MIFF: Last firsts

It’s been a MIFF of firsts for me, even though it’s my fifth MIFF.

I closed the festival with three firsts on Wednesday:

1) My first time seeing a MIFF movie on a weekday afternoon.

2) My first time reaching 12 total movies, my previous festival high having been 11.

3) First Reformed.

You might almost include a fourth first, as I watched my 12th and final film, First Reformed, with a mate. (Might as well use the local parlance.) That’s something I almost never do, but the “almost” is what keeps it from being a first. My friend Don Handsome was visiting us during MIFF in 2015, and we saw two films together, so just because I’d seen 32 straight films solo since then doesn’t mean it had never happened before.

But first, the first first.

As I’ve mentioned in other MIFF 2018 posts, you get three weekday afternoon movies for free on a ten-ticket minipass, as these sessions are always undersold due to it being business hours. This was the third minipass I’d either bought or earned through press credentials, and I’d yet to use one of these three additional passes.

Twenty eighteen was the time to change all that. I’d been planning to take off Wednesday afternoon from work to assist with childcare, something that’s much easier now given that I’m no longer a contractor and get all sorts of paid leave. (Government jobs, God bless 'em.) At the last minute that wasn’t needed anymore, but I’d already secured the time off so I didn’t feel like forfeiting it.

That left me redeeming a free afternoon ticket for Chris the Swiss, which would be the first in an eventual day-night double feature at the festival hub, the Forum on Flinders Street. It’s my favorite festival venue, in part because it’s a beautiful and ornate old theater, and in part because the downstairs is transformed into a festival lounge, where I’m always sure to grab a drink or a meal. But I hadn’t yet visited it in 2018, as my ten previous films were scattered between the other venues. I didn’t need to select Chris the Swiss to ensure a Forum visit, as First Reformed was scheduled for there later that evening. I actually picked it because was on my original shortlist for evening sessions, losing out in a numbers game.

And it was an important add to keep going an informal tradition I’ve developed in the past three years, ever since I’ve started going to double digit films. When I boosted my total from four movies in 2015 to 11 movies in 2016, I decided I now had the freedom to go outside the box a bit, which led to the selection of an animated zombie movie called Seoul Station, made by the same guy who directed the live action zombie movie Train to Busan. That was a big hit for me, so in 2017 I rolled the dice on My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, wanting to keep the outsider animation groove going. This didn’t work quite as well for me as Seoul Station, but I did enjoy it, and in 2017 I also saw a repertory screening of one of my favorite outsider animation films, Fantastic Planet.

Without Chris the Swiss the tradition would die, or at least take a year’s hiatus, so it was especially satisfying to squeeze it in. It also allowed me to make sure I had a female director among this year’s screenings, which felt important in our current cultural moment.

Anja Kofmel’s film uses a mixture of documentary interview footage and animation to investigate the 1991 death of her cousin, Chris Wurtenberg, a war correspondent who was entrenched with a paramilitary unit in Croatia. She interviews people who knew him, including family and other journalists, in the present day, and supplements the real footage with wonderful black-and-white animation that speculates on what might have happened to him based on the available facts. I thought it was a really engrossing combo that allowed for plenty of creative expressionism, elevating it above your “standard” documentary. It was a real win and I hope it reaches a much larger audience.

So a really good start to my afternoon – or, I should say, a really good second chapter of an afternoon that had started with lunch at this sushi place where you pick plates of sushi off a conveyer belt that goes by your seat, not unlike the baggage claim area at the airport. Believe me, it’s a lot more charming than it may sound.

The third chapter was worth talking about because having time off in the afternoon allowed me to replace my mobile phone. It had gotten to that phase where it would randomly say the battery was drained when there was still 40% left, and I was a week or two out of contract, so the timing was perfect and the store was not crowded.

The fourth chapter involved going to the State Library, where I wrote my review of the movie I’d seen the night before, Everybody Knows, which has still not posted but should soon.

A full day finally climaxed when I met my friend in the line outside the Forum for First Reformed. We’re both cinephiles and had discussed MIFF in the past, but this was the year we decided to line up our schedules and see something together. I’d limited our choices to something playing at the Forum, so we could grab dinner afterward in the lounge downstairs. He didn’t care which of the three choices I proposed, so I selected First Reformed, even though it’s been out since May in the U.S., and may actually already be available for rental through my American iTunes account. (When you’re seeing 12 movies essentially for free, you can “fritter away” one of your choices on something like this.)

But it was not frittered. There was no frittering.

I sat there, rapt, blown away by every single solitary second of this movie. For five minutes afterward I wondered what I thought of that ending. And then I decided I loved the ending too.

What could I say about First Reformed that you have not already heard somebody else persuasively argue over the last three months? Probably nothing, so I won’t even try. I had been planning to write a review of it, and I might still, though my editor has chipped in two reviews, so our eight in total more than justifies our receipt of the press credentials. Or maybe I’ll chew on it some more and write a full-length review whenever it finally does hit Australian theaters (I can’t believe there’s still no release date). There’s a lot of chewing a person could do. In fact, one of my other dense favorites so far of this year, BlacKkKlansman, leaves me with the feeling that I didn’t write half of what I could have said in the review. Maybe thinking about First Reformed longer will allow me to get out all of it in my allotted length.

Alas, my viewing companion was not as sold on it. His first words after the credits rolled were “There was a nugget of a good idea in that movie.” Needless to say it was an interesting debate over dinner. (I had the antipasto and a beer.) I suppose it’s that kind of movie.

And so closes another great MIFF, in particularly great fashion. Also, with four films in a 26-hour period, which is the same way I started this year's festival. 

I think I may write one more MIFF post this weekend, as a special way of celebrating my landmark fifth MIFF. But we’ll see how I go. I am a bit MIFFed out at this point, and in fact, expect to take a second straight night off from watching movies tonight. 

That’s pretty rare for me. I must be really exhausted.