Transgression is a positive thing

From the political to the perverse, and the avant garde to the just plain bizarre, the fourth annual Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF) features an eclectic array of films designed to confront, tantalise and excite the discerning cinéaste. This year’s festival kicks off with the Australian premiere of South of the Border, the latest film by Oliver Stone (Platoon, JFK) which documents the filmmaker’s fact-finding 2009 trip through South America and explores US government coup attempts, CIA involvement in local politics, the economic interference of the International Monetary Fund, and the wild allegations about the leaders and their countries that pass for news in Rupert Murdoch’s mass media outlets.

South of the Border is a film designed to push all the right (or should that be left?) buttons, opening with a montage of tabloid gossip courtesy of Fox News before segueing into a series of intimate, one-on-one interviews with the heads of state of several South American nations, including Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Juan ‘Evo’ Morales, and Argentina’s charismatic Cristina Fernandez. Stone may not be the most impartial interviewer around, but as Mick LaSalle notes in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘if nobody else wants to do it, we have to take what we can get’.

Other highlights from this year’s SUFF program include the ‘shock-cinema performance art’ of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, the artfully assembled documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story, and the overwhelming Enter the Void by Gaspar Noé (Irreversible), which Melbourne critic Thomas Caldwell called ‘an astonishing and hallucinogenic cinematic experience’ after it’s recent screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Short film fans are equally well catered for at SUFF 2010, with a range of screenings ranging from twisted insights into the strange corners of daily life, in the documentary program ‘Reality Bites’, through to ‘Mother’s Milk’, a diverse and imaginative session of films made by talented female directors.

Stefan Popescu, who co-founded the festival with Katherine Berger, says SUFF was established in 2007 in part because of the gentrification of Sydney, and the corresponding loss of the city’s arthouse cinemas at that time.

“That was the time that gentrification was really hitting home, and all the little cinemas were closing down, so there weren’t too many places you could see more alternative films, stuff that wasn’t so commercially driven. Basically, knowing that we had a network that really liked weird, alternative and different films, we decided to get off our butts and do something about it,” Popescu laughs.

Unlike the Melbourne International Film Festival, which focuses almost exclusively on exploitation and genre filmmaking, SUFF casts its net wider, with its mission statement declaring that ‘The festival will only program unique, quality independent films that transgress the status quo and challenge the conservative conventions of filmmaking. The festival is devoted to renewing local interest in independent and experimental film as part of an international underground film culture and aims to change an engrained culture of cinematic complacency and revitalize an enthusiasm for cinema.’

This approach is reflected in the festival’s diverse program, Popescu says.

“We approach the program with a very open mind, in the sense that we include films that are potentially quite commercial, like Oliver Stone’s South of the Border, but at the same time we also showcase films that are quite out there like the ‘LSD Factory’ session for example, which I guess is at the opposite end of the scale. It’s almost gallery work; more experimental and avant garde.

“Really, the idea of the underground has always been about promoting difference, about finding or transcending stereotypes, and it’s the uniqueness of a work that makes it underground. Something that transgresses the rules, something that transgresses stereotypes. Transgression for us is certainly a positive thing,” Popescu concludes.

Sydney Underground Film Festival, 9 – 11 September 2010

www.suff.com.au