KT 113: Fantastic Film Festival
A coterie of KT writers cover some of the FFFA's offerings
Fantastic Film Festival Australia is “a film festival celebrating genre and alternative cinema from around the globe, promising a kaleidoscopic showcase of the world’s most exciting voices in cult, genre, arthouse, and alternative cinema.”
Screening in Sydney at The Ritz and in Melbourne at the Lido and The Thornbury Picture House.
Details and tix available here.
Words by Nicole Cadelina
A Grand Mockery (Adam C. Briggs & Sam Dixon, 2024)
“I marinate in the sunshine, and the salubrious secretions of the departed” – so says a man who is thwarted into existence through pointillist abstraction. Brisbane awakes. The cemetery sleeps. The man looms through the gravestone aisles in a black backpack and cap. Spiders splay out on their webs, while a concrete cherub looks down upon an unmarked burial. Addressing a departed loved one, he laments on, watching his city “baking in the distance” as the sun dawns with twinkles of bokeh. “I think of bushfires. I think of our country going up in flames.”
A Grand Mockery announces itself as an Australian gothic, born and resurrected from grainy, super 8 obscurity. A tragicomic film by Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon, the jointly directed feature was awarded Best Feature Film at SXSW Sydney in 2024. One half of the director duo, Sam, breathes his own semi-autobiographical self-portrait. He plays Josie, a grim-faced Brisbanite shambling through the rusty carousel of displeasures. By day, he works at a local cinema where he commits to a Sisyphean cycle of patronising eccentric theatre-goers and cleaning vomit from bins. By night, he returns to his girlfriend Nelly (Kate Dillon) at their abode, their romance rearing towards its tail-end. Josie limbers the down-trodden gears of life with his own peculiar comforts – from goon-boxed red wine served in mugs, to letters delivered through cemetery postal systems.
Similar to Paris Funeral, 1972 (2021), Adam’s debut solo feature, A Grand Mockery creeps into our theatre screens as an inebriated odyssey, where alcoholic men are thrown into a languished journey of internal suffering and self-confrontations. At times, the doom and gloom offers sparks of grim humour – Josie is, indeed, something of a screwball in his futile attempts to brave through the surreal carnival of friends, family and freaks. But amidst the grody ennui of piss-filled soda cups, he reaches for anything that might pull himself from his numbing existence. He stokes a fire in his living room; not because he’s cold, but because he wants to “sit by the fire, and thaw [himself] out.” It’s not enough to be called “a work of art” by his stoned compadre – he must earn it literally, by becoming a painted body of Piet Mondrian-like geometry.
Is the "mockery" of its title directed towards self-flagellation, or a cynical pisstake of the she'll-be-right ethic? Either way, there’s a heaven Josie longs for beneath Brisbane’s sun-scorched artifice. He slugs through these sedated reveries, abstracting himself into deformity as he bears the burdens of his abject failures. There are no prophecies at the end – only mercurial missives full of rapturous, libidinal nightmares, summoned by a ghoulish voice.
Words by Austin Lancaster
Dragon Dilation (Bertrand Mandico, 2024)
French director Bertrand Mandico has a visual impairment that gives him double vision — in his words, a “divergent gaze”. It’s an apt pun — his oeuvre, now numbering three features (The Wild Boys, After Blue, Conann) and over two dozen short to mid-length films, amounts to a wildly deviant, eclectic expression of cinematic kleptomania. His latest, Dragon Dilation, is a diptych of two films (Petrouchka, La Deviant Comedy), produced separately but united by a stylistic device that translates double vision into form: a split screen combining two takes, each a variation of the same scene.
Petrouchka transposes Stravinsky’s ballet from 19th century St. Petersburg to a nightmarish underground bunker, evoking both abuses within France’s fashion industry and the Russian-Ukrainian war. Mandico channels the performance-based theatrics and warped anti-imperialist fantasy of multi-disciplinary Japanese provocateur Shuji Terayama, as three puppet-like models are blindfolded, manhandled, drugged and finally pitted against each other in a deadly catwalk fight. As in recent work such as Extrazus and Ultra Pulpe, Mandico questions the dichotomy of passive muse and active artist; one of the film’s performers, Ekaterina Ozhiganova, is a #MeToo spokesperson and founder of Model Law, a non-profit organisation that offers career and legal counsel to models in France.
The second film, La Deviant Comedy, consists of fabricated “behind the scenes” footage based on a Covid-cancelled play rehearsed at Théâtre des Amandiers, later expanded and adapted as the film Conann. Doubling for Mandico, a cross-dressing femme theatre director greets us from a urinal surrounded by decapitated heads, sharing Cocteau-inflected ruminations on death, cinema and acting. The play’s cast of actresses bicker and make out on a barbaric fantasy set. Rehearsing scenes, they begin to merge with their roles. As in Petrouchka, #MeToo is invoked, giving new resonance to moments from Conann — as in one scene where the victimized protagonist pulls a heavy boulder, attached by hooks that stretch her skin like soft rubber. This time the critique is directed at the media’s spectacle of martyrdom, with its reduction of actresses to “whores or corpses”. Interspersed through the film are vulgar musical interludes by musician-activist Ultra Lux (another character). Near the end, she demands from the director that footage be cut from the film — "until it pierces the belly of power… until the head of power rots”.
Words by George Samios
Pure Scum (Gideon Aroni, 2025)
Two private school boy graduates embark on a night out on the town. Does that spark some dark connotations to you without explicitly suggesting it? Well, you’re clearly not the only one – as writer, director and producer Gideon Aroni has used that very premise for his debut feature Pure Scum, an anxiety-induced nightmare. Following two privileged young men who embark on a night of violent debauchery (and that’s putting it kindly) out on the town, Pure Scum is a pretty monumental feat of indie filmmaking in a lot of ways.
What I really appreciate about this film is that it doesn’t attempt to just tackle the ramifications of toxic masculinity (a theme already on the cusp of being overdone in modern media). Rather it looks to explore the root cause of it by delving deeper into the relationships between men. It’s the first time I’ve seen a film tackle how their behaviour extrapolates not how they want the world to see them, but how they want to be seen to their male peers. Any young he/him can definitely relate to similar relationships in their own friend groups. Even if they may not lead to the same level of mutually assured destruction depicted in this film, it is not a far-fetched notion to see it reach that point.
Certified Narrmheads will recognise and enjoy seeing Melbourne’s urban particularities in all its grit, while non-Narrmheads will appreciate the city’s subtle depiction. Shot in a dense, close up guerilla style, you’re only given broad strokes of each setting their misadventures lead to, whether it be a kebab shop, a nightclub or their parent’s lavish homes. The broadness of the production design allows the film to be recognisable from all corners of the country. These characters are applicable wherever there’s wealth, private schools and/or a JD sports store, which unfortunately is everywhere from Cairns to Perth.
The film intersperses their violent night out with talking head interviews attempting to make sense of their atrocities. Admittedly this is to the detriment of the film as it blatantly tells you things that would be far more enriching if they were shown. But to its credit, the non-linear interweaving works to give the audience a much-needed breather after scenes of graphic drug use. Looking like Disney Channel stars, the youthful appearance of the lead actors Will Hutchins and Nikita Chronis makes their antics all the more harder to watch knowing these two characters have only just made it to adulthood.
From the first scene guilt is the film’s lingering force. Through a new vice-fuelled plan it will momentarily be scrubbed over, but the guilt returns even stronger until there’s not a glimmer of humanity left. It makes for a haunting watch but a helluva gripping one.
Listings | Thur 8 May - Wednesday 14 May
Notable Screenings
Fantastic Film Festival
For the full program visit here.
Screening at Lido and Thornbury Picture House
German Film Festival 2025
For the full program visit here.
Screening at Palace Cinemas
Cinema Reborn
For the full program visit here.
Screening at The Lido
New Films in Release
Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales
Jonathan Zawada, 2025
Screening at ACMI, The Astor, Cinema Nova
The Wedding Banquet
Andrew Ahn, 2025
Screening at Cinema Nova and Palace Cinemas
ACMI Presents
Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales
Jonathan Zawada, 2025
Screening Thur & Sat
Björk: Cornucopia
Ísold Uggadóttir, 2025
Screening Friday
MechaFest: An Anime Celebration
Metropolis
Rintarô, 2001
Screening Thursday
Evangelion: 1.11 You Are (Not) Alone
Hideaki Anno & Masayuki & Kazuya Tsurumaki, 2008
Screening Sat
Evangelion: 2.22 You Can (Not) Advance
Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki & Masayuk, 2009
Screening Saturday
Promare
Hiroyuki Imaishi, 2019
Screening Sat 10 May
Evangelion: 3.33 You Can (Not) Redo
Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Mahiro Maeda & Masayuki, 2011
Screening Sun 11 May
Evangelion: 3.0+1.11 Thrice Upon A Time
Kazuya Tsurumaki, Katsuichi Nakayama & Mahiro Maeda, 2021
Screening Sun 11 May
Paprika
Satoshi Kon, 2006
Screening Mon 12 May
Matinees
All About My Mother
Pedro Almodóvar, 1999
Screening Fri, Sat, Sun
Kung Fu Hustle
Stephen Chow, 2004
Screening Wednesday 14 May
No screenings this week.
Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales
Jonathan Zawada, 2025
Screening Thur, Fri & Sat
Björk: Cornucopia
Ísold Uggadóttir, 2025
Screening Thursday
The Surfer
Lorcan Finnegan, 2024
Screening Friday
GFF25: Berlin Alexanderplatz: Part 2 (ep 6-10)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980
Screening Saturay 11am
Casablanca
Michael Curtiz, 1942
Screening Sun
Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock, 1960
Screening Sun
Millers Crossing
Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, 1990
+
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Robert Zemeckis
Screening Monday May 12 from 7pm
BBBC CINEMA (GALLERYGALLERY BRUNSWICK)
Returning in June
The Capitol Theatre Orchestra plus Grease ( 1978)
A Gilded Game
Herman Yau, 2025
Screening Daily
The Dumpling Queen
Wai Keung Lau, 2025
Screening Daily
An Unfinished Film
Lou Ye, 2025
Screening from Saturday
Peg O’ My Heart
Nick Cheung, 2024
Screening Daily
No screening this week
Evita
Alan Parker, 1996
Screening Saturday from 6:30pm
Events / Previews
Palestinian Film Festival
Tix and more information here.
Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales
Jonathan Zawada, 2025
Screening Thur, Sat & Sun
Björk: Cornucopia
Ísold Uggadóttir, 2025
Screening Thursday, Sat & Sun
The Salt Path
Marianne Elliott, 2024
Screening Thu, Fri, Sat & Sun
ChalaMAY: A celebration of Timothée!
Call Me By Your Name
Luca Guadagnino, 2017
Screening every day exc. Tue
Little Women
Greta Gerwig, 2020
Screening Fri, Sat & Mon
Bones and All
Luca Guadagnino, 2022
Screening every day exc. Tue
Alien (Theatrical Cut)
Ridley Scott, 1979
Screening Thu, Sat & Sun
New Release
The Wedding Banquet
Andrew Ahn, 2025
Screening Daily
Monsieur Aznavour
Mehdi Idir & Grand Corps Malade, 2024
Screening Daily
Dale Frank: Nobodies Sweetie
Jenny Hicks, 2024
Screening Daily
Sinners
Ryan Coogler, 2025
Screening at most cinemas.
An Unfinished Film
Lou Ye, 2025
Screening at Nova and Lido
Tinā (Mother)
Miki Magasiva, 2025
Screening Daily
Lies We Tell
Lisa Mulcahy, 2023
Screening Daily
Flat Girls
Jirassaya Wongsutin, 2025
Screening Daily
The Correspondent
Kriv Stenders, 2025
Screening Daily
Crossing
Levan Akin, 2024
Screening Daily
Small Things Like These
Tim Mielants, 2025
Screening Daily
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre de La Patellière & Matthieu Delaporte, 2024
Screening Daily
Death of a Unicorn
Alex Scharfman, 2025
Screening Daily
Warfare
Ray Mendoza & Alex Garland, 2025
Screening Mon
The Cats of Gokogu Shrine
Kazuhiro Soda, 2024
Screening Daily
Flow
Gints Zilbalodis, 2024
Screening Daily
Mickey 17
Bong Joon Ho, 2025
Screening Daily
Bob Trevino Likes It
Tracie Laymon, 2024
Screening Daily
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024
Screening Daily
Last days of every other film, probably, see calendar.
DOGMILK DEGUSTATIONS/MISCELLANIA
Song of All Ends
Giovanni Lorusso, 2024
Screening Thursday 8 May at Miscellania (Doors at 7pm, screening at 7:30pm tix $10)
FRENCH FILM CLUB
No screening this week
GAY24 (Bar Flippy’s)
Updates on upcoming Gay24 screenings via instagram.
No screening this week
LIDO / CLASSIC / CAMEO
Events
La Cocina
Alonso Ruizpalacios, 2025
Screenings Thurs 1 May
FFFA: A Grand Mockery
Adam C. Briggs,Sam Dixon, 2025
Screening Friday
Sculpting in Time: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky
The Sacrifice
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983
Screenings Thurs
To see all events, click here.
General Release
Sinners
Ryan Coogler, 2025
Screening at most cinemas.
Small Things Like These
Tim Mielants, 2025
Screening Daily
Thunderbolts
Jake Schreier, 2025
Screening Daily
Tinā (Mother)
Miki Magasiva, 2025
Screening Daily
The Amateur
James Hawes, 2025
Screening Daily
Black Bag
Steven Soderbergh, 2025
Screening Daily
Warfare
Ray Mendoza & Alex Garland, 2025
Screening Mon
OVA CLUB
No screening this week
PALACE BALWYN / BRIGHTON / COMO / KINO / PENTRIDGE / MOONEE PONDS / WESTGARTH
Events / Previews
General Release
Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales
Jonathan Zawada, 2025
Screening Daily
The Wedding Banquet
Andrew Ahn, 2025
Screening Daily
Sinners
Ryan Coogler, 2025
Screening at most cinemas.
Small Things Like These
Tim Mielants, 2025
Screening Daily
Thunderbolts
Jake Schreier, 2025
Screening Daily
Tinā (Mother)
Miki Magasiva, 2025
Screening Daily
Stelios
Yorgos Tsemberopoulos, 2025
Screening Daily
The Minecraft Movie
Jared Hess, 2025
Screening Daily
Flow
Gints Zilbalodis, 2024
Screening Daily
Black Bag
Steven Soderbergh, 2025
Screening Daily
Mickey 17
Bong Joon Ho, 2025
Screening Daily
Between shows.
Brunswick Underground Film Festival (BUFF) starting May 30 — 1 June
THE MELBOURNE CINÉMATHÈQUE (ACMI)
BARABARA STEELE: THE QUEEN OF SCREAM
The Long Hair of Death
Antonio Margheriti, 1964
Screening from 7pm
+
Curse of the Crimson Altar
Vernon Sewell, 1968
Screening from 8:50pm
Tinā (Mother)
Miki Magasiva, 2025
Screening Daily exc. Wed
Björk: Cornucopia
Ísold Uggadóttir, 2025
Screening Friday, Sat, Sun & Mon
Sinners
Ryan Coogler, 2025
Screening Thu and Wed
Ocean With David Attenborough
Toby Nowlan, Colin Butfield & Keith Scholey, 2025
Screening Sat and Sun
Grey Gardens
Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde & Muffie Meyer, 1975
Screening Mothers Day (Sunday 11 May)
Sexy Beast (25th Anniversary)
Jonathan Glazer, 2000
Screening Tuesday
Hackers
Lain Shoftley, 1995
Screening Wednesday
Flow
Gints Zilbalodis, 2024
Screening Wednesday
UNKNOWN PLEASURES @ Thornbury Picture House
No screening this week