The Sydney Film Festival will revisit one of Australia’s most iconic live music moments with a documentary on the Summersault Festival.
Originally premiering at Sundance, The Best Summer is built from archival footage shot from the tour and captures backstage moments and performances from bands including Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth and Foo Fighters.
The official description for the film reads: “An infectiously fun tour diary, The Best Summer unearths a treasure trove of never-before-seen footage from one of the most stacked festival lineups ever to grace Australian shores. Dusting off tapes recovered from her garage while fleeing the recent Malibu fires, director Tamra Davis (Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, SFF 2010; Billy Madison) pieces together an electric time capsule of ’90s alternative music legends at the peak of their youthful powers. Featuring candid, frequently hilarious interviews with the likes of Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Kim Deal, Beck, Dave Grohl and Kathleen Hanna, alongside raucous on-stage antics, it’s an all-access pass to a momentous moment in Australian music history.”
Headlined by the Beastie Boys, Summersault toured Australia in the summer of 1995/1996. Despite the positive reviews to the event and its inaugural lineup, the festival never returned.
The 73rd Sydney Film Festival will take place from June 3rd-14th, with a 200+ strong program. While the full program will be announced in May, the festival has shared a sneak peek with 13 daring new films set to screen.
Australian stories lead the charge with urgent and intimate perspectives. Selina Miles’ “Silenced” follows Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson and survivors including Brittany Higgins and Amber Heard, examining defamation law in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Ian Darling’s (“The Final Quarter, SFF 2019) “The Valley” crafts a quietly immersive portrait of life in Kangaroo Valley, capturing the rhythms, labour and traditions that sustain a rural community.
Star-led international features include “Dead Man’s Wire,” directed by Gus Van Sant (“Milk”), featuring Bill Skarsgård, Australia’s own Dacre Montgomery and Al Pacino. It recounts the infamous 1977 hostage standoff broadcast live across America. Meanwhile, documentary “Broken English” reflects on the life and legacy of Marianne Faithfull, starring Tilda Swinton and George MacKay, from the makers of “20,000 Days on Earth” (SFF 2014).
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Ildikó Enyedi’s “Silent Friend,” winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, will also screen, starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Léa Seydoux in a story spanning three generations connected by a mighty ginkgo tree. As will Ulrike Ottinger’s “The Blood Countess”, starring Isabelle Huppert and written by Elfriede Jelinek (“The Piano Teacher”), reimagines vampire mythology in a visually opulent tale, and “Erupcja,” in which Pete Ohs follows a couple’s getaway to Warsaw that begins to unravel, starring musician Charli XCX in a lead role.
İlker Çatak’s “Yellow Letters,” winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, will also screen at the festival. It follows a family’s descent into turmoil after a simple act of disobedience triggers authoritarian persecution in Türkiye. Rafael Manuel’s Sundance award-winning debut feature “Filipiñana,” which follows a teenage tee-girl at an elite Manila golf course, unveiling the class divisions and violence beneath its pristine surface, is also on the program. As is Marwan Hamed’s “El Sett,” which brings the life of legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum to the screen in a lavish and epic telling, tracing her rise to become one of the most influential voices in the Arab world.
The festival will also feature innovative approaches to storytelling that explore memory, technology and speculative futures, including Damien Hauser’s “Memory of Princess Mumbi,” an indie that dazzled audiences across the festival circuit. It imagines a future African kingdom shaped by the tension between artificial intelligence and tradition. Meanwhile, Firouzeh Khosrovani’s “Past Future Continuous,” an International Documentary Festival Amsterdam award-winner, follows a woman who fled Iran decades ago reconnect by watching her ageing parents via cameras in their Tehran home.
Nashen Moodley, Sydney Film Festival Director, said: “Prize winners from Berlinale and Sundance, an immersive World Premiere from Australia, Isabelle Huppert as a vampire who’s as fabulous as they come, and more – we wanted to offer a glimpse of the distinctive voices from across the globe coming to SFF.”
The full Sydney Film Festival program will be announced on Wednesday, May 6th. Tickets to specific sessions will go on sale at the same time. For now, flexipasses and subscriptions are on sale – see here for details.
