It's been another great year in 2024 for Australian alternative films. For Australian mainstream films, not so. If the indie cinema didn't exist, would I be watching any Australian cinema? Probably not.

Like last year, there has been great activity around the Adelaide screening/production collective moviejuice. They highlighted such great talents like the Brisbane-based Adam C. Briggs and the Perth-based Tim Barretto, and were also busy themselves, with Daniel Tune, Jordy Pollock, Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese all making their debut features.

The list below is a list of films I saw in 2024, some are from the immediate past, and one is from the future.


Top 10 Australian films of 2024

1. Paris Funeral, 1972
(Adam C. Briggs, 2021, 76 mins)

Maverick Brisbane filmmaker working on 16mm and Super 8, Briggs has created with Paris Funeral, 1972 a shaggy dog road movie going from Australia to Europe, a blend of doco and fiction, and very reminiscent of '70s American films from Hellman and Altman, and also the emotional cinema of John Cassavetes. Italo-Australian Rosario Zocco puts in a tour-de-force central performance, full of liquor and love.

2. Malls
(Daniel Tune, 2025, 60 mins)

Adelaide young gun filmmaker-programmer-critic Daniel Tune makes a stylish and powerful debut feature with Malls, a vibrant observational piece on two young solitaires (Emily Pottinger and Gabriel Bath), who traverse city malls with disgust and desire. A slow cinema enlivened by great visual and aural effects, the film slow burns towards a transcendental ending, one both magical and sad. Will premiere Feb 2025 in Adelaide.

3. Captain Crook
(Saidin Salkic, 2024, 70 mins)

Bosnian-Australian filmmaker Salkic continues his extraordinary and prolific career, making films unlike any other filmmaker in Australia, probing psychological works that are experimental in their form. Captain Crook features John Flaus as a paranoid and confused Emperor of his land. The film blends colonialism, wounded pride, disassociation and murder. It opens with Flaus displaying dementia, and ends with Greek tragedy.

4. Love & Fascism in the
   21st Century
(Carmen-Sibha Keiso, 2018, 74 mins)

Brilliant young Arab-Australian poet-artist-filmmaker Carmen-Sibha Keiso's debut feature film Love & Fascism in the 21st Century is a truly unique work for Australian cinema, mixing the essay-film form with a document of experimental theatre. It's amazing to see an Australian film take on the essay form, complete with a dual-voiced intellectual narration on art, love and life.

5. Wabi Sabi Rendezvous
(Jordy Pollock, 2024, 60 mins)

Another Flinders Uni graduate, Jordy Pollock's debut feature Wabi Sabi Rendezvous is a delightful Rohmerian romp through Adelaide parks and homes, actresses Hebe Sayce and Lauren Koopowitz lighting the screen up with breezy performances. Full of surprises and quirks, and a playful, quizzical structure, the film is a breath of fresh air from go to whoa. Probably the perfect emblem now of Adelaide's current Nouvelle Vague.

6. Lesbian Space Princess
(Emma Hough Hobbs & Leela Varghese, 2024, 86 mins)

The Adelaide Film Festival's program notes for this film called it a "riotous, candy-coloured joy", and for once this wasn't spin – the words are spot on. Vibrantly animated and boldly voiced, it's quite the modern, playfully transgressive lesbian/queer/feminist work one hoped it would be. It perhaps lacks depth ultimately, getting stuck in its adolescent glee, but it's still a great achievement.

7. Us and the Night
(Audrey Lam, 2024, 67 mins)

Another striking Australian debut feature, from a known hybrid experimental/narrative filmmaker. Us and the Night is a strange film, quiet and down-beat on the one hand, and playful and expansive on the other. It reminds one of the cinema of Akerman and Wong, with all those lonely characters traversing the night. But in this case our heroines are stuck in a library, cleaning it. A film of intelligence, naivety and inner beauty.

8. Bassendream
(Tim Barretto, 2022, 80 mins)

Another debut feature, this time from a Perth-based filmmaker, Bassendream is set in the outer suburb of Bassendean, and is composed of disparate moments among an assortment of characters/ordinary people. Barretto has a light and whimsical observational touch, which lends a charm to the film. Music and an "ad break" enliven the film, as it meanders along. In its own way, it is quite a radical community realist film.

9. Between the Ocean
   and the Clouds
(Kai Perrignon, 2023, 43 mins)

A moody, eerie and funny lo-fi mini-feature from micro-budget cinema champion Perrignon (who runs screenings through the group Static Vision in Melbourne). It's a relationship study on the one hand, and on the other hand it's a sci-fi thriller/horror genre piece. It's B-grade cinema, and knowingly so, and also radical experimental cinema, playing masterfully with light and sound.

10. Coma
(Saara Lamberg, 2024, 80 mins)

Finnish-Australian actor-director Lamberg has made multiple feature films since 2017, and this is the best of the two I have seen. Coma is a concept performance film: a man lies in a coma and various people from his life speak to him, unburdening themselves. The film has brilliant splintered editing from John Couper-Smartt, creating a chaotic but also spiritual effect at times. Janet Watson Kruse shines in the central role.

Bill Mousoulis is a Greek-Australian independent filmmaker, a programmer of Australian indie films, and an occasional writer on film.