Australian Cinematheque 10 results

Fairy Tales: Truth, Power and Enchantment is now screening at Australian Cinémathèque!

This free cinema program presents beloved classics alongside contemporary retellings. Fairy tales have always been a means of speaking truth to power; challenging injustice and providing hope. This program highlights how filmmakers have innovated on older stories to resonate in different times and contexts. The program tells these tales across five thematic strands, each strand exploring how fairy tales inform ideas of transformation, identity, and wonder.   //   ...

The Film Diaries of Márta Mészáros is coming to the Australian Cinémathèque this month!

Following recent restorations of her films by the Hungarian National Film Fund, the Australian Cinémathèque presents Mészáros’s ambitious and deeply personal ‘Diary’ trilogy: Diary for My Children 1984, Diary for My Loves 1987, and Diary for My Father and Mother 1990. Part historical drama, part künstlerroman – the ‘Diary’ series is a semi-autobiographical recreation of Mészáros’s upbringing amid the social tumult of the newly founded Eastern Bloc. Fusing poetic ...

Screwball season arrives at the Australian Cinémathèque!

The screwball comedy is one of the great treasures of American cinema. Emerging in the 1930s, these fast-talking farces subverted the conventions of romantic comedies with acid-tongued wit and slapstick silliness. The genre rose to prominence amid the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, with audiences responding to the intermingling of metropolitan glamour and acerbic class commentary. Famously described by critic Andrew Sarris as ‘sex comedies without the sex’, screwball ...

Juliette Binoche Retrospective is coming to Australian Cinémathèque this month!

Juliette Binoche is one of the most sought-after and celebrated actors of her generation building her career on the foundation of fearless, authentic, and sensitive performances. Crafting a screen persona that embodies meaning throughout her projects, Binoche is a unique actor bringing strong authorship not only to the role she plays but the whole film.   //   Boasting an extraordinary career of seventy feature films over five decades, Binoche has won a multitude of ...

Melting into Air is coming to the Australian Cinémathèque at GOMA this month!

‘Melting into Air’ illustrates the possibilities – and impossibilities – of capturing air on screen. These films consider the environmental consequences of mass industrialisation and the sublime potential of natural phenomena, humanity’s dreams of taking to the skies and the exquisite mechanics of respiration, the hidden mysteries within deep fogs and the transformative power of the invisible world around us.   //   This cinema program brings together films ...

Check out the Mahamat-Saleh Haroun retrospective at the Australian Cinémathèque this month!

A former journalist, Haroun studied filmmaking in France and went back home to make the first feature documentary for the African country of Chad in 1999. This film, Bye, Bye Africa, launched Haroun’s compelling filmmaking career and went on to win Best Debut Film at Venice International Film Festival. This retrospective offers a chance to see the strength and breadth of his deeply humanist filmmaking. //   Films include his short film The Second Wife 1994, which focuses on a ...

Golden Age of Czech Animation coming soon to the Australian Cinémathèque!

Jiří Trnka’s stop motion puppet animations rivalled Walt Disney in both output and international acclaim, earning him the title the ‘Disney of the East’. Karel Zeman took animation to new poetic heights, interweaving animation techniques with live-action filmmaking.   //   All three overcame the constraints of postwar politics to create extraordinary works which still inform the work of filmmakers like Jan Švankmajer, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and Wes Anderson...

Collection Highlight: Kumar Shahani at GoMA

He has developed an epic idiom that engages with contemporary issues and cultural memories embedded in classical Indian art forms, texts and objects. His visual explorations of Indian music and dance, the classical Indian epic and contemporary literature mark his practice as unique in the history of Indian cinema. Shahani also engages with European cinematic traditions and his oeuvre is considered alongside renowned directors — Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Paradyanov, ...

Shirley Clarke and the New York beat Exhibition at GoMA

A dancer turned video artist and filmmaker, her work pushed beyond the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction and explored the space in-between. Her love of jazz found its way into many of her films, the improvisational rhythms matching the kinetic energy of her camerawork. With fellow filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Clarke was instrumental in the formation of the New American Cinema Group, now the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world. This program ...

Forbidden Hollywood: The Wild Days of pre-Code Cinema Movie Festival

‘Forbidden Hollywood’ celebrates this unique period of creative freedom which ended with the reinstatement of traditional moral values through the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934. Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Depression, struggling Hollywood studios sought to attract audiences by creating films that pushed the boundaries of social acceptability. With a gleeful mix of realism and glamour, these films tackled issues of sexuality and crime, social criticisms ...