Inside the circle of friends

I saw a bunch of movies at Sydney Film Festival, several weeks ago. My favourite was probably The Circle (2000, Jafar Panahi) screening as part of a Panahi career retrospective. He's an Iranian director who has been persecuted, imprisoned, and forbidden to leave Iran at various times, and has won numerous film awards.

This movie is set over the span of one day, starting in a hospital maternity ward and ending in a prison cell, giving glimpses into the lives of women under the Islamic State regime. A grandmother laments the birth of a girl because it will mean her daughter (the baby's mother) is likely going to be divorced by her husband; a young woman newly out of prison tries to secure passage home; a woman tries to secure an abortion; and so on, through all the hours of the day. It's so skilfully directed and so naturalistically acted and shot, each storyline bleeding into the next so simply. Panahi was present at this screening and took questions after the movie (some much worse than others, as is the way with public Q&As).

I also had a great time, in a very different way, with Lesbian Space Princess (2025, Emma Hough Hobbs, Leela Varghese). Princess Saira of Clitopolis, a world entirely peopled by lesbians, must go on a quest to rescue her ex-girlfriend, who has been kidnapped and held hostage by Straight White Maliens. This is a silly, funny and very Australian animation with art in a style that reminded me of Adventure Time. The humour is mostly as obvious and silly as indicated by the names; and the other villain of the story, aside from the incels, is Saira's own lack of self-esteem.

There's some very knowing nods here - there is a "problematic (space) ship", the main character's magical girl moment is straight from Revolutionary Girl Utena, one of the other main character is from a "gay-pop" group who runs away from overwork, etc. This session was introduced at the film festival by the directors, who said "we are two nervous people, between us we made up one confident person who could direct this movie."

I liked The Mastermind (2025, Kelly Reichardt). Set in 1970s against the backdrop of the student protests against the Vietnam war, a struggling suburban dad decides to rob a museum of several artworks. He recruits a few people and so begins a rather terrible heist. This is a slow moving, understatedly funny movie, watching all of his schemes unravel in the most obvious ways.

And I liked Twinless (2024, James Sweeney) - when Roman's twin Rocky dies, he ends up at a grief counselling group where he meets Dennis, who has similarly lost his twin Dean. The two strike up a friendship, with Roman the gruff hockey loving straight guy from Idaho, and Dennis the urbane gay guy. Then the movie flashes back, and there's several very funny and/or devastating reveals. It's structurally interesting and the black humour made my neighbour physically cringe at times with second hand embarrassment.

And then there were 2 movies I straight up did not enjoy. Both were documentaries unfortunately lol.

Tokito (2024, Aki Mizutani) subtitled "The 540-Day Journey of a Culinary Maverick" is purportedly a documentary about chef Yoshinori Ishii, who opened a new restaurant in Japan in 2023 after many years living and working overseas. I say 'purportedly' because this is nothing more than a glossy advertisement. It is beautifully shot, gorgeously filmed, but it is just an ad.

The Shadow Scholars (2024, Eloise King) is a documentary about Oxford Professor Patricia Kingori's research into the world of "contract cheating", focusing on the booming trade in Kenyan writers selling their work to students in the global north. The subject is fascinating and I was so interested to hear from the Kenyan writers - these intelligent writers who are capable of doing the work on their own merit but the credit and qualifications go to the privileged students who can buy their labour, reinforcing global inequalities. However - it's a very clumsy and vague documentary that spends a lot of time on filler interstitials - my god, yet another panning shot of Oxford?