Sothysen Tuyhor Screens in the lobby of the Capitol Theatre in full festival mode (Source: Own photograph)
Writer’s Note: This was written some days after my return to Cambodia from Melbourne, having finally processed my time there and being ready to write once more. The text itself is less a comprehensive review of the films I watched in Melbourne than a reflection on them and my other experiences there. As much as I wish to discuss more events to be more charitable to this city which I am more bitter about than appreciative of, I became too tired and defaulted to what felt essential to mention. At the end of the day I suppose I did not want my memory of this festival to wither away as easily as my memories of Melbourne itself. To give precedence to the films and the festival would mean a minimum of precedence to the city, its history and my relationship to it. I came into this text attempting to remember and reflect on these events and leave it having done so; feeling no more fulfilled nor dejected. Whatever you, dear reader, see in it is your own. I can only hope that it offers something positive overall.
Opening
The excellent and aesthetic interior of the Capitol Theatre and my view of the screen for All of a Sudden but projecting a Rolex ad which has become the bane of my existence (as if I have not seen enough at BFI Southbank!). (Source: own photograph)
I first witnessed Melbourne’s Capitol theatre when I was walking on Swanston Street to get to a Brunetti with my parents. We sort of had a strange business lunch coming up but I had not yet satisfied my craving for a cappuccino. I pointed out to my dad as we passed by, he reminisced that Phnom Penh too used to have a Capitol theatre, a seemingly popular name around the world as I recall Singapore having one as well. He said it was almost all gone now, the cinemas of the previous age of Cambodia. And then we continued walking. The last time I came to this area, was in a mad rush, an ankle-breaking sprint from Melbourne Central to make a screening of The President’s Cake in boots. I had a nice catch up with a friend at that screening and it was an excellent film overall. This pleasantness I wished to replicate as I returned home that day, got done with an online meeting and the booking of tickets.
Day One (07/08/2026)
[Track 1: 太陽の翼 (Taiyou No Tsubasa, transl. Wings of the Sun) by The Spiders]
I wake up after a sporadic set of alarms from my phone have awakened me at the rough interval between six to eight in the morning. Rarely have I ever woken up so groggy, crawling into a lukewarm shower assisted by the heating from the light bulbs. Far more concerning for my timing, my sister, who seems to be oblivious to the concept of a sensible bedtime and requiring a good few punches at the door to even channel a faint yawning groan from.
“We can leave at like ten or ten-thirty. It doesn’t take that long to get into the city.” She says with the confidence of a tired, too-regular commuter. Goodness the things that life plays on you to make you miss London’s public transports. God, I just hate Australian Suburbia; just an endless row of tasteless, nondescript and hollow walls barely held together by their façades of brick and slightly manicured lawns. For great expanses it is nothing but this affront to the living which has segmented both land and people. At least a city does the latter less, a forced proximity much like a cinema. Thankfully my sister and I got a rather empty area of seats in the theatre for this screening of Two Seasons, Two Strangers. A film which occasionally seemed to offer a mirror to the lucky sunny weather I recall for the day. Each careful shot of nature, each meditative pause in silence. The film was evidently a slight test of patience for roughly ninety minutes, or at least for a noon screening that was my first in the day. As well is the fact that it is rather structurally ambiguous at times. The titular two seasons present as rather antithetical but director Sho Miyake stresses how they come to be one, the balance, sides of a coin.
[Track 2: ដើរលេងក្នុងសួន (Der Leng Knong Suon, transl. Leisurely Garden Stroll) by Chhun Vanna]
Perhaps a most profound detail to the film’s vision is how it tries to lend attention to the voices of the downtrodden, the depressed, the outsiders of Japanese society. This is occupied by each pair of strangers but is most evident in the writer character of Lee (Shim Eun-kyung), whose role allows for the audience to remain locked in a slightly Brechtian affair. One never forgets that they are really watching a film and so forcing an engagement with the film’s rather melancholic or mundane diegesis requires an intense hyper-engagement. Whether one tires of it or not, I think the film at least masters this mode of filmic presence.
[Track 3: Johana by Johari Salleh]
We step out of the theatre with roughly less than an hour before I try to go back and attempt to get into the screening of All of a Sudden at The Capitol, again. To ensure a safe enough timing, my sister suggests having Char Kway Teow at Ho Liao in a slightly hidden building sitting behind the aforementioned Brunetti on Swanston. A great (stir-)fry up of the classic noodle dish, a favourite of mine. Add to that a split side order of chicken, pickled veggies and an egg tofu dish with soy on top, as I continue writing the dish’s name still eludes me, and one has got a wonderful brunch of sorts to wash down with the viscous, vigour-inducing magic of teh tarik.
With a good ten minutes or so until the screening, I stroll over back to The Capitol. With no extra seat close by, my sister declined to join and instead saved herself the almost two hundred minutes by going to the Melbourne University campus to nap. Evidently a sleep schedule I shall never fully understand.
Perhaps in a bid to rival his initial international claim to fame Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi opts for All of a Sudden’s title card to basically appear as soon as the establishing shot of rooftops in Île de France break us open into this extended drama of hope with cynicism along with the continuous struggles of compassion fatigue and the thankless work of caring.
[Track 4: String Quartet, M. 35: II. Assez vif, très rythmé (composed) by Maurice Ravel, performed by Emerson String Quartet]
Part didactic political philosophy treatise on humanity, part trauma-bonding and mutual aiding through it all, Hamaguchi’s script is certainly not even close to the easily consumable, super-digestible stories that I once heard Coppola complain about. If it is even “engineered” at all, it is not done so for any sense of pleasing the audience. Engagement is voluntary and therefore active, even if the walking and talking may come off as the standard passivism of most contemporary films.
More so than other films of his, the emotional agony is far more palpable here. That is thanks to the contributions of the performances, and I wish to highlight yet another appearance of Kyōzō Nagatsuka’s lovely French-speaking voice which we only got a brief glimmer of in Teki Cometh, but perhaps as well in these performances that deliver the bilingual beauty of the film. Of course, subject matter does a lot more as well. It somehow touches on even more serious themes than Evil Does Not Exist, which perhaps may offer the biggest contention as one is bound to have their own moral position. Hamaguchi himself tries to be quite honest in the depiction of human nature and society but at times seems hesitant to offer any sense of treatment or diagnosis. This, I feel, is far from the truth though. His answers lie in the subtle, almost dreamily transcendent moments that feel unreal. Not out of many supposing that they are idealistic or unrealistic, but that they situate some innate aspect of us that we are yet to realise ourselves. His critical lens is incredibly thin, almost like an artisanal satin-like paper. It is in the interest of sensitivity which life and cinema almost requires if not benefits from in a contemporary age which begins to devalue it.
If only I could have processed all that with a good amount of time. But alas I needed to get on back to Melbourne Central, to ensure I was early enough to arrive at the Hoyts, and also catch up with my sister and my cousin who were to join me for Master and Human Resource there.
[Track 5: Paint a Lady by Susan Christie]
In the rare and exciting occasion here that us three get to hang out, my cousin got a drink and my sister a popcorn and drink. We hopped into screen three, sat through the pre-roll, including one that I became too familiar with, an Intrepid ad about a couple breaking up but both attend MIFF while avoiding each other, and a variety of film or governmental logos. Some background chanting, to be expected for Master as a film about Bangladeshi politics, but then more talking (not chanting) without subtitles! How does this happen? A good ten minutes in and attendants began either leaving or complaining to staff. We were rather unfazed and resigned, trying to at least appreciate the visual storytelling of its clean and nicely shot lens. Evidently though that is unsustainable for a Melbourne screening where the audience most definitely is not expecting to be fluent in Bengali. A damn shame because it seemed like a genuinely interesting film for me who knows rather little about Bangladeshi cinema, what I feel to maybe be the less beloved sibling of Bengali cinema with Ray and Ghatak more in India (though note that I hope there is an ultimately unified essence even regardless of whether the filmmaker was either in Kolkata or Dhaka or elsewhere). The staff announced the session’s cancellation, and appropriately refunded us. We left having only gone through a handful of popped kernels and roughly fifty minutes of runtime. More than two hours to go until the next film.
The drifting around was ultimately rather uneventful. A few hungry people walk down and eat some noodles and a couple hundred grams of Japanese steak. Then my cousin had a few Vietnamese spring rolls. Even more time left and we head down for an Asian grocery and stock up on drinks, for me some more tea to keep awake for the night screening. The minutes strike closer and we make our way up again. To my memory, MIFF showed on its schedule interface that Human Resource would be in the same theatre as Master, screen three. But under the impression that the “technical difficulty” was not resolved yet, it seemed sensible that the volunteer directed us to screen eleven (IMAX!!! Though this film was not optimised for it) instead. Even the tickets scanned were valid. How convenient then that upon pre-rolls and the Studiocanal and CNC logos we realised the misguidance, that we had just entered a screening to Radu Jude’s contemporary, slightly experimental adaptation of Diary of a Chambermaid. How convenient as well that we went for dead centre seats and that both films were scheduled for the same time. I should wish to say it all was a happy little accident but baseline strange films should be enjoyed at your consent and personal dedicated motivation.
I liked it overall. It seems so clearly the kind of film that gets made when you just want to experiment with one specific filmmaking aspect. In this case, it is the cinematography of mobile phones, which serves two main purposes of communicative detachment and committing further to documentary realism. A random recording of rural ruin almost becomes a literal channel for geographical presence, as if we fill the shoes of citizen journalists, amateur documentarians.
Yet, everything else verges on a ‘take it or leave it’ question depending on your taste for social commentaries and satires. It is an excellent comedy at times which reserves no mercy for so many subjects to its diegesis. Nonetheless, the combination of its barebones script, slightly incohesive cast synergy and ultimately drained tone limit it greatly. It seemed more suggestive of an incidental product of negligence rather than any active capture of the ennui and struggle of domestic labour. Though Ana Dumitrașcu was still the main standout. I of course have not read the source material, nor seen the various adaptations of it, so it might actually be more insightful with its slight metatextual tangents than I might be giving it credit for.
We left Melbourne Central a little more than scarred and confused. And now checking the runtimes through festival information, we found that Human Resource was still going. Most symbolic was that I snuck into screen three to see its still projections, a scene where a character walks into a packed elevator and sees back into the corner and bears witness to what I can only guess is the protagonist’s mental breakdown as she tears up about something. She stares into the camera with an attempt at a reassuring smile, almost desperately accepting something, and nods. That can only be the most fitting and poetic encapsulation with how done and disillusioned I was by that evening. Thankfully all was not lost after a kindly worded email returned our three multipass admissions.
