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| Unknown Pleasures: Australian independent cinema A series of regular screenings featuring the best of Australian independent cinema, both classic and contemporary, with discussions with the filmmakers. Curators/presenters: Chris Luscri, Bill Mousoulis Guest programmers: Digby Houghton, Peter Tammer Assistant/videographer: Colin Hodson read more |
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Thank you to our supporters Unknown Pleasures is self-funded by Chris Luscri and Bill Mousoulis. It receives no government funding and it has no sponsors. |
INFO FOR SCREENINGS: Our main venue is the Thornbury Picture House, |
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Saturday, February 15, 4:00 pm |
Jeni Thornley (1948- ) is one of Australia's landmark feminist filmmakers, along with other Sydney figures such as Margot Nash, Martha Ansara, Gillian Leahy and Digby Duncan. These filmmakers have "lived in interesting times", as the old Chinese proverb warned. The decades of the '60s and the '70s were indeed interesting times, tumultuous and changing. And now, in the uncertain 2020s, these filmmakers are living through problematic times once again, with wars and fascistic despots again raging. The main difference for these filmmakers now though is that they are approaching the end of their lives. Thornley acknowledges this in her sublime film Memory Film, openly calling it a “death poem”.
The Super 8 film medium, developed in the 1960s, was always a revolutionary medium in a way. The cameras were so small you could pack them in your handbag as you went out for the day. And then film anything you wanted, anything that came your way. Thornley did this, from the early ‘70s to the mid ‘00s (when it finally became unfeasible to have the film stock processed). The nominal “home movie” camera for your average family became a handy tool for many of the international experimental filmmakers of the time, such as Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage. In Australia however, Super 8 was used primarily by a younger wave (Gen X even), in the ‘80s, with all the political and documentary filmmakers of the ‘60s and ‘70s not seriously considering it as a cinematic tool. But Thornley obviously intuited the value of the medium, and thus did her furtive little shooting, capturing various moments of her life as she lived through them.
- Bill Mousoulis (programmer)
Jeni Thornley tribute at Melbourne Cinematheque
Memory Film: a Filmmaker’s Diary: In Conversation with Jeni Thornley
Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary
Jeni Thornley Talks About the Evolution of the Mind |
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Tuesday, March 18, 8:15 pm We present the World Premiere of a new feature film from Melbourne independent film legend Peter Tammer. Titled Trip of a Lifetime, this is a unique family footage film, Tammer being handed (in 1988) some unwanted 16mm. footage shot in 1950-51 of a seemingly ordinary older couple, as they travelled the world and recorded the sights they saw and the people they met up with. Stunningly restored by Tammer to a pristine high defintion, this is a heartfelt and exquisite film, honouring the existence of the people we see on screen, even if no-one (including Tammer) now knows who they are. A film one watches with awe and wonder. (Bill Mousoulis) |
World Premiere
Peter Tammer (1943- ) is one of Australia's most storied filmmakers, and no-one would begrudge him if he simply settled down these days in retirement and wisdom-dispensing elderdom, but an indefatigable spirit drives him on to keep making films. After a semi-retirement of sorts in the late 1990s, in the past 20 years he has made or completed projects such as his John Flaus portrait Flausfilm (2009), his Paul Cox portrait The Nude in the Window (2014), various short digital works, and also restorations of some of his earlier films. This new film however, Trip of a Lifetime (2025), is a truly special work, a work 75 years in the making.
In a nutshell, Tammer, whilst working at the Swinburne Film and Television School in 1988, received some cans of 16mm. film footage from a couple of strangers, the contents purporting to be home movie footage shot by a man in the years 1950 and '51. These strangers did not know the man. All they knew was that the man and his wife were now both deceased, and that they had no children or anyone else to pass the film cans on to. Tammer decided to keep the cans, intrigued by them. When he first opened then, he found the contents to be very fragile. He could not run them on any projector or film viewer so he had to wait until 2007 when he found a way to digitise them without damaging the film. A further and final stage of restoration was then begun by Tammer several years ago, and concluded this year. What we now see in Trip of a Lifetime are brilliantly sparkling high-definition images.
I myself can't think of a single film I've ever seen that is anything like Trip of a Lifetime. Firstly, Tammer has no personal investment in or connection to the people portrayed on the screen or the seemingly-average "man with a movie camera" who shot the images. Tammer is not related to them, he doesn't know anyone who even knew them, he has no idea even what their names are. Because of this, Tammer's completed film here, and the presentation of such to an audience, is an extraordinarily selfless act, an act that bestows great honour to the people filmed (and to the footage itself, as a record of the people).
Most "found footage" films that filmmakers have made over the years are acts of artistic creation in themselves, taking and shaping the images according to an intellectual or artistic concept the filmmakers have. Otherwise, the only other time we see home movie footage from the past in films is when the footage is of direct personal relevance to the filmmaker (biographical films). So, Trip of a Lifetime is unique, especially as Tammer completely resists any urge to edit the footage in any artistic way (he leaves the images with their original scatter-shot rhythms), or accompany them with music or voice-over (he leaves them silent). Apart from prologue and epilogue bookends by Tammer, the images run just as they would have been shown to family and friends in 1951.
This is the kind of film that brings up questions and mysteries around the entire cinematic apparatus itself. "What is Cinema?" as André Bazin once asked. There is a layering of "gazes" here in particular that is quite fascinating. Our gaze on this film takes in multiple gazes: we see Tammer's gaze (as an archivist in a way), we see the cameraman's gaze (as a recorder of events), and then we also see the content itself, as it renders itself into our minds in 2025, with all our cultural and historical perspectives interacting with it.
I think Peter Tammer is also asking "What is Cinema?". Or, more precisely, he is offering his own personal answer: "Have a look at this, isn't Cinema a wonderful thing, a thing of immense beauty and resonance?"
- Bill Mousoulis (programmer)
Peter Tammer and Bill Mousoulis Zoom video interview
Peter Tammer radio interview |
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Monday, April 14, 8:15 pm We are pleased to welcome Ben Hackworth to our screenings, |
Program Notes --
Corroboree is a film of silent tremors, the kind that run deep yet have left their mark - craggy and scarred - upon later inspection. On the surface, it’s a simple story - a young man arriving at a house full of secrets, primed for something like a reckoning… or perhaps, a renewal. Yet Corroboree's almost byzantine literary and cinematic allusions (Tsai, Bergman, Rivette) coupled with the rhizomatic emotional roundelay that debuting director Ben Hackworth structures in order to chart and rechart the communal and performative bonds this young man forms with a host of other mysterious characters creates a temperature that makes the unfolding action utterly mesmeric - and enormously generative as both an act of gentle intellectual gamesmanship and as naggingly ineffable, ultimately devastating meditation on loss, inhabitance and legacy. It’s also fucking smart, funny and rigorous as all hell - Resnais’ Providence as refracted through the textual cut-ups of verbatim theatre... in rapt, aching tribute to the late Australian theatre director Richard Wherrett, Hackworth's avowed source of inspiration here, in ways both overt and subterranean. Part of the film's force comes from parsing all these elements out which, suffice to say, I will not spoil. Corroboree thus represents something of a road not taken in Australian cinema, a cyclical beginning and an end (much like the narrative form itself), impossible to reconcile both with what came before, and what has come after. A film that struck me as a UFO when I first saw it on a beautiful apportioned, albeit sadly out of print, first-run DVD courtesy of the legendary distributor Accent. Come and marvel at one of the essential Australian independent films of the early 2000s. (Chris Luscri).
Synopsis --
A director has organized for a young man to visit him in a meditation retreat to perform scenes from a story of his life. The young man has been given a tape of instructions: he must visit different rooms over the weekend, encountering five actresses who portray the key women in the director’s life.
Over the following days, the young man becomes familiar with the women and through the content of the performances – he becomes familiar with the history of the director. This allows Conor to have compassion to “play” the director and as the final scenes unfold, he must make a decision about whether the performance has gone too far. Quotes --
“If you respond to the deadpan presentation, Corroboree finds ways of renewing its droll comedy over the course of its 90-minute running time, and suggests an intriguing social context for the shoot that we grasp only in fragments. First-time director Hackworth is in total control of his medium, so much so that one wonders where he goes from here.”
DAN SALLITT, Senses of Cinema
“Captivating Corroboree is the mysterious first feature by Australian director Ben Hackworth. The idiosyncratic and dazzling brilliance of what we see onscreen is only amplified by knowing that newcomer lead Conor O’Hanlon is playing himself and that he and Hackworth (may) reunite for their next project. These shades of the real-world director/actor relationship enhance the graceful and beguiling Corroboro’s keenly felt observations on performance, pedagogy, loyalty and legacy.”
NOAH COWAN, Artistic Director - Toronto Film Festival
"In its manner, Corroboree is like half a dozen Jacques Rivette films in one and, as in the master’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), a solemn aura of ritual is mercifully accompanied by comical bits in which none of the designated performers seem to know quite where to stand or what to do next. But, from the first shot, Hackworth and his collaborators bravely nail down their audiovisual form – mostly static camera, distant group framings, drawn-out durations, ambient sound peppered with atonal musical stylings – and stick with it, creating a thick mood that is unique in the annals of Australian cinema."
ADRIAN MARTIN, Film Critic: Adrian Martin website
“This daring and singular feature debut from Ben Hackworth is both a fitting tribute to a theatre director Richard Wherett and a cinematic experiment that echoes the interests of Guy Maddin and Lars von Trier.”
CLARE STEWART, Artistic Director - BFI London Film Festival
“Corroboree is enigmatic, playful like some sensual and modern Mankiewicz movie, beautifully directed, fragile because not much concerned with regular narrative storytelling and people could easily get lost and not make the effort to let themselves be taken by the film's gentle hand and wander about at the pace you want. The film distillates trouble in a very subtle way. If the film critics still have some taste for discovering non mainstream and talented young directors: here it is. Times were more favorable when Jane Campion or Gus Van Sant started, or even Lucrecia Martel, but there is always some hope.”
LAURENT JACOB, Feature Film Programmer - Cannes Film Festival Links -- Notes on the Death of Beauty, Art and Talent: A Correspondence with Ben Hackworth
Australian Autofiction: A Filmmaker Roundtable by Chris Luscri
The Responsibilities of Power: The 32nd Toronto International Film Festival
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50th anniversary screening Pure Shit (1975, 77 mins, Bert Deling) Melbourne: Adelaide: |
Warning: Strong drug use. Restricted entry: R18+ (High impact drug themes)
One of the most unclassifiable of Australian films, a rollicking heroin narrative, B-grade yet still clearly with artistic integrity. No subsequent drug film in Australia has been able to match its energy, wit, humour, or sheer joie de vivre. Reviled by many, it's also been celebrated by many, and had a great (but limited) 2009 DVD release. Featuring a killer cast led by Gary Waddell, it is one of only 3 features made by Bert Deling (1942-2022). Rolf de Heer calls it "the most kinetic Australian film ever". “Made on the run, on 16mm, on a tiny budget, over four weekends, its rambling, episodic script harvested from the experiences of addicts and focusing on their manic 24 hour quest for a definitive 'hit’, Pure Shit is a piece of cinematic graffiti, that functions as doco-snapshot of Melbourne’s inner city drug culture c. 1975 all delivered without moral alibis, existentialist poetry or neat sociology.” – Peter Galvin, Pure Shit review, SBS website, June 10, 2009. “Deling’s bat-out-of-hell style combines snappy editing, killer music (recorded in one day, mostly by local Melbourne bands the Toads and Spo-dee-o-dee) and unconventional compositions. There are shots through cracks of doors, out of car windows and there is a stylish use of hand-held cameras long before the technique became fashionable. One short carwash scene shows the film at its most frenetic, comprising about a dozen images lasting about a second each. That staccato rhythm encapsulates the film’s wigged-out energy.” Bob Weis and Bill Mousoulis Zoom video interview Bob Weis radio interview Pure Shit: Speedball comedy by Adrian Martin, Pure Shit website, April 1 2025. In Search of the Good Stuff: Pure Shit, Adrian Danks, Metro Magazine, Issue 149, 2006. Original Pure Shit poster, Bob Daly, Pure Shit: Australian Cinema, March 4, 2021. Interview with Bert Deling, director of Pure Shit, Luke Buckmaster, Crikey, June 5, 2009. Great info about the film at Oz Movies website. |
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Saturday, May 31, 2:45 pm MovieJuice is an Adelaide-based film collective dedicated to the screening & distribution of alternative & experimental cinema. In addition to showcasing boundary-pushing movies and music, they also make their own awesome magnificent microbudget art! |
MovieJuice is an Adelaide-based film collective dedicated to the screening & distribution of alternative & experimental cinema. In addition to showcasing boundary-pushing movies and music, they also make their own awesome magnificent microbudget art! BUFF is proud to present a triple feature of MovieJuice onscreen, with the filmmakers in attendance. Malls (2025, Dir. Daniel Tune, 60 mins) A STRUCTURAL ROMANCE Lou and Noodles are consumers. Adrift and empty, they are separate from each other and from the world. Ruled by desire and uncontrollable drives to excess, they spend their solitary hours in spaces both real and unreal. Occasionally, they are in the same part of the mall. In a landscape of increasing alienation and drab horrors masked by an endless feed of bright, colourful ones, Malls is a lament for a culture that is most alive in its doomed attempts to escape itself. An ambient city symphony that draws from the urban slow cinema of Tsai Ming-liang and the microbudget spirit of early John Waters, Malls sets on a search for the persistent poetry amongst and in spite of the glaring lights, piss-stained alleys and cold concrete slabs of the Adelaide CBD. Can we find it together? SIMILAR: Safe, Stranger Than Paradise, The Hole, Je Tu Il Elle, Nick Pinkerton's monograph on Goodbye Dragon Inn Night of the Cryptoid (2024, Dir. Aubrey Winslow + Jack Langford, 3 mins) PUNK'S NOT DEAD ... YET After accidentally killing a hippie cleaning up the woods, two littering youths are hunted down by nature incarnate. An homage to schlocky B-horror, shot on 16mm. Perfectly paced bloody mayhem!!! Ships That Bear (2023, dir. Gabriel Bath, 49 mins) POP. BANG. CRASH. IT'S AN EPIC HISTORICAL YARN Gabriel Bath’s Ships That Bear takes the audience on a journey that starts in the Cuban plains and ends in The Big Apple, all whilst his camera never leaves good ol’ Adelaide. A a backyard historical epic that is at once a dizzying symbolic treatise on the meaning of history and a very funny exercise in poetically goofing off. No money, no fear, a movie of infinite possibility. SIMILAR: Natural Born Killers, I Shot Andy Warhol, Bad Girls Go to Hell, the films of Julio Bressane Screens with a live Q&A. PRAISE FOR MALLS "Malls is melancholy and often gross, appropriate for a film titled in mock tribute to some of the worst, most lonely places on Earth." - Kai Perrignon, BUFF Head Programmer "Mcbeautiful. Mchypnotic." - Jordy Pollock, Letterboxd PRAISE FOR SHIPS THAT BEAR "Multidimensional friction that feels like the vibrations in a room full of people trying to figure out a revolution." - Kai Perrignon, BUFF Head Programmer "Wild, funny, riotous, experimental, abstract, political, playful, joyous, this is the best Australian film of the year by far. Now this is the kind of cinema Australia needs!" - Bill Mousoulis, Unknown Pleasures Co-Presented with Unknown Pleasures |
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Sunday, June 29, 7:00 pm Unknown Pleasures is excited to bring Melbourne filmmaker Kim Miles back to her hometown of Adelaide for a special screening. Miles is a radical and queer cinema artist who smashes both conventional forms and conventional gender stereotypes. Inspired by Lynch and Campion and Jarman, Miles' work is experimental, abrasive, playful, surreal, full of punk and jazz music, visually expressionistic, childlike, and even a little whimsical. She is bold and inventive like no other short filmmaker in Australia. (Bill Mousoulis) |
BDE (2025, 1:11 mins, HD digital)
Proportion of Australian males with erectile problems; nearly 40% (2025 edit of 2003 film, 4:50 mins, SD digital)
Mind Sick (2025, 4:34 mins, HD digital)
The World Really Is W (2004, 5:47 mins, SD digital)
Top Speed of a Rabbit - 72 KPH (2004, 9:56 mins, SD digital)
The Purpose of Life and the Nature of Death (2002, 4:49 mins, SD digital)
Heavyweight (Episode 1, 2025, 7:56 mins, HD digital) PREMIERE SCREENING
Sick to the Vitals (2005, 19:32 mins, SD digital)
Kim Miles is one of Unknown Pleasures' very favourite Melbourne filmmakers of the past 20 years. Originally from Adelaide, Miles studied acting in Sydney in the 1990s whilst working at the Sydney Opera House, before moving to Melbourne at the start of the new millennium and transferring her energy into making her own films, starting in 2002 with the short film Love and Death. She had an initial fertile period making 30 or so shorts from 2002 to 2014, before personal problems brought her to a standstill. After this point, she kept her artistic hand in by exploring digital photography (though there was one more film in 2018, the slick Exit Wounds), and recently, in mid 2024, her passion for filmmaking was finally rekindled. Coinciding with this new-found desire, as kismet would have it, some unexpected recognition came her way – her initial film work was discovered and analysed by academics Claire Henry and George Evander Cunningham at the 2024 Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand conference in Adelaide (and in the journal Short Film Studies), and the Melbourne Women in Film Festival screened one of her films (The World Really is W) in a prime slot, which was complemented with a Q&A with her and a profile essay written on her.
Miles has never made a feature (or mini-feature) length work, and this is a telling marker – her work is indeed short and sharp, suiting her punk aesthetic and experimental mind-set. She seems to have begun her film work in the early 2000s as an instinctive auto-didact, a naive artist (no film school, no knowing other indie filmmakers) with a wildly creative imagination and an incredible DIY confidence to explore and disrupt the medium of cinema, formally but also thematically. As I detailed in an essay I wrote in 2018 on her early work up to 2014, Miles' formal and stylistic play was one-of-a-kind in the Australian film landscape – lo-fi and punky (loud and in-your-face), experimental (fractured editing, exaggerated visuals), surreal (odd characters and plots), and even playful (a certain kind of whimsy and wonder appear at times). Being so enamored with this zany kaleidoscope of inventive formal and stylistic elements at the time, I neglected to see the more thematic radicalisations, how Miles' trans-diverse gaze and thinking created bold representations and deconstructions of gender and sexuality and relationships in her work. This idea is at the core of the essay George Evander Cunningham and Claire Henry wrote for the journal Short Film Studies last year (2024). It is wonderful to have academics recognise the value of Miles' art within this kind of context. Here is their conclusion: "In her combination of punk ethos and trans cinematic aesthetics, Miles displays the complex and contradictory nature of binary gendered relationships and, across her body of work, she disrupts short film conventions to explode normative gender assumptions, destabilizing tradition in favour of the new and the radical." (1)
Of the 10 films showing in this program, 7 of them are from that early pre-2014 period, even if a few of them have a brand new "director's prerogative" re-cut. Which means that 3 of the works we are presenting in this program are from recently, from 2024 and onwards, which is great news for all the Kim Miles fans out there, that she is back working on cinematic projects. The main work of the last few months especially are numerous short performance pieces, mainly with Miles herself looking at/playing to the camera, and the footage then manipulated with the editing. Two of these films are in the program: BDE is a great feminist provocation ("big dick energy"), complete with a sad but bold accusatory stare at the camera at the end; and Mind Sick is a haunting portrait of a person in mental disintegration, perhaps mental breakdown, perhaps dementia, and Miles suitably matches the content with the form of the film, as the visuals fracture and dissolve in the air. The other new film however, Heavyweight (Episode 1 of a series of short films), is a more traditional narrative work, with actors, but a brilliantly new direction for Miles, a detective spoof with bungling cops. It is Godardian in its genre deconstructionism, subverting police stereotypes and police-procedural tropes, complete with asynchronous dialogue and repeated takes (and, curiously, out-of-place spiritual music, again reminiscent of Godard). It's a surprising turn for Miles, but this is what radical artists do.
- Bill Mousoulis (programmer)
NOTE:
a film doesn't have to be a whole , it can be this image....this sound....this movement.....this face.....this music.....this behaviour......this feeling.......this mystery......this light.....this darkness.....this joke......this mistake......this body.... i throw everything on the canvas........the ideas,writing,filming,editing,adding, subtracting,shaping,refining,distorting, manipulating.... in this film an unexpected depth and soul from the young actor being arrested and played with revealed something mysterious, nasty, painful ......transcendental.
there was the humour and great black and white images but the end result is cinematic art, which is the goal.
Creating in the Chaos: Kim Miles
Punk Surrealist: Kim Miles
Punk Filmmaking |
Rocking Melbourne Ladies Post Wedding Blues |
The Purpose of Life and the Nature of Death
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Sick to the Vitals |
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Sunday, July 6, 2:30 pm We celebrate the life and work of one of Melbourne’s most remarkable and beloved film figures, Nigel Buesst, filmmaker, teacher, festival director - a true legend of Melbourne independent film. |
From the early 1960s, Nigel Buesst was active in the Melbourne independent film scene like no other: he made his own films, a broad range of documentaries and dramas, from the early 1960s up to the 2010s; he taught at the Swinburne Film & TV School from 1970 to 1984; he was director of the St.Kilda Film Festival from 1986 to 1990; he assisted many filmmakers in various ways, including managing editing suites; and generally he was a great supporter of Melbourne’s independent film community right up until his passing on December 27, 2024.
Nigel Buesst profile
Tribute to Nigel Buesst
Bill Mousoulis Zoom video interview (from 8:30, for Nigel discussion) |
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Tuesday, July 8, 8:30 pm A showcase of Salt Suck films with director and founder Rex Woods in attendance for a Q&A moderated by Digby Houghton. Salt Suck is an independent film production and exhibition company founded by Jade Valeontis and Rex Woods in 2017. Their films utilise avant garde aesthetics and alternative modes of distribution, as the company started their own fortnightly screening and studio space based in their house in Reservoir, which ran between 2021 and 2024. Five short films will be shown on the night. (Digby Houghton) |
A showcase of Salt Suck films with director and founder Rex Woods in attendance.
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God Speed
Blowing animated fantasies into neon lights. No sleep. A boy with a hood on looks at the Italian man with the broken face, he sees a tiger gently stride in and around the tightly packed crowd at Ivy. The girl in a sequin dress tells her friend and the boy about a nightmare she had, for the first time. |
The River
Three young people discover a portal into a parallel universe, Earth in the distant future. Time travel is the norm. |
Where the Platypus Live
When space is free and wifi is strong. Two women seek to capture the sound of the platypus. |
Pelican Girls
14 year old Sarah meets 17 year old Stella online. |
Moment of Being
A filmmakers family.
A poetic mother. |
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Tuesday, July 29, 8:15 pm We present a new 4K-enhanced version (thanks to Peter Tammer) of Daryl Dellora's powerful film, Mr Neal is Entitled to be an Agitator, about the visionary High Court Judge Lionel Murphy, who introduced many radical and political reforms into the legal system. Dellora is one of Australia's most committed documentary filmmakers, and Sue Maslin one of Australia's great progressive producers. Their production company Film Art Media has been active since 2008. (Digby Houghton) |
Film Art Media is an independent film production company established by Dellora and Maslin in 2008, as a rights management, development and distribution company. Film Art Media is responsible for the production of the 2015 adaptation of Rosalie Ham’s novel The Dressmaker; the theatrical release of Brazen Hussies and Courtney Barnett: Anonymous Club and the production and distribution of the television documentary, The Search For The Palace Letters. Maslin and Dellora have defined a generation of fiercely independent documentary, feature film making and narrative production. Mr Neal is Entitled to be an Agitator recounts the feats and triumphs of QC, high court judge and attorney-general during the Whitlam administration – Lionel Murphy. Murphy rose to prominence during the Whitlam administration as attorney-general where he created the Family Court of Australia, and developed the Family Law Act 1975, which fully established no-fault divorce. Dellora’s documentary highlights these achievements as well as the unlawful dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975. - Digby Houghton (programmer)
“The runtime makes the proceedings easy to follow, each taut piece of information passing by at a clipped pace in order to get to the essence of not only Lionel Murphy himself, but of a long-ingrained xenophobia that constitutes the foundations of present day White Australia.”
Review: Mr Neal is Entitled to be an Agitator (1991)
Daryl Dellora radio interview
Daryl Dellora and Digby Houghton Zoom video interview It’s time for another reforming and agitating attorney-general
Film Art Media page on the film
Daryl Dellora profile |
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