SHORT FILM SESSION: REALITY BITES #1

SHORT FILM SESSION #1 A program of engaging, reallife narratives in short bitesized pieces, Reality Bites presents the year’s very best documentary shorts. From cinema verité, to essay films, animations and ob-docs, this package presents a hardhitting dose of non-fiction shorts spanning the globe. At a time when truth is so often stranger than fiction, these films are not to be missed.

CINEMA RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME

Dir. Rachel Wolther | 5 mins | USA | Documentary | AUS Premiere | 2020 Catch a movie with film buff Caroline Golum, as she shares her thoughts on the best places to see weird movies in New York City and the state of cinema itself. We accompany Caroline to three movie screenings over the course of a week: a new indie at Anthology Film Archives, a matinee double-feature of 1920’s comedies at MOMA, and a late night 1970’s Italian horror film at The Quad. These scenes are intercut with an interview with Caroline at her apartment in Brooklyn, which is covered in vintage movie paraphernalia.

DIEORAMA

Dir. Kevin Staake | 10 mins | USA | Documentary | AUS Premiere | 2019 Abigail Goldman spends her work days as an investigator for a public defender’s office in Washington state, helping people who are seriously in trouble—which can mean hours of staring at grisly pictures of crime scenes, visiting morgues, even observing autopsies. By night, she dreams up gruesome events, which she then turns into tiny, precise dioramas. Rife with scenes of imminent death and brutal dismemberment, the fruits of Goldman’s painstaking labor would be adorable … if they weren’t so disturbing. In this new documentary short, we follow along as Goldman brings her miniature worlds of murder and mayhem to life with tweezers, paint, and resin, and meet the people who just can’t get enough of her twisted visions—where the final touch is always, in the artist’s words, “two or three brushstrokes of red paint.”

JUST THAT TIME OF THE MONTH

Dir. Tess McArthur-Dowty | 7 mins | Australia | Documentary | AUS Premiere | 2019 In this visceral impressionistic film the viewer is invited into the director’s world as she experiences a menstrual cycle - from food cravings, to anxiety, to physical pain. Set almost entirely in the director’s bedroom, Just that time of the month uses a series of visceral visual metaphors to share the experience of having a period.

LIMINALITY & COMMUNITAS

Dir. Laura Rantanen | 10 mins | Finland | Documentary | AUS Premiere | 2018 After the sunset, a man wanders between the edges of the highways and freeways gathering edible dead animals hit by a car. A one night journey during where the temporal and eternal meet, this film investigates the border between life and death and the edges of the manmade world.

MODERN WHORE

Dir. Nicole Bazuin | 11 mins | Canada | Documentary| AUS Premiere | 2019 University student by day, escort by night, Andrea Werhun led a secret life under the alias “Mary Ann.” To her horror, Andrea discovers outrageous online reviews of Mary Ann’s sexual performance written by self-proclaimed “hobbyists.” In this hybrid documentary, hobbyist and escort perspectives collide with hilarious and revealing results. And when the sex work narrative is controlled by johns, there are darker consequences than just a bad review.

PATTY ARE YOU BRINGING WEED IN FROM JAMAICA?

Dir. Matthew Salton | 9 mins | USA | Doco/ Animation | AUS Premiere | 2019 In 1968, Patty a flight attendant, realised she could smuggle strong weed in from Jamaica with relative ease. She is 77 years old now, and this is her version of what happened.

STRANGER/THINGS

Dir. Philip Brubaker | 10 mins | USA | Documentary | Sydney Premiere | 2019 Go behind-the-scenes for the tale of Wim Wenders’ The State of Things and how an illfated collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola led to the blossoming of Jim Jarmusch’s breakthrough, Stranger Than Paradise. The juxtaposition of the two films leads to a larger meditation on stylistic and thematic unity, and

how we watch films and the way art imitates life.

THE DEEPEST HOLE

Dir. Matt McCormick | 12 mins | COUNTRY | Doco/Experimental | AUS Premiere | 2020 It’s common knowledge the USA and the Soviet Union have competed to win Space, Arms and the Cold War. Few know that they also faced off to see who could dig the deepest hole. It is particularly surprising that one of the countries may have also discovered Hell in the process.

THE WANKER

Dir. Jan Soldat | 12 mins | Austria/Germany | Documentary | World Premiere | 2020 While waiting for his inseminators, the Viennese wanker shares his sexual fantasies and his honour of being the biggest cumwhore of Vienna. When the doorbell rings, the wanker doesn’t open. The computer screen and the camera of the filmmaker is in this film, a reflecting mirror of how fantasy and reality, desire and memory become one.