Stan Grant has hailed the choice of The Australian Dream, a documentary about AFL legend Adam Goodes, to open the Melbourne International Film Festival as "a really powerful statement".
"Given that it's the home of AFL, and it asks some really hard questions of the AFL and how the [Goodes saga] was handled, I think it's really fitting that it's opening in Melbourne," says Grant, who both wrote the film and is interviewed in it.
This is not the first project to tackle the vilification that eventually hounded dual Brownlow winner Goodes out of the game – The Final Quarter, which also addresses the subject, will screen at the Sydney Film Festival in June – but it is the first with which he has cooperated.
In the movie, the former Sydney Swans great talks openly and in detail for the first time about the emotional and psychological impact the persistent booing of his every move had on him.
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He also revisits the incident that some believe sparked the campaign against him, when he called out a 13-year-old female Collingwood fan who labelled him an "ape" during the 2013 Indigenous round.
But what ultimately persuaded Goodes to speak was the fact the filmmakers wanted to do far more than merely replay the incidents leading up to his decision to quietly retire at the end of the 2015 season. It was, says Grant, that they wanted to place that story within the wider context of an examination of Australia's national identity, including the uncomfortable truths that underlie the assertion that "Australians all" are equally free.
"I think the whole Indigenous question in Australia goes to the heart of what it means to call yourself a nation," says Grant, whose writing on the subject provides the intellectual spine of the film. "And I don't think that journey is ever finished."
And for all the footage of Goodes at his best on the footy field, that is what takes it well beyond the scope of a typical sports documentary.
"It's an accomplished piece of documentary filmmaking that tackles broader questions of who we are as a nation, together, in deeply affecting terms," says MIFF artistic director Al Cossar. "It's a film for all Australians, and a film for now."
Also among the first films announced for the festival is Sydney filmmaker Abe Forsythe's follow-up to Down Under. Starring Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave, Us) as a zombie-killing, ukulele-strumming kindergarten teacher, the zom-com Little Monsters will make its Australian debut at the newly-restored Capitol Theatre on Swanston Street, following its world premiere to strong reviews at Sundance in January.
Making its world premiere is the new film from Strangerland's Kim Farrant, Angel of Mine. Starring Swedish actress Noomi Rapace (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and written by Luke Davies (Catch-22, Lion), the film is a remake of the 2008 French movie L'Empreinte de l'ange (Mark of an Angel), about a woman who believes a young girl she meets at a birthday party is her own daughter, who has been missing for years. Richard Roxburgh, Yvonne Strahovski and Luke Evans also star.
Roxburgh will also be seen in H Is for Happiness, the WA-shot adaptation of acclaimed YA novel My Life as an Alphabet. The film will have its world premiere at the Family Gala at the Astor on August 11. Harry Potter's Miriam Margolyes heads the cast, alongside Emma Booth and Deborah Mailman.
Hardcore festival goers will have an endurance test worthy of their commitment in the form of the 14-hour La Flor, a six-part multi-genre metamovie from Argentinian writer-director Mariano Llinas. Starring four actresses who appear in each of the mini-movies within, it will screen across three one-off sessions.
Fans of virtual reality will also be catered to with a new home for the form at Arts House in North Melbourne, and a program that will be headlined by The Waiting Room, a collaboration between Molly Reynolds, Rolf de Heer and Mark Eland.
On the documentary front, Chinese-born, Berlin-based artist and activist Ai Weiwei continues to focus on the global refugee crisis in The Rest, the follow-up to his 2017 film Human Flow, while Charles Ferguson (director of the Oscar-winning Inside Job) turns his gaze on America's most famous political scandal in Watergate – Or: How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President.
Musician PJ Harvey, meanwhile, teams up with Irish photojournalist Seamus Murphy for A Dog Called Money, an exploration of war-ravaged Kosovo and Afghanistan and the poverty-wracked parts of Washington, D.C.
Full details of the first glance program can be found at miff.com.au. The full program will be announced on July 9. The Melbourne International Film Festival runs August 1-18.