And maybe this is a good time to mention a disappointment I have about MIFF 2025, which is not MIFF 2025's fault.
The films I selected are entirely in cinemas that I already visit for other reasons.
My two favorite MIFF venues, The Capitol and The Forum, are both distinguished by their beautiful architecture, design, and old-world theatrical touches. I don't ever get to see movies in them if not for MIFF, so I try to hit both each year, and usually succeed.
This year, when I'd made my big spreadsheet, lined up good times against my other weekly obligations, and let the algorithm spit out what I'd see, the films were all at ACMI, Hoyts Melbourne Central or Cinema Kino, the cinema that's downstairs from where I used to work. And though I do miss working upstairs from a movie theater, and have not seen nearly as many movies at Kino lately, I've probably seen 100 movies there overall, so there's no novelty.
Hoyts? It's just a multiplex. It was a surprise when it got involved with MIFF at all a couple years ago, but now it's a central venue. (No pun intended.)
ACMI is the one that's a little bit different, but still not great. ACMI is The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which contains a free museum dedicated to lots of things related to, well, the moving image. Including a lot of movie stuff. It's a good public resource and it's great that it's free, but I liked it better before they reconfigured it about four years ago.
Anyway.
They do have theaters upstairs, but the theaters have all the charm of two giant lecture halls. They are like multiplex theaters in some respects, but more ... academic.
They are, however, a novelty within my current viewing habits, so I tried to embrace it.
I'd planned out a whole evening around ACMI. Between the very short 1001 Frames at 6 p.m. and the very short Death Does Not Exist at 9 p.m., I was going to have about 90 minutes to kill. I'd spend the first 45 or so reading. ACMI has these funky couches in the foyer that look pretty comfortable, and are raised up on landings, so you're kind of nestled up in there under the staircase above. A great place to make a dent in my book, which I hope to finish before my big trip next Friday. (I haven't told you about the big trip. I will.)
Then, although I certainly didn't need this long, I'd have 45 minutes at the festival hub, where the ads for Campari negronis I'd been watching before MIFF movies could finally get their outlet. I might even get to my seat early, rather than habitually almost-late as I have been doing.
Well the couch area was closed off. I guess the ACMI foyer is extricable from the theater portion upstairs, and on a Tuesday night, they didn't need to be playing host to 51-year-old men who wanted to read a book for 45 minutes. So that was out.
Then the festival hub was closed to a private party. This always happens with the festival hub. They tantalize you with its glamour and then they always close the velvet rope on you just when you really want to go.
The place playing backup duty to the festival hub was a pop-up bar, still glamorous but slightly less so, run by Penfolds, the wine maker. I should know. I had a glass of wine there Friday night. But it was only wine, and I wanted that negroni.
But ...
One of the MIFF staff suggested that he thought they did do cocktails there, but was easily dissuaded from his conviction when I insisted that they didn't. He was probably just being polite. Well of course he was right, as I noted walking by the place and seeing a guy with an empty negroni tumbler. Stupidly, I confirmed that he had indeed purchased it in the bar where he was sitting. He confirmed he had.
So I got my negroni. It was good.
And ...
Before that I walked up to San Churro Chocolateria, needing more steps by this point like I needed a hole in the head, and had a hot chocolate to drink with a significantly smaller amount of book reading. On a rainy night, it paired nicely with the early ramen dinner I'd had at my favorite ramen bar before the first movie.
And ...
The first movie I saw was my new favorite of the festival.
Chosen specifically because it was foreign -- and I suppose, even more specifically because it was Iranian, and I love Iranian movies -- was 1001 Frames. I'll give you the premise.
We see a montage of about a dozen Iranian actresses, whose stories are woven together throughout the narrative and move forward at the same pace, auditioning for the role of Scheherazade in an upcoming film. They're all nervous because the director they're auditioning for -- the only person in the room they're auditioning for -- is famous, his work beloved, though not necessarily his behaviour. There's a wariness in them beyond their nervousness.
This wariness is warranted. In each audition, which involves very little actual auditioning, his words are becoming uncomfortable, crossing lines, giving lie to the notion that they might be here for an actual job. His comments become unmistakeably lascivious, suggesting quid pro quos, and he becomes too physically intimate with them. Some think it's a test to see what sort of reaction he can elicit in them, which might say something about their fitness for the role, but others see it as the last director unworried about getting #metoo'd. And then he becomes threatening.
Did I mention we don't actually see him? We only hear his voice from the other side of the camera?
I don't want to tell you any more. I'll just say that the really wonderful thing shared by much Iranian cinema is that it contains layers of meaning. No, that's too pedestrian. It contains layers of reality, layers upon which to interpret what we're seeing.
I should tell you the director: Mehrnoush Alia. Never heard of him. But he shares an approach to cinema with such countrymen and cinematic luminaries Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. And that is most certainly a good thing.
I don't actually think it was shot in Iran. For one, it spends the entire time on a sound stage, which could be anywhere. For another, there were references to New York film commissions and the like in the credits. (I could look this up but I prefer the primary source evidence.) And I also happened to notice that Ramin Bahrani was thanked in the credits, and he's based purely in the U.S., to the extent that he's still making movies at all. (He made one in 2022 for Showtime. That's not that long ago. And I really liked The White Tiger in 2021.)
Anyway, the spirit of the unfortunately not yet dead Harvey Weinstein hangs over this thing big time, and you really feel for these poor, vulnerable women, who can be described as such even when they spit fire and defend themselves. Underneath we can see they are scared, and who wouldn't be.
After the hot chocolate and the negroni -- a less good pairing than the hot chocolate and the ramen -- it was this year's entry into my unofficial MIFF "outsider animation" category. That's right, every MIFF I try to see an animated movie made outside the animation mainstream, and I think my streak in this case is unbroken.
The movie is called Death Does Not Exist, and it's French. So that makes three of my five MIFF movies so far originating in other countries, which is not bad.
I won't really try to describe the animation style, because if you want to know the truth, I'm on the bus riding home from the movie as I write this, and my creativity for the day is pretty much exhausted. (Yes, buses are replacing trains on my route. Buses are always replacing trains on my route at night.) You can get some sense of it from the poster above.
The story is a fairly simple one, with room for a lot of dream logic and radical philosophizing in the middle. It's told from the perspective of Helene, a somewhat reluctant revolutionary who has signed up with five other friends to try to assassinate some corporate bigwig at his sylvan home. Their act is to be in the name of left-wing change, but at the crucial moment, of course some of them are overcome by the enormity of actually taking another person's life, to say nothing of the fact that they will then be on the run.
The attack of the compound is a total balls-up, and Helene flees. She then spends the rest of the movie wrestling with her conscience about whether she should have left them, even though by that point it was already hopeless. Her conscience takes the form of various figures who travel through the woods with her, some known and some unknown, and a contemplation of the Big Issues -- death among them -- comes to pass.
If the way I'm writing about Death Does Not Exist sounds a little dismissive, I did like the movie. But I also found my mind wandering at some points, and then increasingly more points. For a movie that was only 72 minutes long -- the same length as the dog horror movie I saw on Friday night, Good Boy, which also felt too long -- DDNE started trying my patience more than I wanted for a movie I knew I basically liked. So then that made me wonder how much I actually did like it.
When we were coming out of the theater I heard someone say that it was very earnest, and I think that was the problem. There are a lot of platitudes presented quite earnestly in this film, and it hasn't much of a sense of humor at all. Not that every film needs a sense of humor; this one probably doesn't. But the point is, you do get weighed down eventually by a film that takes itself a little too seriously, and this may have prevented DDNE from being more of an unqualified success, majestic as it is in parts.
And I'm glad I got my negroni now, because that's it for ACMI in 2025. I might be able to squeeze in another one between the two movies that close out the festival for me on Thursday night, which are (sadly) at Hoyts and Cinema Kino.
Even when you don't get to go to your favorite venues, though, it's still MIFF. And there's always the promise of excellent movies, two of which I've seen out of my five.
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