Film festivals are like when you sit down at a restaurant and let the chef choose the dishes for you. You’re not sure what you’ll get. Trepidation can seep into your excitement and poison it, ruining its taste. I’m here to neutralise the trepidation so you may enjoy the excitement unmolested, at least regarding the 2025 Adelaide Independent Film Festival that will be held at the Capri cinema on October 18.
I’ve been fortunate enough to know the AIFF’s director Tom Kerby through volunteering at the Capri (the old art deco cinema is staffed entirely by volunteers) and to have had a relationship with the AIFF since it began in 2023 and I was completing a journalism internship and Kerby let me interview him for an article. The following year, he gave me access to some of the Festival’s films to review them ahead of the Festival and help stir up buzz about the Festival. He’s given me the same privilege this year, and thanks to his confidence in me, I can give you a sneak peak of what will show at the AIFF 2025. You can get a sense of what you’ll be signing up for if you buy a ticket for the Festival and hopefully that makes you less afraid to buy one and inspires in you an urge to go and see the films I’m about to describe to you and all the others that’ll appear in the Festival. I didn’t love all the films I saw. I didn’t even like them all. I didn’t expect to. There were some I hated and some I loved, but I expected that. I’d be very suspicious of a film festival if I loved or liked all the films. I’d think something was up with the judges. Part of the fun of a film festival, and getting the chef to order your dishes for you, is that you’ll get a bit of everything.
So, here’s a slice of what’s on offer at AIFF 2025.
The Line We Walk
Philosopher George Berkley becomes a 70s Aussie copper in this short drama film directed by Fletcher Turale. Not literally, but you’ll be wondering if all the cops in this film set in 1977 Australia studied the same philosophy degree while members of the same amateur theatre troupe. Leo played by David Callan is being investigated for beating a suspect to near-death and social services are investigating if to remove his daughter from his custody. He mulls his double-predicament over with his therapist, partner, superior and the social worker running point on his custody case but he does it in a tangled web of navel-gazing philosophising, mixed metaphors and cliches. Some are so clumsy they actually made me laugh and I had to write them down. “I don’t want you blowing up over something that will inevitably blow over,” police Commissioner Torrens, played by Peter Orchard, tells Leo. “This isn’t a speed bump it’s a fork in the road,” Leo tells the Commissioner before capping it off by declaring priest-like that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Just what does this all have to do with the investigation and custody of his daughter? Turale avoids going into specifics about either procedure. The plot’s so vague you begin to suspect Turale made a cop film without knowing anything about how cop’s work or social services for that matter. Any time he tries to get specific, he messes up and just makes the film look implausible. Leo’s therapist, played by Aimee McQueen, calls the suspect he beat up a “perp” (a piece of American cop lingo foreign to Australian coppers) and takes a swipe at him for “beating [the] perp into a bloody pulp.” I dare you to go and find a therapist who would use those words with a patient, even in the 70s. When you’re not laughing at how cops speak in The Line We Walk, you’ll be groaning at how little effort Turale seems to have exerted to make his film believable.
Cats
No, this isn’t an unofficial adaption of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. Directed by Danilo Stanimirović, Cats is meant to be one of those sweet, touching films about a lonely kid finding a kitten and then nursing it in secret from his neglectful parents. Except, you half expect it to turn into a kitty-slasher horror film at any moment. Misa, played by Sergej Totic, is living in Berlin with his distant parents. He finds a kitten in his flat block’s courtyard and takes the kitten in, hiding the kitten under the stairs and bringing it milk. You can believe he’d do this. His parents are seen so fleetingly they never appear a present much less a loving presence in his life, but Totic handles the cat so roughly, dragging it by the collar from the box he keeps it in, pushing its face down into the saucer of milk he’s set out for it, and stroking it suspiciously hard around the neck, that he seems ready, like some young Norman Bates or Ted Bundy, to start suffocating or drowning it at any moment. You might have heard some people in the film business say “I don’t work with children or animals.” Given how poor he seems at directing both, Stanimirović may want to take that up.
Sisters
This is a good horror film that never happens. Sisters Jacqui (Jessica Sofarnos) and Leia (Isabelle Ford) are staying together in their recently-departed mum’s house and going through their mum’s stuff and packing the place up before they sell it. Director Luke Neher gets real close to the sisters. There are few if any wide shots in the film. Even when Jacqui goes for a run, Neher frames her in a close mid shot that makes her take up most of the frame and cuts out most of the street around her. When she’s inside the house with Leia, Neher favours extreme close ups of both sisters’ faces. It’s thrillingly claustrophobic, like there’s some demon in the house or some madness in the air pressing in on the sisters and crushing and/or suffocating them. You get the same tension you do in an Edgar Allan Poe story that there’s something horrifying just waiting to happen. It’s not just due to Neher’s direction. A lot of it rides on the performances of Sofarnos and Ford. They’re an ideal duo for a domestic horror film. Ford’s got a bouncy extroversion to her manner while Sofarnos is much more restrained. It shows in every inch of them. Their body language is contrastingly liquid and rigid and while Ford’s eyes are a party girl’s eyes filled to the brim with energy Sofarnos’ are much more subdued and quiet. Much like with Ralph Fiennes and Matthias Schoenaerts in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, they’re so different you expect them to eventually come to blows, potentially literally and murderously. Each of them is also eery in their own way. Ford reminds me a lot of Carole Baker. She can seem fun and exuberant and sweet, but if she turns her head the right way her smile can look menacing rather than happy. You wonder if murderous thoughts are skipping around inside her head. Meanwhile, Sofarnos is so restrained and quiet, almost mute, that you wonder what she’s thinking and feeling and why she doesn’t let it out. She’s the quiet one whose silence could conceal a killer. Eventually though, you become disillusioned by the film’s lack of jump scares and as you watch the sisters scream with pillows on their faces (what’s that about?), jog and eat dinner.
Dusty
This heart-warming comedy takes a while to become heart-warming but it’s worth it when it does and it’s an outrageous gut-burster while you’re waiting for the scenes that will make you cry. And they will make you cry. Directed by Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Dusty can at times seem like it was made as a vehicle for its star Travis Jeffery, but what a vehicle! It’s a hit pink Ferrari. Taylor is one of only two characters in the film and he dominates almost every scene. He plays Dustin (‘Dusty’ to his friends - the names alone make you laugh at their comedic irony) who shoots about his house all day snorting cocaine and downing can after can of beer after his best friend Ashley, played by Shannon Ryan, dies of cancer. It sounds boring but it’s not thanks to Taylor. He’s got an adorable, chimp-like face (you won’t be surprised when you read his bio and find he was in Kingdom of the Planet of The Apes) that’ll remind you of Jim Carrey, Dick York and Rowdy McDowall and an ecstatic manner. He talks like a potato machine gun and dashes about the place like a man unmolested by gravity. There’s a slap-and-dash, party-til-you-drop buzz dancing about in his eyes and on his tongue. It’s a joy just to watch him getting high, but also to see him crash when his grief over Ashley’s death finally catches up to him. Taylor’s cheeks and eyes become so sunken. It’s like he’s caving in on himself. You feel he’s sinking deeper and deeper into despair at losing his best friend but he’ll never stop sinking. Taylor is one of those rare actors who can look hilariously ridiculous one moment and then genuinely, dramatically heartbroken the next and make it believable. Even if all the other films I got a sneak peak of were rubbish (which they definitely were not) I’d go to AIFF 2025 just to see him.