Sydney Film Prize Winners at Golden Age - Sydney Film Festival

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Tue 04 Apr 2017 - Tue 30 May 2017

We all love to lose ourselves in good Cinema and some unique films deserve celebration and awards. The Sydney Film Festival celebrates ten years of its Official Competition and the Sydney Film Prize with a screening of each Prize-winning film at the Golden Age Cinema & Bar , Surry Hills – every Tuesday for nine weeks, leading into the Sydney Film Festival.



The Official Competition awards the Sydney Film Prize – a $63,000 cash prize, recognising the talented, unusual and gifted films makers and their casts that make an impact on the films we are privileged to see. The Festival shows all nine winners, starting on the 4th April with Steve McQueen's Hunger from 2008.



This year's series are the most courageous and innovative films of the year and will be judged by a selection of international and local industry experts appointed by the Sydney Film Festival."From Steve McQueen's Caméra d'Or award-winning political drama Hunger (2008), starring Michael Fassbender; to Miguel Gomes' extraordinary trilogy Arabian Nights (2015); two-time Cannes Palme d'Or winners the Dardenne brothers' Two Days One Night (2014) starring Oscar-winning actress Marion Cotillard; and Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives (2013); These contemporary masterpieces are not to be missed.



All screenings on sale via www.ourgoldenage.com.au from 3pm, Tuesday 20 March. A special ticket price available for each volume of Arabian Nights.



HUNGER - Tuesday 04 April, 6.20pm

UK artist Steve McQueen, in collaboration with Irish playwright Enda Marsh (Disco Pigs), has created an extraordinary feature debut about the life-and-death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Establishing the conditions of Her Majesty's Prison Maze near Belfast in the early '80s, the first movement powerfully pushes into abstraction, with McQueen approaching the prison cells as installation sites for articulating the human body as both weapon and battleground in a series of intense and violent clashes between the wardens and prisoners.



BRONSON – Tuesday 11 April, 8.30pm



Nicolas Winding Refn's (The Pusher Trilogy, SFF 06) high-octane cabaret features Tom Hardy in a career-defining performance as Britain's most notorious criminal 'Charles Bronson'. Initially imprisoned for armed robbery, the real-life Bronson (aka Michael Peterson) has been out of jail only four months in 34 years, with 30 of those spent in solitary confinement. Repellent and seductive, Hardy's muscular interpretation channels A Clockwork Orange's Alex de Large and comes on like an amped-up Chopper Reid – jester, moustachioed showman and raconteur – a character to whom the prison cell is the perfect stage and an artist whose chosen form is extreme violence. Underscored by an explosive soundtrack and heightened use of visual and sound design, Refn and Brock Norman Brock's audacious script delivers an uppercut to the jaw of the traditional biopic.



HEARTBEATS – Tuesday 18 April, 8.30pm



Xavier Dolan follows the adolescent scream of I Killed My Mother with a more reflective (though equally teasing) second film about wilful delusion, rejection and the politics of the competing and unrequited crush. Francis (the filmmaker himself) and Marie (Monia Chokri) are a couple of drop-dead gorgeous twenty-something hipsters whose friendship is rocked when they both fall for Nicolas.



A SEPARATION – Wednesday 26 April, 8.30pm



This utterly compelling, emotionally resonant drama from Asghar Farhadi – director of About Elly (SFF 2009) – was awarded Best Film and both acting prizes for its superb ensemble cast at the Berlin Film Festival. Not exactly out-of-love, Nader and Simin are attempting to divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. They have acquired visas to emigrate from Iran – Simin is anxious to ensure a better future for their 10-year-old daughter Termeh, but Nader refuses to leave his elderly father who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. When the judge refuses to formalise their separation, Simin resolutely departs the family home, leaving the obstinate Nader to contract the services of a housekeeper. Razieh is a devout, impoverished woman who tends to the apartment and Nader's father with her own four-year-old daughter in tow. When Nader returns one day to find his father alone and compromised, his fury leads to an altercation that has unexpected and devastating consequences.



ALPS – Tuesday 02 May, 6pm



Director Yorgos Lanthimos, who put the Greek 'Weird Wave' on the map with the biting black comedy Dogtooth (2009), and also produced Athina Rachel Tsangari's acerbic and offbeat Attenberg (which screened in SFF's 2011 Official Competition), returns with another warped vision of lives on the periphery of a society in decay. Alps (co-produced by Tsangari, and co-starring Attenberg's Ariane Labed) follows a secret club whose members are paid to act as replacements for the recently deceased – going into their homes, impersonating them, getting uncomfortably intimate with the bereaved. It's part therapy, part theatre, with more than a hint of prostitution.



ONLY GOD FORGIVES – Tuesday 09 May, 8.30pm



Following the international hit Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn (who won the 2009 Sydney Film Prize with Bronson) reunites with Ryan Gosling for this brutal story of rage, betrayal and redemption. Set almost entirely in a neon-lit Bangkok at night, each frame in this dazzling, muscular film, which was shot by Larry Smith (Bronson, Eyes Wide Shut), is a carefully composed work of art. Gosling, in a restrained and complex performance, plays Julian, an American who runs a Thai boxing club in Bangkok and who is clearly involved in the criminal underworld. When Julian's brother Billy is murdered, their mother Jenna (Kristin Scott Thomas) – the dangerous head of a powerful criminal organisation – arrives in Bangkok to collect her son's corpse. She also dispatches Julian to find his brother's killers, which pits him against the 'Angel of Vengeance', a terrifying cop called Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) who is determined to restore order, and unafraid to use his sword to do so.





TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT – Tuesday 16 May, 8.30pm



The Dardenne brothers have won the Palme d'Or twice: for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005). Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose, The Dark Knight Rises) is wonderful as Sandra, a woman in a precarious position. Her employer at a factory has given her colleagues a stark choice – to either receive a bonus or have Sandra return to work after a leave of absence. An initial ballot is not promising. The employer agrees to another vote, leaving Sandra one weekend to convince her colleagues to let her keep her job. Sandra visits them one by one to make her case. With this intriguing premise, the Dardennes fashion a very special film. Without resorting to sentiment, the film is filled with emotion.


ARABIAN NIGHTS VOL I (Tuesday 23 May, 6.00pm) VOL II (Tuesday 23 May, 8.45pm) VOL III (Wednesday 24 May, 8.30pm)



Ambitious, indignant and filled with offbeat humour, Miguel Gomes' extraordinary new film draws on the structure of 'Arabian Nights' to create a vivid portrait of Portugal today. Following Tabu (SFF 2012), Gomes was anguished by the austerity measures imposed on his homeland and commissioned journalists to gather true stories from all over the country that were then fictionalised. The outcome is a heady blend of the surreal and the all too real, told in a series of thrilling segments.



AQUARIUS – Tuesday 30 May, 8.30pm

Neighbouring Sounds, Kleber Mendonça Filho's extraordinary examination of race, class and fear in Recife, Brazil appeared in the SFF Official Competition in 2012. In Aquarius, selected for the Competition in Cannes, Mendonça returns to his native Recife, again telling a story of great ambition and scope. This time he hones in on an unforgettable protagonist Clara, played brilliantly by the incomparable Sonia Braga (Kiss of the Spider Woman). 65-year-old Clara is a fiercely independent and intelligent retired music critic and the last resident of the seaside Aquarius building. Every other apartment has been acquired by a development company with plans for the site. Clara politely refuses to sell, but the requests from the company become increasingly aggressive. What follows is an escalating battle between Clara and the firm. In Clara, Mendonça has created a remarkable character for whom we feel great concern and affection. The film's strength is in the way her life is conveyed in its fullness – her intellectual, family and sex lives are all explored. Through Clara, Mendonça masterfully reflects on an entire society in this powerful and complex film



Buy your tickets at http://ourgoldenage.com.au/

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!date 04/04/2017 -- 30/05/2017
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