Some 24 feature films will be screened in the attractive programme of the 2nd Australian Film Festival which opens at the IFC next Friday night. The Dutch-born director, Paul Cox, who has lived and worked in Australia since 1965, will be the special guest of the festival which will show three of his feature films - Lonely Hearts (1981), Man Of Flowers (1984) and Lust And Revenge (1996), along with a new documentary, A Journey With Paul Cox - all on Tuesday, the 20th. Later that evening, Cox will discuss his work in the Meeting Room of the IFC.
The festival opens with Rob Sitch's comedy, The Castle, which has been one of the most successful Australian movies of recent years. It deals with the attempts of a wacky family to retain their ramshackle home built at the edge of an airport. The closing film on January 22nd will be one of the hot Australian films on the festival circuit last year - Chris Kennedy's delightful Doing Time For Patsy Cline, featuring the engaging Matt Day as a country singer hitching a ride to Sydney when he is picked up by a fast-talking drug dealer (Richard Roxburgh) and his mysterious girlfriend (Miranda Otto).
The highlights of the festival also include:
George Miller's documentary, 40,000 Years Of Dreaming: A Century Of Australian Cinema; Oscar winners Geoffrey Rush and F. Murray Abraham teamed up with Judy Davis and Sam Neill for Peter Duncan's political satire, Children of the Revolution, dealing with the offspring of Stalin and his young Australian lover;
Simon Lyndon and Linda Cropper in Steven Vidler's well-regarded Blackrock, which follows the aftermath of the rape and murder of a 15-yearold girl;
Mark Joffe's agreeably offbeat Cosi with Ben Mendelsohn as an aimless young man hired by a Sydney asylum to direct some of the patients in a variety show as an occupational therapy exercise and persuaded by one patient to stage Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte instead;
Shirley Barrett's assured and quirky Love Serenade, which won her the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 1996 and is set in a remote small town where two sisters (Miranda Otto and Rebecca Firth) are smitten by the thrice-divorced, middleaged disc-jockey (George Shevtsuov), who moves in next door. And the programme also features the Oscar-winning Shine along with such notable older Australian movies as Fred Schepisi's 1978 The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith, Peter Weir's 1974 The Cars That Ate Paris and Ted Kotcheff's Wake In Fright, which was released here in 1970 as Outback.
