Tuesday 27 February, 2007

Adelaide Film Festival

This weekend we went to Adelaide for the Film Festival. Here is the view from our hotel window. And here we are all dressed up for the Australian premiere of our friend Tony's film, The Home Song Stories. The World Premiere was at the Berlin Festival. It's a beautiful film about a Chinese family living in Melbourne in the early Seventies. It is based on Tony's life which makes it harrowing at times. It is hard to think of your friends going through what he went through. It was very exciting to be a part of the big night. I think the film is coming out in the middle of the year and I'll write a more detailed review of the film closer to the time. When it comes out, you must see it. Just to make sure we didn't get too happy, we spent the next day at a Russian film called Blockade, made from archival footage of the Siege of Leningrad with no contemporary voice over. Then we went to The Tenth Day, a work in progress based on the plane crash in the Andes in 1972 in which the survivors ate the people killed in the crash. It was 72 days before they were rescued. It was pretty darned riveting, I have to say. Unfortunately I did not get to see the documentary on Norma Khouri by Anna Broinowski: 'HOAX author Norma Khouri failed to show for the premiere of a film about her life at the Adelaide Film Festival last night. But her presence was felt after she blitzed reporters with emails rejecting central arguments in the documentary, in which she presents herself as confused, abused and highly amused by all the attention.'