Originally published by The Sydney Morning Herald,28 May 2010
By PHILIPPA HAWKER

THE Melbourne International Film Festival has released a sneak preview of this year’s program and, yes, there are films from China on the list. Last year, MIFF incurred the wrath of Chinese authorities because it screened a film about Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer, who was also a festival guest. Chinese films were withdrawn from the program, the MIFF website was hacked and the story was reported around the world.

This meant, says executive director Richard Moore, that the festival ’emerged with a reputation for taking an independent stand’, and, he says, it will do so again.

Two of the Chinese titles in MIFF 2010 are City of Life and Death, a film about the Japanese invasion of Nanjing, and Love in a Puff, a romantic comedy about smoking. But MIFF will also screen Petition, a powerful documentary that was to have been part of last year’s festival. It is a devastating critique of the operation of petitioning – a Chinese extra-judicial process that is meant to allow citizens redress against official corruption.

MIFF will also be ‘a Ken Loach-free zone’ in 2010, Moore says. Last year the director withdrew his film, Looking for Eric, in protest at MIFF’s use of Israeli government funding for a festival guest. Loach has a new work, Route Irish, that premiered at Cannes, but MIFF has not invited it. This year, Moore says, there will again be Israeli government funding to bring a guest, documentary maker Yael Hersonski, to the festival.

MIFF will also again have a strand – titled States of Dissent – focusing on political documentaries with a contrarian emphasis. These will include Black Bus, the account of two orthodox Jewish women who chose a secular life; Russian Lessons, an examination of media manipulation in the coverage of the Russo-Georgian war; and Strange Birds in Paradise, an Australian film that takes an innovative approach to covering the West Papua independence movement.

There is a selected retrospective on the inspired and often overlooked US filmmaker, Joe Dante, including an early work, the six-hour The Movie Orgy, which screens over the course of a night, and his new 3D movie, The Hole.

Other MIFF titles include Four Lions, Chris Morris’s controversial comedy about suicide bombers; Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s film based on Robert Harris’s thriller about a British prime minister; French master Jacques Rivette’s most recent feature, Around A Small Mountain; Caterpillar, Koji Wakamatsu’s confronting critique of Japanese nationalism; and cult filmmaker Harmony Korine’s low-budget, lo-fi Trash Humpers.

The music strand, Backbeat, includes a documentary on Motorhead frontman Lemmy; Tom DiCillo’s When You’re Strange, which features extensive footage of The Doors; and Taqwacore, a look at an Islamic punk band.

There are documentaries on Playboy’s Hugh Hefner and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat,

and Adrian Grenier, star of Entourage, has made a documentary about a young teenager who is part of the paparazzi set. Animator Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville) has adapted an unproduced Jacques Tati script The Illusionists, and there is a documentary, Waking Sleeping Beauty, that takes a warts-and-all look at the Disney studios.

Moore, and MIFF head of programming Michelle Carey, attended Cannes and about 30 Cannes titles have been invited to Melbourne. The Cannes competition was regarded as disappointing in some quarters, but Moore says there were some strong films in the sidebar events and the markets. It has been, he feels, a particularly big year for documentaries and the MIFF program reflects this.

MIFF will announce its full program on July 6. The festival begins on July 22.