoking was a risk.

Austin Butler stars arsenic Benny successful The Bikeriders, which follows 1960s motorcycle nine the Vandals.

Most raucous nighttime out - Kneecap was a comic philharmonic biopic astir a Northern Irish hip-hop outfit with that sanction who privation to support the Irish connection alive. The rappers played themselves and it was crude, violent, laced with drugs and large fun. A young Irish-dominated assemblage lapped it up.

Best Western - Forget Kevin Costner. Viggo Mortensen wrote, directed and starred successful The Dead Don’t Hurt. It was a precise likable feminist Western starring Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) arsenic a French-Canadian pistillate who settled extracurricular a frontier municipality with a Danish migrant (Mortensen). As 1 American professional said, it’s a Western for radical who don’t similar Westerns.

Best surprise - the entreaty of Megan Park’s drama My Old Ass seemed to beryllium Audrey Plaza, playing the aboriginal aforesaid of an 18-year-old girl, and Margot Robbie arsenic producer. Then you observe it’s a caller and touching romance dominated by the livewire Canadian actor-singer Maisy Stella (Nashville), playing Elliott, who is down to the past weeks of surviving connected her family’s cranberry workplace earlier heading to uni successful Toronto.

Wildest existent story - however is it imaginable that an aspiring comedian could instrumentality portion successful a Japanese world TV amusement for much than a twelvemonth without knowing that six-minutes of his beingness wrong a tiny flat was being broadcast each week? How is it imaginable that the shaper could importune helium beryllium unsocial and bare for each that time? At slightest the documentary The Contestant showed Tomoaki Hamatsu recovered immoderate redemption for what helium went through.

Wildest fictional story - Hands down, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Read the reappraisal here.

Also announced connected closing night, the $35,000 prize for First Nations filmmaking went to New Zealand filmmaker Awanui Simich-Pene’s abbreviated movie First Horse, astir a young Māori miss successful 1826; and the $40,000 Sustainable Future Award going to American filmmaker Alina Simone’s Black Snow, a documentary astir a Siberian eco-activist.

In the Dendy Awards, champion unrecorded enactment abbreviated was Nathan and Nick Lacey’s Die Bully Die, champion animated abbreviated was Natasha Tonkin’s Darwin Story, and the Rouben Mamoulian Award for champion manager went to Pernell Marsden for The Meaningless Daydreams of Augie & Celeste.