The Melbourne International Film Festival has existed in many forms for me over the years. There was the tentative first year in 2014, when I saw only four films. There was the late-teens peak when I saw as many as 13. There were the COVID years, when MIFF existed purely in streaming form. And there was the year in 2022 when I was out of the country for the entirety of the theatrical screenings, but got back in time for the streaming portion.
This year, I'm going out of the country again, but not until the last weekend. So the defining trait of this year's may be that I'm seeing all of my film's within the first week of the festival, jamming in seven films in seven days on four nights, spaced out a night apart from each other, beginning tonight.
In theory, I could keep seeing films right up until the night before we leave on August 22nd. But my wife would not like that.
That's no shade on her. We are going to Europe for six weeks, and the last week before we leave is a sacred time during which we must do nothing but fret about the enormity of the undertaking ahead of us.
Okay that sounds like I am throwing her under the bus again. But I get it. If I'm out on the town in the days leading up to our departure, she will inevitably have to do tasks herself that I should be helping with.
As it turns out it doesn't matter, as there isn't all that much I want to see in this year's festival anyway, and nothing that I'm not able to see because of the time it's playing.
It's been a pattern with MIFF, or maybe just with me. Am I less in-the-know about new films coming out? Maybe a little. I'm less of a movie forward thinker than I used to be.
But you've probably heard me wax nostalgic specifically about the year 2016, when two directors I loved (Asghar Farhadi and Cristian Mungiu) had new films playing, and I saw my favorite film of the year in Toni Erdmann. Perhaps especially important in my nostalgia is that these were all foreign language films, and in recent years, the "international" portion of the Melbourne International Film Festival has fallen off a bit, simply because I'm either not seeing these names to the same extent, or I'm seeing names but they don't mean anything to me.
I think there was a sweet spot in our larger cinematic landscape, about a decade ago, when foreign directors achieved a visibility such that we knew their names, and their films were also distributed with a prominence that made them a big part of the general discussion among cinephiles.
I'm just not seeing that to the same extent. I pride myself on the fact that I have periodically named a foreign language film my #1 of the year -- only five times overall, but still -- but it's now been since 2019, and I fret about the likelihood of it happening again any time soon, due to a combination of the relative paucity of these name directors and the likelihood of getting their films within the necessary year to rank them.
It's not my biggest gap without a foreign language film as my #1. There were 12 years between naming Run Lola Run my #1 of 1999 (despite a 1998 German release) and naming A Separation my #1 of 2011. In fact, coincidentally, you could pack my entire MIFF career, consisting of more than a hundred films (see this post), into that gap.
But A Separation kicked off a period of prosperity with #1 foreign language films, as it happened again in 2013, in 2016 and in 2019. This also coincides with my time in Australia and my time going to MIFF, and MIFF once demonstrably contributed in that I wouldn't have seen Toni Erdmann in time if not for the festival. (MIFF gave me another #1, First Reformed, in 2018, but they only speak English in that one.)
I'm getting a little off track of the original point of the post.
Which is: Tonight it all starts, and I'm seeing seven films that are all slightly above shrug-worthy in my anticipation for seeing them. It is what it is.
However, I will say that three of them are foreign language films, if I remember correctly, starting with the first one tonight. I don't see a future #1 in any of them, but you never know.
I mean, that's why you watch the movies, right?
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