THIS year's Adelaide Film Festival kicks off on October 5 with a spectacular after-dark festive carnival of cinema surprises.
The festival, which this year celebrates the 40th anniversary of the punk movement, will be a carnival of creative freedom showing the mavericks, the auteurs, the screen visionaries and all that embodies the 2017 theme, Vive Le Punk!
Opening night guests will be immersed in the 360-degree world of The Summation of Force VR, sharing a simultaneous connection through the world premiere screening.
Then follows 11 days of festival fervour featuring 23 world premieres and 40 Australian premieres among 142 feature films, documentaries, virtual reality, shorts and moving image works.
New films include zombie tear-jerker Cargo and Warwick Thornton's Sweet Country.
Martin Freeman stars alongside Natasha Wanganeen and David Gulpilil in Cargo, the story of an infected man trying to protect his daughter in the aftermath of a violent pandemic. The film marks the directorial debut of Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling.
Sweet Country, Thornton's first fiction feature since Samson & Delilah (2009), is set on the Northern Territory frontier of the 1920s with stunning cinematic visions and soundscape in the MacDonnell Ranges.
Australian premieres include Ai Weiwei's Human Flow, a study of displaced people filmed across 23 countries; Lana Wilson's The Departure, focusing on a Japanese Zen priest who specialises in working with the suicidal; Lefteris Charitos' stunning portrait of freediver Jacques Mayol, Dolphin Man; and Taste of Cement, Ziad Zalthoum's documentary about Syrian construction workers virtually imprisoned on the site of the Beirut skyscrapers they build.
Art on Screen, a collection of short films in one feature session, celebrates artists on screen - as filmmakers, as performers and art on screen.
They are Remembering Agatha from Emma Magenta and featuring Andrea Demetriades and Alex Dimitriades; Oddlands, in which Des and Tam are members of a clean-up crew in a strange toxic wasteland; and Brumley's Suitcase, which follows three Adelaide musicians who are brought together with musicians from Texas for a once-in-a-lifetime journey of discovery.
In keeping with the festival's punk theme, there will be a host of punk screenings including The Decline of Western Civilisation (1981), The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle (1980) and the first British punk movie, Jubilee (1978).
Closing night features the Australian premiere of Sophie Fiennes' stunning documentary Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami followed by a gala party.
The Adelaide Film Festival will be staged at its new home, the revamped GU Film House in the city's West End, from October 5-15.
- Ticketing is now open, with special $10 daytime tickets for seniors. Also available is the MultiPass 5 ($89), which gives the holder admission to any five standard sessions plus one bonus daytime screening (up to four tickets per session can be booked on the pass so you can take your friends). Check out the program and make bookings at adelaidefilmfestival.org
Bookings can also be made in person at the box office, GU Film House courtyard, 128 Hindley Street, Adelaide, from September 20.
- We have a MultiPass 5 to give away. For your chance to win, tell us in 25 words or less your favourite Australian film and why.
Entries close 11.59pm, October 1.
