There's still one room of the flat I won't let him into because I haven't cleared up the floor and there's probably lots of bits and pieces that he'll get caught up in. He's very good at finding Loose Things on the floor. Sunday afternoon was the first time I'd let him play unsupervised, and I came home to find him stopped in the middle of the floor, no where near his docking station. Not sure if he got lost and was too tired to find his way home or what..

Today I let him run around in the morning when I went to work, came home at lunch and found him sitting happily in his dock, full of fluff. So I set him off again after lunch, just to see how much more dust there was to pick up. And I came home to find he'd found a tissue, chewed it up and left bits of it All Around The Flat.

So I emptied his dust bin and told him to clean up Again while I did some food shopping before dinner. He did a pretty good job of picking up the tissue.. a few places he missed but the pieces were big enough that I could grab and bin them.

But enough gushing.

Practically.. they are a useful utility in keeping most floors clean. Won't work on deep pile carpets.. there's just not that much suck in it. You shouldn't have to do any follow up, you can just keep sending him out. Instead of vacuuming once a week (or.. every other month), the Roomba can do it a couple of times a week. It needs to be cleaned up a lot, especially if there's a lot of long hair everywhere, from a pet perhaps, or, say, a girl friend who recently moved out but used to shed long black hair on the carpet in every room -- there's a pet-hair version, you might want to look into that if you're serious about it. It's pretty easy to clean the brushes, but you don't wanna be pulling tightly wound hair out of the mechanism every time you turn it on.

It's still a good idea to have a second vacuum in the house. I've got mine set up permanently in a corner, it gets used to suck everything out of the Roomba's TINY dust bin.

Apparently my audience is bigger than one person (who, on average, was, last Thursday, in his black hat and jacket, lined up outside the new Apple store). And they want to know what else I saw, so, here:

The Square (Nash Edgerton/Australia) .. Joel Edgerton (Nash's brother) walked into the State Theatre in front of me, he didn't have a pass. I remember liking this film. Noir.

Hope (Stanislaw Mucha/Poland) Cool story.

The Band's Visit (Eran Kolirin/France, USA, Israel) Funny, charming.

About Water (Udo Maurer/Austria, Luxembourg) Three different stories about

various places on the planet affected by water (lack of, too much of,

redirection of). Fasinating, depressing.

The English Surgeon (Geoffrey Smith/United Kingdom) Documentary. Brain

surgeon. Humanitarian. Interesting.

I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster (Samuel Benchetrit/France) A cool, funny collection of ganster stories intersecting at a roadside cafe.

Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf/Iran) Very disturbing. Has

the look of a documentary shot on HD video, but it's a drama about a -- I'm

going to say -- five year old girl living in the hills of Afghanistan (I think)

where the Taliban (I'm pretty sure) destroyed those huge Buddha statues. She

wants to go to school, and spends a lot of the film trying to get there only

to be thwarted by older boys playing terrorist and/or soldier games. The

games. Are terrifying. I want to talk about the images from the end of this

film, but I'm not going to coz I don't wanna spoil it for anyone who might see

it. Someone see it, so I can talk to you about it.

Night And Day (San-soo Hong/South Korea) Korean runs away to Paris.

Attempts to hook up with the most attractive Korean he can find while he's

there, and while still calling his wife back home every night. I think I

missed what this was really about.

Girl Cut In Two (Claude Chabrol/France) A young TV weather girl, an

older author and a young playboy (who doesn't much like the author). There's

a bit of a love triangle. The first two thirds of the movie are, I think, supposed to mislead you into thinking you know what's going on, and the last third (in which everything pretty much falls apart for everyone) is there to point out what you missed. Interesting enough.

Sparrow (Johnnie To/China) Can't remember.. there was a bird.. and there

was a happy guy in a suit.. I think I liked this one too.

La Zona (Spain, Mexico) Nice. A gated community in Mexico trying to cover

up a crime. Solid story.

A Very British Gangster (Donal MacIntyre/United Kingdom) Documentary following a gangster and his followers around Manchester. Felt strange and uncomfortable.

The Last Continent (Jean Lemire/Canada) Another documentary about Antarctica. Loved this one.

Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz/France) Ponderous, too much talking, not enough happening. Got interesting when the protagonist starting losing his mind towards the end, but I'd given up way before then.

Egg (Semih Kaplanoglu/Turkey, Greece) Think I slept through bits of this. Never worked out why the egg was so important.

God Man Dog (Singing Chen/Taiwan) Intersecting stories in Taiwan. Okay.

The Cool School (Morgan Neville/USA) Doco about the art scene in LA in the '60s. I missed the start, wouldn't have minded missing entirely.

The Pope's Toilet (France, Brazil) This one might need a bit of an

explanation. The Pope is about to visit a small poor village in Brazil,

thousands of people are expected to attend from all over the country.

Fast thinking villages spend whatever they can find on food to sell to the

expected crowds. Our hero manages to keep his wife

and daughter fed by smuggling. Whatever the local shop owners need he brings across the border on his bicycle. He decides he can make his fortune by building a toilet and charging the expected crowds for its use. You can probably guess how it turns out. I enjoyed this.

Young@Heart (Stephen Walker/USA) A doco about a choir of senior

citizens singing rock'n'roll. Pure joy with a couple of tragedies thrown in. Got audience favourite documentary (for sessions at the State Theatre).

Helen (Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy/Ireland, United Kingdom) All the way

through this film I kept thinking of Elephant. I've never seen Elephant.

Tea & Sympathy we were supposed to get *Stranded: I've Come From The Plane

That Crashed In The Mountains* which I was really looking forward to (only

based on the name, I dunno if that was a doco or drama), but they needed to

shift around some of the Deborah Kerr films because of the projection system.

T&S is hard to take for the first half hour or so, but once you get over the

cringes it's not so bad. I could relate.

River Of No Return (Darlene Johnson/Australia) The story of one of the

actors in Ten Canoes. Cool.

Since we last saw our caped.. err, jacket wearing.. crusa.. film watcher.. he's watched some more films.

June 11th, a Wednesday, was sleepsville: My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin/Canada) I'm not sure if I would've had the same reaction to this film if the director hadn't told us before the film started that a) he hadn't done any research at all before starting on this documentary (I kept waiting for him to use the word Truthiness) and b) it's a very hypnotic film. I liked this, it felt a lot like The Saddest Music in the World which he also made (and I also slept through bits of). Maybe he didn't want me to feel betrayed when a women does a documentary a few year from now demonstrating some of the "facts" in this film to be untrue.

Then we had Foster Child (Brillante Mendoza/Philippines) which wasn't a documentary but felt a lot like one, very fly on the wall for most of the film. Didn't keep me awake. There were a few "Really?? That's what's happening?!" moments, but not enough.

And then The Sky, The Earth and the Rain (Jose Luis Torres LEiva/France, Germany, Chile). I can't remember what happened at all.. hmm.. nope.. the short blurb from the SFF web site didn't help.. the longer description from the programme didn't do it for me.. maybe I slept through the entire film? Was this the film people hissed at when the credits finally rolled?

Finally.. (long day) we saw La Corona (Amanda Micheli, Isabel Vega/USA) or, The Crown. About a beauty pageant in a Colombian women's prison. Saying that it was good enough to keep me awake isn't really high praise, but it is true.

Thursday was much better, Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa/The Netherlands, Japan, Hong Kong) is a film, on the surface, about a Japanese business man who loses his job and can't face telling his wife so wanders around Tokyo each day instead of going to work. Apparently that happens a lot. This was a beautiful film with a lot more going on than I'm going to write about, but it's too slow for me to recommend it to you.

The Song of Sparrows (Majid Majidi/Iran) was also just lovely, and I'm probably not going to recommend this one to you either.

Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient (Todd McCarthy/USA) was the last film of the day. A documentary about a man who apparently everyone in the film industry knows. Watch it to try to make out the name of the actress David Straton links nearly-libellously in a bleeped out portion of the film. Not a recommendation.

Friday was a day off. Much Grand Theft Auto IV was played (mostly the night before).

Saturday started with Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke/Mexico) this feels all quirky and arty.. it turns out it's very emotional but I didn't really feel what I knew I was supposed to be feeling.. so I'm not sure it worked. It was good tho. Again, too slow for a recommendation.

And ended with Stop Loss (Kimberly Peirce/USA). Okay.. what to say.. it's not a big explosive battle movie (but it'll feel like one for the first few minutes), it's not really an examination of most of the issues raised by the Iraq war, it's really just about one thing. Stop Loss. "not letting a military member separate or retire, once their required term of service is complete" I guess I wanted it to be about more. And I wasn't that happy with the ending. I'm going to hesitantly recommend this one.

Sunday (today!) started with the single most popular film of the festival (I assume, this was the first film I couldn't use the seat next to me to keep my bag off the floor) In Bruges (Martin McDonagh/Belgium, United Kingdom) Colin Farrel, Ralph Fiennes. Very funny gangster filum. Recommended.

And ended with Terror's Advocate (Barbet Schroeder/France). Densely packed documentary about Jacques Verges, a lawyer who has represented, amongst others, Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, and President Slobodan Milosevic (not in the film). I couldn't keep up with the details. Worth trying to if you've got a better brain than mine.

Only twenty-two films left to see.

Three Blind Mice (Matthew Newton/Australia) Watchable. Felt a bit umm.. acted. Think of it as what an Australian would do if they wanted to make A Few Good Men.

Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog/Australia) A film about the people in Antarctica, very few penguins.

In the City of Sylvia (Guerin/France, Spain) Imagine you're by yourself in a European city. You don't know anyone. You sit in cafes all day on your own watching people. Now film that. Surprisingly I didn't sleep through, and kinda enjoyed, this film. But I can't recommend it.

Lots of films since Thursday, lets see if they've all blurred together yet..

Friday..

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas/France, The Netherlands, Germany, Mexico) This is a Very Slow Film. So I slept through bits. And I don't think I missed much in this one either. The opening sequence is a sun-rise. Then it's a scene of a family having breakfast. Then, of a man (seen earlier having breakfast) crying. At this point, you start to see where this film is trying to take you. It doesn't take long to find out why he's upset.. I think most of the film is spent trying to get you to feel the same pain. The end was a bit mystical, but I didn't think that spoilt the film.

The Red Awn (Cai Shangjun/China) A man and his brother and his son and his brother's tractor (combine harvester?). Also, a bit slow. This was the first on-stage director Q&A we got, he explained the whole shoes on the side of the road thing. Made a lot of sense. I didn't mind this one.

Her Name is Sabine (Sandrine Bonnaire/France) This was probably the most emotional film I've seen so far in the festival. Also possibly angry. But don't just take my word for it, watch me say it to some guy in an alley way. What I mean't was, the story is tragic, Sabine has been autistic all her life, but as a young girl she was attractive, smart, capable of getting around, but after five years of institutionalisation she lost all of that. And her sister, the film maker, seemed, to me, to be angry at the doctors, the institution, the system, that took her sister away from her. And at herself, for not being there for her sister to stop it happening. The scene of Sabine watching a DVD of her trip as a young girl with her sister to New York is moving. And that other guy in the alley way was probably right, it was a bit long.

Saturday..

Quiet Chaos (Antonello Grimaldi/Italy) The first film I really liked. Meaning either this was a bit more accessible, simpler, easier to watch, or I'm starting to get into the mood of the festival. This is about a man whose wife has died, and he decides to wait for his daughter outside her school. Probably as much to reassure himself that he won't lose her too as to reassure her that she won't lose her father as well as her mother. It's kinda funny, a bit sad, and maybe slightly complex.. the relationship between him and his wife might not have been that strong (or maybe that's a failing of the film).

Of Time and the City (Terence Davies/United Kingdom) I would've preferred to attend the Q&A session for Quiet Chaos instead of seeing this one. But how can I know (since I don't read the blurbs, mostly not even the film names) before the sessions. It did have a few moments.

Just to explain, this year the festival has a selection of films "in competition." So far the first film of the day in the day-time subscription session has been a competition film. After the morning screenings, they hold a Q&A with the director (or, perhaps, whichever supporting actor turned up) at the lounge under the theatre DURING the next film. So far, I've picked watching the next film.

Sunday..

Rain of the Children (Vincent Ward/New Zealand) This was a mix of documentary and re-enactment. Telling a story I'd never heard told before, of Maori history during early white settlement, and in particular of the then 80 year old woman that the film maker had lived with in 1978 when making his first film (I'm assuming). This guy made The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey -- I loved that.

Fugitive Pieces (Jeremy Podeswa/Canada, Greece) This was really nice, based on the book of the same name. About a Jewish boy who escapes from Poland during WWII with the help of a Greek archaeologist, and becomes obsessed with the details of people who lived through the holocaust. Audience loved it. I loved it. The director does a lot of good TV stuff. Look him up.

Monday..

Hunger (Steve McQueen/United Kingdom) Best in-competition film so far. But, paradoxically left me a bit cold. This is about Bobby Sands' 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland.. and it's not pretty. I'm sure someone in the audience was dry-wretching during one of the less graphic scenes (I think it was of a guard sweeping up urine). The scene of the conversation between Bobby and the priest revealing that the strike will take place is an amazing bit of cinema.

Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings/UK) Loved this. Take your kids to see this when it comes out. And stay for the end of the credits.

And then, just coz they still had tickets left and I'd finally remembered one reason for seeing it as part of the festival:

Kung-Fu Panda (Awesome-ness) This was awesome.

The Festival is on again. Starting two days earlier than usual. And with more films in the subscriber programme than I can ever remember sitting through (I think it's 48 films for my money this year).

It started with...

Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh/United Kingdom) I was looking forward to this.. not sure if it lived up to the hype. Maybe a bit long. Started off really disliking the main character, but she'd kinda won me over by the end. It's not really a happy film.. but it is a film about a person who's happy.

There was a short film from Singapore that I thought was about a brother and sister skipping school, but I was wrong. And then Wonderful Town (Aditya Assarat/Thailand), a Very Slow film about a man who wants to get away from life in the city (Bangkok) and volunteers for a job supervising a construction (possibly a post-tsunami reconstruction) project in a village in the south. Not on the coast. I slept through bits of this, but, after talking to a woman as I left the theatre to get my four-minute between-film exercise, maybe I didn't miss that much. The film is slow to point out that life in the village is slow (didn't miss that point), the man has issues with his father (they didn't get along, not sure why), he ends up in a relationship with the maid from the hotel, the maids brother doesn't like the idea of someone from outside getting near his sister, and the kids in the town don't have very much to do and don't like outsiders either.

Last film of the day was Revanche (Spielmann/Austria) -- executive director Claire said this was a "thriller" -- with my expectations thus set, I expected something thrilling.. and I guess this was, kinda sorta.. I didn't really feel the tension the story needed. It felt like two different films one after the other.. the first half was a lot more thrilling than the second.

I'm not recommending any of today's films. Not to say you wouldn't like them, it depends a lot on who you are (on average, you've got kids, you don't see as many films as you used to, and your first name is Matthew). Don't fret, I'm expecting to see better films in the next two weeks, maybe I'll recommend one or two of those.

A friend is selling Mineral Makeup on-line. Go buy some. Maybe she'll give me a cut.

Left the last two days write up until now.. might not remember anything.

Flanders (France) I think the audience hated this one. It's not a war story and it's not a love story, or it's both. One of those lack-of-emotion relationship movies that I rarely understand. You'll hate it too.

Beauty in Trouble (Czech Republic) Far too nice rich guy, goes around being far too nice. To a point. Nice movie.

Eye in the Sky (Hong Kong) Yay! HK police movie. Think Enemy of the State.. slowed down a bit, with an implausibly cute asian girl playing Wil Smith.

The Case of the Grinning Cat (France) a documentary about a graffiti cat. Would be the not-so-nice way to describe it. A light, lyrical look at Paris and it's people dealing with George Bush's start to the 21st Century might be nicer. Somewhere in between, is this movie. You won't feel like you would've missed much, but you'd like the cats.

Barakat! (Algeria) I liked this one. Life in Algeria sucks if you're female.

The Monastery: Mr Vig and the Nun (Holland) A quirky old man has a spare castle, and wants to give it away to the Russian catholic church to start a monastery. This documentary was, apparently, the festival audience favourite, we think it might be because the majority of the audience is ... old. Or the film is better than I thought. I did sleep through some of the fight scenes between the man and the head nun.

Don't Touch The Axe (France) Another one the audience didn't like. The story .. and the telling of the story .. were very .. rigid .. not my choice for a final day film. I can't remember the outcome. But I'm not bothered.

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Brazil) Fast, interesting doco about living in Sao Paulo. And frogs. Contrasts commonplace kidnappings of the rich by the poor, with the criminal channelling of government funds intended for projects to aid the poor into the pocket of a single powerful politician. A good end to the fortnight.

Elegy of a Life (Venice) I should've slept in.

After the Wedding (Holland) Excellent.

Sugar Curtain (Cuba) Cuba.. Not so rosy.

Beaufort (Israel) Sad war movie. Israel pulling out of Lebanon, this is about the soldiers at Beaufort Castle in Lebanon and the days leading up to destroying the fort and leaving.

Vanja (India) Cool.. except I don't remember how it finished.

Shotgun Stories (USA) Excellent. See this.

The Island (Russia?) What I was awake for was pretty good. A bit mystical, maybe a bit boring.

The Siege (Australia) Solid documentary about a 120 day siege in Peru in 1997.

Today opened with short film Menged (Ethiopia) about a man and his son and their donkey, and the possible permutations of those three. Charming. Funny. But what it was really about is people giving advice where it's really not needed, which neatly segues into:

Bamako (Mali) - I didn't know where Mali was. Cool film. Mostly about the people of Mali putting the IMF and World Bank on trial for causing the continued povertisation (they may have made that word up.. or just not bothered to translate it from French) of Africa, the film makes a very strong argument. But throughout the trial, which is being held in an open court yard with the residents looking on and carrying on with their lives, there are interruptions from daily life in Mali, all of which are there to illustrate the point, I'm sure. The faux-western shown on the local TV station, which features Danny Glover in the lead role, is hilarious. You'd enjoy this and get angry all at the same time.

Scott Walker - 30 Century Man You would've enjoyed this a lot more than I did. Apart from discovering where the song "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" came from, I'm not that interested in discovering more about the sounds of N.S. Engel. The Q&A with the film-maker was cool though. I thought Sting felt a bit out of place too.

The Paper Will Be Blue (Romania) The second film covering the ousting of Ceausescu, this time from the inside of a militia tank. The opening scene is unexpected (well... I didn't expect it, but I don't read any of the notes, or even the name of a film, before hand), everything that follows gives that scene even more impact.

Poison Friends (France) This reminded me a bit of Metropolitan. But only a bit.

Saturday morning started with Forever (France/Netherlands) - Scenes from a cemetery. And from the lives of people who come to visit the cemetery. When the first images came up on screen I was very worried that I'd be sitting through an hour and a half of pictures of gravestones and epitaphs. Turns out, that can be a lot more interesting than it sounds.

Temple of Dreams (Australia) - About a Lebanese youth centre in Auburn. An excellent documentary. See it. This country could use a bit more understanding (and a bit less Alan Jones). The Q&A afterwards was interesting. Fadi (the central character in the documentary) very gracefully handled a question about Muslim dress codes, but was a bit more awkward when dealing with questions about homosexuality ("You guys are a tough audience" ... "we've got our own problems" "that's their problem").

Sunday morning started with the short film Along Came The Rain (Chile) -- the Sydney audience appreciated the title for it's topical irony (it's raining here a lot at the moment). But I think everyone was surprised when the movie ended abruptly without having really done anything. We did get to see a woman sell cheese on the side of the road.. and there was another chicken plucking scene (head still on this time). Could've been used for one of those round-window sequences on Play School.

4 Elements (Netherlands) - The "we thought you'd sleep in on Sunday so we didn't put a good film on first" film. But still kinda interesting. Snapshots of men working in/on/with fire, water, earth and .. air (space?). The second sequence isn't nearly as exciting as Deadliest Catch.

La Vie En Rose (France) This was the opening night film, shown again for us regular people. The festival really seems to care this year. The story of Edith Piaf. She was 47 when she died, she looked at least 80 in the film. But she led a hard rock and roll life, alcohol and drugs. And tragedy. They left out the bits of her life during World War II, because they weren't that interesting, or because they didn't know what she was doing, it left a hole for me.

Climates (Turkey) A story about a dysfunctional relationship or three. I didn't really get into it. The guy was a jerk, and the two women in the story didn't seem to care. His girlfriend did, at least, leave him, for a while, but only, it seemed, because he was boring. Worth seeing for her scene very early in the film when, while looking down at the guy as he photographs ruins, she goes from happy to tears in one couple-of-minutes long take.

Away From Her (Canada) My pick for the best film of the festival. A story about love and about Alzheimer's. You will sob.

Rescue Dawn (USA) Based on a book written by a US pilot shot down over Laos during a black-op in the lead-up to the Viet Nam war.

Me (Yo) (Spain) I think this is a film about a man taking on an identity because he doesn't have one of his own. Or it's about a man so deeply trapped in a situation that he must eventually become the person everyone expects him to be just to survive. Or it's about a guy who gets a job, discovers a dead body in the water tank, and tries to do the best thing he can for the deceased. I'm not really sure, I slept through a few of the early scenes and left before the director came back out for the Q&A.

King Corn (USA) I'm not sure that food in Australia has become quite as saturated with corn as it has in the US. Still a very frightening movie. Super-size Me attacks fast food, and Fahrenheit 9/11 attacks the US government, this film does neither but you come away knowing how bad fast food, in fact most food in the US, is for you and that the government is, maybe not behind it, but certainly playing a key role in the non-food food production process. Watch the movie.

Bella (USA) Attractive (but hidden behind a beard), talented, charming head chef of a restaurant walks off the job when his brother fires a recently pregnant waitress, and spends the day with her. The film seems to be flawed by the fact that the central character is so perfect. But he's charming and talented and, trust me, gorgeous, if he'd take off his beard, so maybe you won't care. If you've been playing Vice City Stories you'll recognise his car.

In the Company of Actors (Australia) Follows the Sydney Theatre Company production of Hedda Gabler from re-rehearsals in Sydney to performances in New York. It's just not very interesting. You may disagree.

The Japanese Tradition: Apologies (Japan). A charming short film that demonstrates practical apologising.

Hana (Japan). A samurai film in which no one gets killed. I think I actually fell asleep in this. A combination of the pacing and the lighting made it awfully hard for me to stay focused. That, and I've been sitting in a dark cinema for the last four days. I could tell when I was drifting off because the film would suddenly have modern day technology popping up in shot. It's actually much better (and less anachronistic) than I remember.

Half Moon (Iran) I don't remember... [looks at programme] okay, now I remember. Life for the Kurds sucks. A famous Kurdish singer has obtained permission to travel from Iran into Kurdish Iraq to perform at a concert with his sons (the band). This film will make you sad.

All in this Tea (USA) a documentary following an American who travels around China trying to buy the best Chinese tea he can find. Very well edited. You will want to experiment with more tea.

The Home Song Stories (Australia) I cried! This is the Joan Chen film. A single mother from Hong Kong trying to look after her two children in Australia. You will cry too.

I Served the King of England (Czech Republic) I laughed. A lot. You'll think less of me.

Short film: The Flag (Turkey). Both this short and the feature that followed it show Turkish kids reciting a national oath, which, in this film, to an outsider looking in, sounded pretty scary. In the feature, it doesn't have the same impact, maybe because we get to see those kids as real people, (and because we'd already seen this short). And you worry about nationalism taking hold over here.

Times and Winds (Turkey). The Flag had me thought-singing Istanbul, the opening scene of this one threw me into a silent rendition of The Sun. We're introduced to some kids and learn one of them has a crush on their teacher. And soon that another wants his father dead. Why? One of the girls is her Dad's favourite. And one has no parents and gets beaten by the guy who owns the goats. And one of their parents (maybe the one who wants to kill his Dad!) is failing to live up to his own father's expectations. It took me too long to work out who belonged to who. I might've otherwise loved the film.

Blindsight A bunch of blind kids from Lhasa are taken on a trek to Everest (or nearly, they were aiming for a mountain off to the north-east a bit). An amazing film. The producer spoke before and after the screening. She could spin a question out through three tangents.

The Witnesses (France). AIDS in France in the 80s. Solid, maybe a little bit long.

Ghosts (UK). A story based on the tragic real-life deaths of twenty something Chinese illegal immigrants in the UK. I think you would've liked this one.

I haven't cried in anything yet. Came close in Blindsight when one of the girls in the group was told she'd have to go down the mountain early. And Ghosts was moving. But nothing has really affected me.

Antonia (Brazil). 8 Mile but with four girls playing the part of Rabbit. I liked 8 Mile so I didn't write that to be mean. I liked this movie too. It's maybe a bit too much of a happy feel-good ending, but given the lives these girls are living, you really want them to have a happy ending.

Short: The Girl Who Swallowed Bees. Paul McDermott was there to introduce his latest poem-rendered-in-surreal-animation-with-people movie. He seemed a bit more comfortable on stage this year.

Hallam Foe (UK) A peeping tom obsessed with the death of his Mother, moves to Edinburgh and finds happiness with a girl who looks just like her. And, it's funny. A modern Vertigo. You'd like it a lot.

Two films today, no shorts.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is the only movie Dr Seuss ever wrote. Made in the 1950s. It reminded me a lot of this film I saw as a kid where this boy got a box and he climbed inside and became a cartoon character and had an amazing adventure. This film was nothing like that. But if I'd seen this as a child I think I would've responded to it a whole different way. But since I'm a grown up, the best bits were the atomic bomb paranoia, and the short "I think communism is evil, and I completely reject it." speech by the plumber. Would you like it? Yeah. But you'd find it a bit slow. You'd like some of the songs, for sure.

The Walker is a star packed movie from the guy who wrote Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull (and one other movie that I forget, which, including this one, make up his quartet of films about men in isolation). Not having seen either of those (I know, I know) or the other one I forget (I guess) I can't really compare. The film itself was difficult to get into at first because it's Woody Harrelson but doing a thick Virginian accent. And gay. Really, not that there's anything wrong with that. But it takes a while to forget the actor and get involved with the story. It's a bit film-noir, one of the audience during the Q&A called it byzantine (adj. highly involved or intricate) like The Big Sleep and wanted to know who the killer actually was. You would've worked out who it was, and that it didn't actually matter.

First short: Images of the Defense of a Courtyard (Germany). The festival starts with a bit of a Kafka moment. Based on one of his short stories. We see a snippet of life in a country courtyard occupied by soldiers who are there to defend it. The bit with the shirt exchange was funny.. the bit with the chicken was interesting (potentially confronting to people sensitive to the whole "where meat comes from" thing).. the fight in the tree I didn't entirely understand. I don't think the film was sub-titled, the only communication throughout took the form of grunting. And kicking. And waving. Mostly grunting. Off beat, kinda enjoyable. You probably wouldn't have liked it.

12:08 East of Bucharest (Romania). This one took a while to get into. I kept losing track of which of the three main characters we were following at the time. Once I'd worked out there were only the three, and, in fact, once they were all sitting together in front of a TV camera in the local studio, the film picked up and was laugh out loud funny.. while being sad and poignant and other things. The firecracker gags were good too. Good first film for the festival. You might not like this one either.

Second short: Meokgo and the Stickfighter (South Africa). I think this was filmed in Lesotho (a small country entirely surrounded by South Africa). The scenery is spectacular. Unfortunately, that's really all I've got to say to recommend this film. I found it incomprehensible. I mean the girl in the trance showing up in a ball-gown and the tribal guy in cowboy boots was all cool... but didn't he die at the start of the film? Who was attacking who exactly? It's possible I wasn't paying enough attention. I haven't been watching films that much recently. (Too much TV.) Maybe you'd like this one.

Dry Season (Chad). (Chad is pretty much in the middle of Africa, but you knew that.) This sets itself up as a film about revenge. But I don't wanna spoil it for you. There's more talking in this one than today's first short, but not much. Our hero doesn't speak much, and our .. villian (other hero?) had his throat cut in his earlier life and has to speak with a mechanical larynx, so you can understand him preferring to communicate through mostly non-verbal means. I'm very glad I didn't read the blurb in the festival program for this one. I got to follow our hero's progress without already knowing where he was going to end up. This is a solid story with only a couple of scenes of wanky photography. I think you'd like this. But maybe not as much as I did.

That's it for day one. Only two features per day on weekends. They're giving us four on weekdays. Not sure if I'll make it.

If you want to follow along at home, my personal calendar of films is available for viewing on Google Calendars, or, if you've got your own ICS-capable software you can take the ics feed. You probably won't.

Not that I went anywhere.. but I'm going to try posting a bit again. The SFF is back on. And subscriptions exist again, so I'm happy.

The weather is wet and windy at the moment.. it held off while I was walking in this morning but coming back across Anzac Bridge I was blasted, gave up completely on the brolly about half way across. My new jacket is water proof, it turns out. But my new jeans, not so much.

In other news, I'm still taking Nexium, but will be switching to Pariet in a few days time. It's cheaper and I don't have to get a new script for another six months. Yay. There's more info on the net about the side-effects of this one too. Not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing.

The film An Inconvenient Truth is showing advanced screenings this weekend and opening properly next week.

Go see it.