MEDIA:

Saidin Salkic on breakfast radio
by Breakfast show, Radio Adelaide, Oct 19.

Matthew Pastor: Australia’s most prolific filmmaker
by Don Groves, IF Magazine, Oct 15.

Bill Mousoulis and Matthew Victor Pastor radio interview
by Rob Lawry, Radio Adelaide, Oct 13.

Last Time & Meldorama/Random/Melbourne! review
by Adrian Martin, Film Critic website, Oct 12.

Big-budget films and 'new-wave' directors
to share limelight at Adelaide Film Festival
by Malcolm Sutton, ABC Adelaide website, Oct 3.

Filmmaker's Arrival (on Saidin Salkic)
by Tate Papworth, Star Weekly, Oct 2.

Matthew Victor Pastor: Melodrama Random Adelaide
by Anthony Frajman, FilmInk, Sep 26.

Adelaide Film Festival - An open letter to Bill Mousoulis
about Angie Black's THE FIVE PROVOCATIONS
by Geoffrey Gardner, Film Alert 101 Blog, Sep 13.

Sunday, Oct 14, 6:45 pm       Mercury Cinema, 13 Morphett St, Adelaide
festival page for the film

MELODRAMA / RANDOM / MELBOURNE! (Australia/Philippines, 2018, 81 mins)
Directed by Matthew Victor Pastor

Produced by Matthew Victor Pastor and Odin B. Fernandez
Written by Matthew Victor Pastor and Celina Yuen
Soundtrack by Fergus Cronkite
Featuring Celina Yuen and Bridget O’Brien

East meets west in this Filipino-Australian neon-lit pop-punk extravaganza!

Presented by Bill Mousoulis.  Q&A with director to follow.  AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE

Matthew Victor Pastor is a 29-year-old Melbourne-based dynamo Filipino-Australian indie director, who has a phenomenal energy (there are 3 features he is releasing currently), and whose work is edgy and vivid, reminding one of Wong Kar-wai and Jean-Luc Godard both.

MELODRAMA / RANDOM / MELBOURNE! (the exclamatory upper case title fits the film) is a low-budget but mesmerising film, a millenial-modern kaleidoscope of the Filipino (and generally Asian) community in the Melbourne urban jungle, as it battles with assimilation, alienation, racism, sexism.

A panoply of characters intersect: a feminist documentary filmmaker, a sex worker, a lonely Filipino migrant mother, and various men who are either desperate, emasculated or arrogant. The gender and identity themes are current and relevant, and Pastor doesn’t shy away from presenting ugly situations and questionable characters.

But whilst the film’s main mode is a gritty realism, the film also magically flips itself in an inventive way periodically, puncturing the “mean streets” of Melbourne with delightfully bizarre musical interludes, like a twisted Karaoke taking over.

Pastor is a fresh, colourful talent on the Australian film scene currently. – Bill Mousoulis

Matthew Victor Pastor is an Australian filmmaker of Filipino heritage.

An alumnus of the prestigious Victorian College of the Arts.

His Masters' film I am JUPITER I am the BIGGEST PLANET won Best Director at VCA, and completed a successful festival run.

At the 2018 Sinag Maynila Film Festival (Philippines) MELODRAMA / RANDOM / MELBOURNE! was awarded Best Original Score for Fergus Cronkite.

He is also soon to release a new feature film Repent or Perish!

MELODRAMA / RANDOM / MELBOURNE! is supported by the short film

The Last Time (Australia, 2018, 6 mins)
Directed by Allison Chhorn

festival page for the film

Produced and Edited by Allison Chhorn
Location Sound Yolande Van Haalen
Featuring Bianca Conry, Russell Lucas

A dress. A couple.

He holds on to the past but does she see a future?
Or will this be the last time?

Presented by Bill Mousoulis.  WORLD PREMIERE

Allison Chhorn has an honours degree in Visual Arts at UniSA.

She produced & edited Mike Retter's 2017 vertical feature Youth On The March.

The amalgamation of her interests in painting, photography and sound have informed her DIY minimalist approach to filmmaking.

Wednesday, Oct 17, 7:30 pm   Sax & Violins Film Society, 195 Pirie St, Adelaide
festival page for the film

The FIVE Provocations (Australia, 2018, 94 mins)
Directed by Angie Black

Produced, Written and Directed by Angie Black
Featuring Sapidah Kian, Rebecca Bower, Tony Moclair, and Blake Osborn

Bold mix of human drama and queer extravaganza.

Presented by Bill Mousoulis.  Q&A with director to follow.  ADELAIDE PREMIERE

After 30 years of short films and academic work, Angie Black unleashes her debut feature The FIVE Provocations onto the Australian film scene, and what a blast it is!

It’s a terrific achievement for a no-budget feature: a finely nuanced ensemble realist drama, with intertwining characters negotiating this fluid world we live in currently, wedded to a series of bizarre, theatrical, surreal incursions into the narrative (the “provocations” of the title), surprising the characters (and we the audience).

It’s like a Luis Buñuel or David Lynch film, where the narrative is suddenly split open by molotov cocktails, by characters or events that subvert the natural storyline, and everything shifts into the realm of dream and emotion.

The Five Provocations is certainly a bold film – it will please both those looking for a subtle human drama, and those looking for a colourful queer extravaganza. – Bill Mousoulis

Angie Black is a multi-award winning Australian filmmaker and director.

She has directed more than ten short films, including Bowl Me Over (2000), which have screened at festivals around the globe, including Locarno and Melbourne International Film Festivals.

In 1999, Black founded Black Eye Films as an independent, Melbourne based, production company that supports the promotion and visibility of women on and behind the screen.

The FIVE Provocations (2018) is the first feature film independently produced through Black Eye Films.

Friday, Oct 19, 7:30 pm    Sax & Violins Film Society, 195 Pirie St, Adelaide

The Arrival of a Phoenix (Australia, 2018, 40 mins)
Directed by Saidin Salkic      festival page for this film

Produced, Written and Directed by Saidin Salkic
Featuring Saidin Salkic and Sevdah Salkic

Beautiful experimental film about a man and his daughter.

Presented by Bill Mousoulis.  Q&A with director to follow.  ADELAIDE PREMIERE

The Arrival of a Phoenix celebrates the relationship between cinematic image and sound, and attempts to examine this crucial relationship while telling an emotional story of the rebirth of a human.

These words come from the director Saidin Salkic himself, and are telling: his cinema is indeed an “experimental cinema”, in the way he uses images and sounds, and also a deeply “humanist cinema”, in the way he expresses the deepest of human feelings and situations.

One is struck, from the very first second, by the sheer beauty of this film’s form, all shimmering lightness and ethereal twinklings – the sky, the sun, the earth, the sea. The images are sublime, but the sounds are also sublime, little chimes and whispers, matching perfectly with the awe and transcendence on display.

It’s a stunning self-portrait, “from the ruins of my childhood” as Salkic says (where he experienced genocide first hand), to the beautiful land of Australia, where he stabilised his life and brought into the world a child of his own, a child whose father was spared death by a whisker.

It’s a heart-rending, utterly beautiful film. – Bill Mousoulis

Silence's Crescendo (Australia, 2018, 40 mins)
Directed by Saidin Salkic      festival page for this film

Produced, Written and Directed by Saidin Salkic
Featuring Saidin Salkic

Experimental horror film.

Presented by Bill Mousoulis.  Q&A with director to follow.  WORLD PREMIERE

Silence’s Crescendo is the most recent film from Bosnian-Australian avant-gardist Saidin Salkic, and this screening is the World Premiere of the film. It is the dark to Salkic’s previous film The Arrival of a Phoenix’s light. Placing both films in the one program gives an indication of Salkic’s concerns, his range as a filmmaker.

Silence’s Crescendo is an extraordinary and unique horror film. It plays with many tropes of the genre, but in a low-budget and intense way. Filmed in a murky B&W, it is like an “experiment in terror”, somewhere between a normal horror film and an aesthetically-minded experimental film.

It goes for a heightened intensity, a “crescendo”, that never lets up. It loops its rough sounds insistently, offering no escape for our doomed hero. It’s a dark, nightmarish work, not for the faint-hearted.

Psychologically, is this film a metaphor for Salkic’s experience in the Bosnian genocide, where he experienced fear and death? – Bill Mousoulis

Photographed by Damian Vincenzi (Instagram handle: @damian_w_vincenzi) at Multicultural Arts Victoria’s Emerge in Yarra festival.

Saidin Salkic was born in Srebrenica, Bosnia.

Having survived the genocide he migrated to Australia in 2001.

Hailed by Bill Mousoulis as "one of the Australia's best film makers", he is also a prolific painter, musician and poet.

Saidin is the author of seven mini-feature films to date and has been featured in many media outlets across the world, including SBS World News and CNN Balkans.

The Arrival of a Phoenix and Silence’s Crescendo are his two most recent films.