Film

 In recent years, much fuss has been made about our foremost filmmakers’ apparent reluctance to set their films in the present day. Instead, they have flocked to the comforts of nostalgia, just as audiences have. 

Maura Delpero’s The Mountain Bride – Vermiglio was the winner of the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is a film of austere beauty, as fragile as it is forceful. Set in the Trentino village of Vermiglio in 1944, it conjures a community perched on the edge – geographically at the border of Switzerland and Austria, historically at the close of World War II, and spiritually at the uneasy threshold between tradition and change.

Agnes (Eva Victor) is a high achiever. Barely out of her twenties, she is already a faculty member of the English department at a north-eastern US college. The red brick college sits with certainty in the landscape; so should Agnes, but something is off. The cottage where she lives – narrow and tall, just like she is – feels isolated. At night she hears the wind in the trees and checks the door, waiting for something. A reckoning never materialises.

Point to any one of the near 300 films at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) and you will likely find a luminary vision of imperfection. For three weeks Melbourne’s cinemas housed testaments to the incapable, the broken, and the mediocre.

Structured like a documentary but with the escalating tension of a tautly choreographed thriller, Late Shift follows one day in the working life of a nurse in a Swiss public hospital. Floria, expertly portrayed by Leonie Benesch, arrives at work mid-afternoon to discover that the third shift nurse has called in sick, leaving her and her colleague to tend to the two dozen patients on the ward with only the assistance of a student nurse.

A woman loses her friend to suicide and inherits his dog, by his wish. The dog is a Great Dane, the size of a pony, who grieves for its companion, the woman’s friend, steadfastly. It has none of the embarrassment that people can sometimes feel about their own grief, its depth and insistence, its noisiness. The dog lies on the woman’s bed, taking up space, and though the metaphor is obvious – a big grief, a big animal – it isn’t only a metaphor. Apollo, for such is his name, is real enough, and dog enough, to cause a mess.

While vastly different in tone, scope, and geography, El 47 and Through Rocks and Clouds (titled Raíz in Spanish) offer complementary visions of resistance – one overtly political, the other quietly poetic. Together, they provide a rich entry point into contemporary Spanish and Indigenous language cinema, balancing crowd-pleasing drama with subtle, art-house storytelling.

The Surfer opens with its Australian-American protagonist, played by Nicolas Cage, giving his teenage son a surf-inspired pep talk: the ocean, he says, is ‘pure energy’. And like life, either you learn to ride it ‘or you wipe out’. These words could well have come from Cage himself, an actor known for his self-described ‘nouveau shamanic’ performance style, whose late-career oeuvre seems designed to repeatedly bring the sixty-one-year-old to the brink of spiritual oblivion.