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Melbourne International Film Festival 2021: Keeping The Dream Alive

Melbourne International Film Festival 2021: Keeping The Dream Alive

Melbourne International Film Festival 2021: Keeping The Dream Alive

Unfortunately, the 2021 Melbourne International Film Festival in-cinema showings were all cancelled due to COVID, however, MIFF wasn’t going to leave us hanging and instead offered a wide range of the festival’s titles on their MIFF Play platform. Here is a selection of the movies I saw this year, a year when I paradoxically found escape in the world of documentaries rather than fiction.

Come Back Anytime (John Daschbach)

Melbourne International Film Festival 2021: Keeping The Dream Alive
Come Back Anytime (2021) – source: Melbourne International Film Festival

The pandemic has shrunk our world, forcing us indoors and staring at the same four walls day after day. We can explore our neighborhoods to an extent, but the days of overseas travel and holidays are a long-ago concept and something to strive for in the future.

A movie like Come Back Anytime, from director John Daschbach, is like a holiday. It is the story of Bizentei, a ramen restaurant in Tokyo with a group of dedicated regulars who not only enjoy the excellent soup and noodles but also look up to the owner of the restaurant, Masamoto Ueda, as a mentor. The movie follows a year in the life of Bizentei and shows how the patrons are happy to spend their weekends with Ueda helping him with his gardening and harvesting yams up in the mountains.

Come Back Anytime will leave you wanting ramen, a trip to Japan, and the feeling of being surrounded by friends and makeshift families all looking after each other and sharing great food and a few beers.

Set! (Scott Gawlik)

Melbourne International Film Festival 2021: Keeping The Dream Alive
Set! (2021) – source: Melbourne International Film Festival

The Internet has given us access to subcultures we never thought existed or could exist. Others are dark, and some are simply sweet. And for so many of these subcultures, there is usually a documentary that exists about them.

Tickled, Pecking Order, King of Kong, etc. all deal with those people who have chosen a lifestyle or hobby that borders on the obsessive. Set!, from director Scott Gawlik, is another movie in that genre. As someone obsessed with subcultures, a movie about competitive table setting hits all of my pleasure centres. A hobby that at face value makes no sense? Check. Big personalities going for broke? Check. A sense that the filmmakers aren’t laughing at the subjects? Check. We don’t come to these movies looking for smugness and superiority and Set! never stoops to that. The table setters are left to tell their story and the viewer can make their own mind up about them.

It’s a fascinating glimpse into a whole new world and while you might not think you’re interested in table setting, this movie will prove you wrong.

Ablaze (Alec Morgan and Tiriki Onus)

Melbourne International Film Festival 2021: Keeping The Dream Alive
Ablaze (2021) – source: Melbourne International Film Festival

A movie every Australian should watch, Ablaze, from directors Alec Morgan and Tiriki Onus, follows opera singer, Tiriki Onus as he traces the origins of a movie made by his uncle, Indigenous rights activist, Billy Onus. As he goes scene by scene through the silent, mysterious movie Tiriki takes us through Onus’ life and the history of Indigenous Australians during the twentieth century.

That history is characterized by cruelty, racism, and the indefatigable spirit of a people who refuse to be made extinct, no matter how hard their colonizers try to destroy their language, culture, and bodies. Onus was at the forefront of the Indigenous rights movements all through his life and the movie he made touches on how that fight was fought.

Ablaze is a story about a man who lived a massive life in the service of others, and the legacy he left behind. It is a must-watch in a country that so often ignores the plight of the Indigenous in this country and a good lesson in fighting the good fight to the end.

Stray (Elizabeth Lo)

Melbourne International Film Festival 2021: Keeping The Dream Alive
Stray (2020) – source: Melbourne International Film Festival

2016’s Kedi tells the stories of some of the stray cats that call Istanbul home and the humans who care for them. It is a light-hearted look at the animals who own the city and how they live and survive. It presents the cats alongside the humans who have adopted them and who know their stories.

Stray follows their canine counterparts and is a much darker movie. Elizabeth Lo‘s camera stays at dog height throughout so the viewer follows the lives of some of Istanbul’s famous street dogs. It’s incredible to see the city from a dog’s perspective, weaving through legs on busy streets, relaxing in the city’s beautiful parks, and chasing some of the cats who catch their eye.

The darkness comes from the addition of the other “strays” trying to survive on Istanbul’s streets: a group of young Syrian refugees. The boys and the dogs navigate the city together and we see the care given to the dogs while the boys are left begging and sniffing glues wherever they can before eventually and inevitably being moved along.

Kedi and Stray make for an interesting double-feature. One is bright, cheerful, and depicts a romantic Istanbul, while the other shows us the animals and people who stay in the shadows and remain invisible to those wandering by.

The Witches of the Orient (Julien Faraut)

Melbourne International Film Festival 2021: Keeping The Dream Alive
The Witches of the Orient (2020) – source: Melbourne International Film Festival

French documentary The Witches of the Orient, from director Julien Faraut, is the story of a volleyball team from Japan who, during the early 1960s, whipped the ass of anyone who went up against them. They earned their racist and misogynist nickname from European journalists after they toured Eastern Europe, just whipping ass left and right. And after their initial concern for being associated with black magic, they took the name up themselves.

The movie has minimal narration outside of the stories from the surviving players and title cards from the filmmakers. Instead, the documentary is made up of scenes from the cartoons made about the team, and footage of their training drills from the 60s. This training footage, backed with electronic music from Portishead, Jason Lytle and K-Raw, has been cleaned up and looks as though it could have been filmed yesterday for how incredibly crisp it is.

This is one of those documentaries that does what historical documentaries should do: it takes a monumental achievement that the viewer might be too young to know about or that the Western media wouldn’t have much interest in, and gives it the presentation and love it deserves. If you had asked me before I pressed play what I thought of 60s volleyball I would have just shrugged, but when the credits were rolling, I was cheering on the Witches in the Olympics like it was happening live.

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