Film
Highlights of the 72nd Sydney Film Festival include Alex Ross Perry’s fascinating tribute to video stores as well as a plethora of films about small-town ritual. By Anthony Carew.
Encountering the sublime at Sydney Film Festival
The 72nd Sydney Film Festival screens 201 films from across the globe, which means there’s no singular curatorial principle at play: it’s more a broad survey of contemporary cinema. Any recurring themes or connections a viewer makes depends on what they see. This year it’s headlined by a career retrospective from the persecuted Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, from his child-friendly early parables, his mid-career experiments made under house arrest, to his new Palme d’Or-winner, It Was Just an Accident.
Films about films always play well at festivals, and Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven is a sure SFF stand-out. This three-hour essay movie begins with a scene from Michael Almereyda’s largely forgotten 2000 modernisation of Hamlet. Here we see a young Ethan Hawke delivering the “to be or not to be” soliloquy while wandering the cavernous aisles of a turn-of-the-century Blockbuster video store.
There’s added resonance and humour in the fact that his daughter, Maya Hawke, is narrating these opening sequences. She will later be seen in scenes from Stranger Things, in which her character – as a beacon of that show’s ’80s-ness – gets a job at a video store.
The opening narration may not rise to the level of Shakespeare, but it’s just as philosophical. “The video store is a place where people pass from one condition to another,” says the younger Hawke, placing Hamlet in a space of “hope and anxiety about the future”. It’s a comic remnant of cinematic yore (did Hamlet ever watch Deep Impact?) and an exemplar of how video stores, as nascent repositories of movie history, once seemed the site of endless possibilities and weighty choices.
To see them on-screen now is to gaze into the past: to witness how people once lived, how they consumed and regarded these spaces. They are time capsules within time capsules. Seen from our position in the future, video rental stores are like haunted archaeological sites.
Perry’s PhD of a movie, built from fair-use clips of film and television across four decades of screen history, openly cites its sources. Videoheaven was itself a decade in the making: Perry was inspired by Daniel Herbert’s 2014 book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store. By charting the shifting representations of video stores, Perry reveals changing perspectives on cinema itself and larger social trends toward corporate consolidation and individual consumerism.
The New York filmmaker was famously a long-term employee at the iconic Kim’s Video Underground, which is surely why, in Videoheaven, he pushes back on one of the most persistent clichés of video store dramatisation: the obnoxious, condescending, often socially maladroit clerk. Sure enough, Clerks is in here, along with everything from The Fisher King to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. It features no-budget curios, exploitation pics, a host of rom-coms. There are many scenes from iconic TV shows of the era – Frasier, Seinfeld, Friends, Gilmore Girls – which are less self-reflexive commentaries on cinema than interrogations of the sociality of these public spaces.
The most resonant and temporally strange moments are sequences from the 2007 Will Smith blockbuster I Am Legend, where its post-apocalyptic, post-human landscape includes scenes set in a video store. This dark vision of a depopulated future arrived at the cultural moment in which the business model of the rental video store was heading into a death spiral. This strange dissonance of past and future, video within movie, perfectly illustrates Videoheaven’s complex thesis.
Across as much of the festival program as I’ve been able to cram into my brain, I’ve noted a confluence of films about small-town ritual and belief, often showing them in conflict with countervailing forces of modern life. A number of these exist as hybrid pictures, nestled in the intersection between documentary and fiction.
Silent Observers, a portrait of superstition and how humans project onto animals, was made in collaboration with Bulgarian villagers. The Wolves Always Come at Night, the latest film from the impressive Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady, works with a Mongolian couple moving from their rural home to the city. The experimental Gods of Stone playfully observes a slowly vanishing community on the Spanish/Portuguese border. Ancestral Visions of the Future is a cine-memoir recounting Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s increasingly urban life, largely set against imagery from the remote mountains of Lesotho.
These themes are dramatised in another festival stand-out, Harvest. Adapting Jim Crace’s 2013 novel of the same name, director Athina Rachel Tsangari creates a portrait of traditional rural life colliding with the encroaching power of the state. When villagers learn that outside forces with a claim to their land wish to turn a public common into private property, it’s so destabilising to their sense of community and tradition that the nameless idyll destroys itself from the inside, rent asunder by suspicion and superstition.
This narrative evokes the shift of the English countryside from a loose assembly of lords and manors to an accountant’s system of private ownership, increasing industrialisation and large-scale agriculture. But it’s told less as history lesson and more as fable, a storybook nightmare floating outside specific time and place.
Harvest marks both a change of pace and a long-awaited return for Tsangari, whose previous two films, 2010’s Attenberg and 2015’s Chevalier, were definitive works of the Greek Weird Wave. Shooting on 16mm with director of photography Sean Price Williams – a hero of the American indie scene who has worked often with Perry – Tsangari renders the muddy terrain of village life with aplomb. Her dirty, dank mise en scène offers both an honest take on environmental cinema and a corrective to antiseptic period dramas.
It opens with scenes featuring the always game Caleb Landry Jones as lead character Walter, who is licking, biting and fondling the natural environment: local love for the landscape – including its hallucinogenic mushrooms – made literal. This instantly demonstrates that Harvest, for all its grimy realism, is a film unafraid of lyrical flourish. Crace is uninterested in historical accuracy and fidelity, and on-screen that intersects with the classic belief of Werner Herzog – whose Heart of Glass is a sure spiritual predecessor to Harvest – of pursuing not the “accountant’s truth” but the “ecstatic truth”.
This is best seen early in Harvest with the ill-omened arrival of a map-maker who comes to codify the land, preparing it to be a place of progress and industry. He shows Walter a map, and Walter initially fails to grasp how lines on a page can represent wild land. Slowly the correlation clicks and in response the camera rises from the ground until it floats overhead, cloudlike, to a view that invokes both maps and gods.
It’s one of my favourite shots this year, conveying a complex idea with simplicity and beauty. Summoning the sublime as it depicts a radical shift in mind, it’s a gorgeous reminder of cinema’s power to capture and to change perspectives, both on-screen and off.
The Sydney Film Festival continues until June 15.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "Ghosts of the past".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
