In her review of the Sydney Film Festival’s Virtual Reality program, Lauren Carroll Harris encounters a work about incipient blindness which is at once wonderfully immersive and deeply empathic (image above). We turn to art for the sustenance with which to understand and face reality, or to evade it. We often do both at once, finding in art a refuge from which we can reflect on painful reality at a distance. In Britain, a Prime Minister, in appeasing the right-wing of his party, has made real the rank nationalism, xenophobia and racism of Brexit. Artists will suffer, losing access to the EU’s £1.3 billion Creative Europe funding program, to visa-free movement, training programs and the benefits of “the largest export market for the UK's creative industries, totalling 56% of all overseas trade in the sector.” In Australia, we face the harsh reality of the Turnbull Government’s depredation of culture and its cowardly, non-binding, right-wing accommodating gay marriage plebiscite. We hope that the brave art we respond to in this e-dition will provide some solace and strengthen our collective resolve to fight for art beyond the 2016 election.
REVELATORY VIEWING Humans behave like chimps; a family, cats included, relocate to the wilds; a profoundly patient camera transforms our sense of the world; and a space courier witnesses Fukushima-like destruction across the universe in the REVELATION Perth International Film Festival.
A CULTURAL SHAPE-SHIFTER In Mens rea: the Shifter’s Intent, Raghav Handa, creator of the celebrated Tuk're, brings together his Indian heritage, his experience in performing for Aboriginal choreographers and transformative digital animation.
VIRTUAL REALITY GETS REAL At the Sydney Film Festival, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, in which sound plays a pivotal role in sharing the experience of a man’s incipient blindness, convinces Lauren Carroll Harris that VR can make art.
A NECESSARY CELEBRATION
Amid funding challenges but with undimmed spirit, the National Play Festival headlines new plays, introduces works by Asian-Australian, Indigenous and New Zealand playwrights and features intensive discussion led by prominent writers.
GIVEAWAY DVD
Roy Andersson’s Venice Gold Lion Winner, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, captivated cinema audiences with absurdist humour loosely centred around two salesmen selling joke toys, badly. We have 3 copies to give away courtesy of Madman Entertainment.
RealTime E-dttions are published by Open City an Incorporated Association in New South Wales. Open City Inc is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy [VACS], an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. RealTime’s Principal Technology Partner is the national communications carrier, Vertel.
Opinions published in RealTime are not necessarily those of the Editorial Team or the Publisher.
RealTime, Open City Inc PO Box A2246 Sydney South 1235 Australia
