SIX OF THE BEST: A SNEAK PEEK AT SOME SYDNEY SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL TITLES
Times and dates are unspecified, but the Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival has confirmed six titles set to screen at the 2022 national events…
The Sydney season is set to run August 25-28 at Event Cinemas George Street, with a selection of titles then hitting the road, to screen on September 2-3 at Event sites in Tuggerah and Shellharbour on the eastern seaboard; Marion in South Australia; Palmerston in the Northern Territory; Whitfords on Perth’s outskirts; and, at the Brisbane City Myer Centre venue. Details of a planned Melbourne season will be announced soon.
The five short films are in the first wave:
FIELDTRIP (Dirs: Soren Bendt, Paul Arion; UK/Iceland; 20 mins) AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE.
A lone astronaut must navigate an alien planet with only his sentient A.I. spacesuit to help him. But what if the agency we afford our passive devices proves to be detrimental…even life-threatening? Official Selection - FANTASIA FEST 2022
THE DAYS THAT (NEVER) WERE (Dirs: Pedro Rivero, Kevin Iglesias Rodríguez; Spain; 11 mins) AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE.
Three characters are about to have the best time of their lives ... until a strange phenomenon appears to interrupt everything. Co-directed by Pedro Rivero, winner of a Best Screenplay Goya award for the Netflix hit, The Platform.
ERASED (Dir: Gabriela Loza; Australia; 14.05 mins) NEW SOUTH WALES PREMIERE.
On Mars, The Erasure Institute promises to remove suffering through a painless but permanent procedure, which is “encouraged and sometimes enforced.” Cate begins to believe that voluntary erasure is her only way out. Can love be erased? WINNER - BEST PICTURE, L.A. Sci-Fi & Horror Film Festival; Official Selection - London Sci-Fi Film Fest. (Pictured, below)
MADELEINE (Dir: Alain Kulmburg; France; 17 mins) INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE.
When family heirlooms evoke trauma from her youth, a young woman uses a new technology to relive her memories simply by touching the old objects.
THE OPERATOR (Dir: Matt Riley; UK; 20 mins) AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
Connecting long distance intergalactic calls from a remote satellite, a bleary eyed and coffee-fuelled operator receives a distress call. No one ever receives a distress call…
The sixth title is the U.S. feature LANDLOCKED, the debut narrative feature from documentarian Paul Owens (Reformat the Planet, 2008; Double Fine Adventure, 2015). Summoned to his soon-to-be demolished childhood home, Mason discovers an old VHS camera that can see into the past, inspiring him to record as many memories as possible before the doomed house is destroyed.
Utilising the director’s actual home movies and casting real life family members to play fictionalised versions of themselves, LandLocked is a purely auteurist vision. Combining a narrative structure and documentary aesthetics with understated horror and sci-fi beats, Owens has crafted the most strikingly original debut feature since Donnie Darko.
“The slow-burn, neo-realist first half is utterly gripping, the last half-hour quietly devastating,” said Festival Director Simon Foster, who acquired the film for its Australian Premiere after its selection at the Salem Horror Fest (where it won the George A. Romero Foundation Fellowship Prize) and Barcelona’s Terror Molins festival. “This is a lo-fi, high-impact fantasy work like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
The full program announcement is due in late July, when tickets for the 3rd annual Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival will also go on sale.