Festival Info

Obsessions is a four-day film event exploring compulsion, rabbit-holing, feverish fixations, and the pursuit of the mysterious.

A retrospective screening of A24's new 8K scan of Darren Aronofsky's grungy, jaw-dropping debut Pi opens the festival on Thursday night, accompanied by the Australian Theatrical debut of William Friedkin's underappreciated late-career masterpiece, Bug. Friday night sees the return of Gregg Araki's Teenage Apocalyse Trilogy (Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere) to Australian screens for the first time in 20 years.

Saturday showcases six new features with a taste for the mysterious: 2022's other Aftersun, a DV-shot Lynchian fairytale, a midlength double-header featuring Mamántula, a queer, adults-only police procedural with a supernatural twist (direct from Sitges), and Mangosteen, the latest high-concept experimental piece from Tulapop Saenjaroen. These films are followed by two contemporary Japanese works from cult faves: River, the latest heartwarming time-looper from the team behind Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, written by The Night is Short, Walk on Girl's Makoto Ueda, and #MITO, Static Vision regular Daisuke Miyazaki's sinister and humourous take on influencer culture. Narrated by rock star iconoclast Debbie Harry, Amanda Kramer's tech-futurist essay film So Unreal traverses our digital past, present and future via the cyberpunk cinema that pervaded in popular culture throughout the '80s and '90s. Two iconic cyberpunk cult classics accompany So Unreal: a secret screening of a newly up-res'd anime mindmelter, and the Australian premiere of the new 4K scan of 1995 masterpiece Hackers (starring Angelina Jolie, Matthew Lillard, and Jonny Lee Miller).

A trio of retrospective screenings open our Sunday program: the Australian theatrical debut of William E. Jones' groundbreaking queer essay film, Finished, probing into the life of a deceased French pornographic actor, the international theatrical premiere of the new 4K scan of Guy Maddin's second feature, Archangel, a surrealistic piece in which a strange assortment of people meet in the Russian Arctic at the height of the revolution and World War One, and Sara Driver's Sleepwalk, an underappreciated gem of mid-'80s NY No Wave cinema, in which a translator begins to experience strange events that eerily mimic those described in an ancient Chinese manuscript. The festival closes out with the Australian premiere of infamous Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi's latest feature, Revolution+1, a look at the events leading up to the assassination of Shinzo Abe, told from the perspective of his killer, and a special preview screening of the Cannes-premiering The Sweet East, infamous indie cinematographer Sean Price Williams' (Good Time, Her Smell) directorial debut, penned by critic Nick Pinkerton, which sees a high-school student (Talia Ryder) traversing the underbelly of the US East Coast, encountering characters played by Earl Cave, Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri, Jacob Elordi, Jeremy O. Harris, Rish Shah and many others along her travels.

Credits

Programmers: Felix Hubble, Conor Bateman and Eleanor Smith
Trailer: Conor Bateman
GIFs, Art Direction and Poster Design: Eleanor Smith
Music: Earnest RAW (Jeremy Camilleri)
Website: Eleanor Smith and Felix Hubble
Special Thanks: Benji Tamir, Jaymes Durante, Rachel Bostock, Lucinda Mason, Darren Aronofsky, Gregg Araki, Ritz Cinemas