ARTRAGEOUS!

SUNDAY 23RD MARCH, 1:00pm
60 MINS, Cinema 2, ACMI

Full: $18
Concession: $14
ACMI Member: $12

This session is Unclassified 15+.

The Melbourne Women in Film Festival is proud to showcase the work of women and gender diverse filmmakers and storytellers. This means that we sometimes include films or panel topics that may explore difficult subjects and be confronting for some audiences. Our aim is to ensure our audience has a safe and enjoyable experience when coming along to our festival and so we have included content warnings, classification and cultural information throughout the program.

Please take the time to read the film synopses below to determine whether the session is suitable for you.

Join us for this special screening of experimental and avant-garde shorts from the 1990s and early 2000s. These hard-to-see films emerge from the era of Australian third-wave feminism, riotgrrl, and the 90s surrealist revival. Rebellious, funny and startling, these outré tales are truly not to be missed.

Films Include

  • Maidenhead is a series of chamber-fictions inhabited by a young woman named Alice. Linked in an oblique, dream like way, these short, sharp stories describe Alice’s survival in an everyday world of bizarre logic and strange emotions. It’s a place where miracles unfold in the bathroom and desire appears on a bus; where menacing joggers roam the suburbs and there’s something sinister about hats. Vibrant like musical, Maidenhead is at once funny and disquieting, poignant and absurd.

  • This experimental drama follows a young girl's adventures. She works as a prostitute and has a boyfriend but finds the situation a bit troubling so she goes on a journey into the Queensland outback.

  • A VERY WEIRD OFFICE!

  • A study of the relationship between words and meaning, Cheap Blonde deconstructs the notion of cinematic "truth" and highlights the contrived nature of every filmed image.

  • It is Hollywood’s favorite role for black women: the maid. Sassy or sweet, snickeringly attentive or flippantly dismissive, the performers who play them steal every scene they are in, and Tracy Moffatt’s engrossing video collage reveals the narrow margin Hollywood has allowed black actresses to shine in. But shine they do. Giving lip is proven an art form in these scenes from 1930’s cinema to present-day movies featuring a remarkable roster of undervalued actresses and their more celebrated white costars.

  • Amelia Rose Towers - whose initials spell ART - faces off against an adversary whose initials spell MAN, after passing through surrealistic chambers and screens offering images of a personal identity that can never be reconciled.


    Camp, baroque, decadently theatrical, with a distinctly Warholian rap on the soundtrack, Amelia Rose Towers is filled with an acute atmosphere of fear and loathing, and a suitably perverse ethic of survival.