*** POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT ***
Each May, the Sydney Film Festival program
comes out and I trawl through it, circling films in pencil, making notes on
them, trying to work out which ones I do, don’t and wouldn’t mind seeing,
working out the eleven days of the festival around whatever else it is I’m
doing then. For the past few years, uni got in the way of fully enjoying it
properly (at all, in fact) so last year was my first year, and I thoroughly enjoyed
the seven films I saw (especially Joe Wright’s Hanna, along with the symphonic expanse of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood). This year, even though
there might’ve been a smaller selection of films that I was interested in, it
was – on the whole – another enjoyable experience.
My first film this year was the repeat
screening of the Opening Night film, Peter Templeman’s very-Sydney Not Suitable For Children
– the film, so the joke goes, whose title doubles as its classification. I’m
going to say straight off that it is one of the best films I’ve seen this year
so far, and definitely one of the best Australian films of recent years (along
with Leon Ford’s Griff The Invisible,
also starring Ryan Kwanten).
