Al Cossar is the Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, the largest and longest running film festival in the Southern Hemisphere, and a major centre for all things documentary in Australia. Indeed, his passion is non-fiction filmmaking of all kind, and he can be found often (mostly?) in front of a screen, in Melbourne or abroad, absorbing new and old cinema alike, or generally drinking too much coffee; or let’s face it, both.
How to Survive a Plague
How could I not include a film with this title in the mix at the moment?
Putting that aside, I've always remembered the positive ferocity of this film since first viewing it, and it's a doc I hold in very high regard. David France's angry, incendiary, full force Oscar-nominated portrait of how activists impacted medical roads into HIV treatment in the 1980s and 90s is a knockout, a reminder of how determination can forge a path through politics. France is a filmmaker who has continued to build a body of work that stridently profiles LGBTQI+ persecution and activism across titles such as The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson, and the extraordinary Welcome to Chechnya), and his work as documentarian is on fine display here. Double-feature it with Robin Campillo's recent BPM if you can for maximum impact. I feel like a hypeman writing all of that - which doesn't make it less true, though.
Island of the Hungry Ghosts
In 2018, when we played this film at MIFF, I wouldn’t stop recommending it to people. I’m not done now, either. Just watch it – a singular vision of nature, folklore and politics colliding, Gabrielle Brady's film is one of the high-points of recent Australian filmmaking of any kind. It's a doc that seems to take a kind of inspiration from Apichatpong's cinema, a refugee film like no other. Managing a surreal poetry and a political certainty, Island of the Hungry Ghosts is an otherworldly vision of migration and detention, movement and limbo - in short, a must-see.
Vivan Las Antipodas!
If there's a film that earns it's exclamation mark, it's probably this one. In these times of COVID confinement where we crave connectivity, of reclaiming movement and, to be grandiose here, the world itself, it's great to watch a film that takes that connectivity as its thesis, and does so in such playful and persuasive and unexpected ways, in profiling pairs of places in the world that are diammetrically opposed to each other. Kossakovsky is a filmmaker with a singular, persistent eye that always seems to see things in a way no-one else does. And I'm always delighted to see where this master filmmaker takes us - here, it happens to be everywhere.
City of Gold
If your mainline to foodie culture on screen is a weeknight Masterchef mysterybox, I fully encourage you to check out Laura Gabbert's lovely portrait of the Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold (a MIFF guest, and sadly recently passed away). It's a charming taste-travelogue of Los Angeles itself, a city revealed and rediscovered by way of taco trucks and off-street eateries. The film, through its consideration of the role of the critic gives an an insight on insight itself, and ultimately a reminder of how food nurtures us in ways that have nothing to do with calories or kilijoules. And when you're a few steps away from your kitchen in the middle of a pandemic, there's a new kind of comfort to that.
The Ground We Won
I may be a New Zealander at heart (also on my birth certificate), but the national sport/hysteria of rugby is never something I've grown to rabidly fixate upon like many of my countrymen. However, Christopher Pryor and Miriam Smith's The Ground We Won is a documentary that sees the sport in a whole other way - their take is a visually beautiful, accomplished portrait of rugby as the authentic connective tissue of a small town NZ farming community over the course of a year or so. It's a sort of neo-pastoral, sometimes idyllic, occasionally beer-soaked and irreverent - a film that oscillates between quiet observation, a benign rowdiness and a sporting spirit that can't fail to charm.
Marwencol
Jeff Malmberg's film is an indelible documentary portrait of Mark Hogancamp - an artist who, following a harrowing attack, escapes into an elaborate miniature world (the titular town of Marwencol) populated by dolls; a space where WW2 era storylines play out, reforming as memory and identity to fill the space of what he has forgotten in the assault. It's a simply unforgettable film that speaks so forthrightly to art's potential to confront and process trauma, as therapy, and as creative reckoning.
