That’s a wrap! The 2018 Sydney Underground Film Festival delivers its best season yet

This year’s Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF) was a feast for cinephiles, figuratively and literally (thanks to a seemingly endless supply of food and ice-cream — suffice it to say we never once ate dinner outside the festival). With four days of films and workshops, we were stunned, we were delighted and at points, grossed out. We were subjected to a whole smorgasbord of human emotion, some we didn’t think possible — these are our highlights.

In 2004, a time travel film debuted at Sundance to rapturous applause. It was called Primer, and it was mind-boggling: critics and audiences alike raced to figure out the timelines beneath the plot — so gnarled and knotted that fan-made maps soon emerged to explain the time travel mechanism.

Mega Time Squad is not that film — at all. The time travel here is deliberately messy and unexplained and it’s all the better for it, eschewing any kind of genre convention in favour of two hours of unabashed fun.

The lowdown: small-town dealer John (Anton Tennet) is on the run from druglord Shelton (Jonny Brugh, What We Do in the Shadows), but manages to evade being caught with the lucky use of a Chinese locket with time-travelling properties. What ensues is sheer mayhem — chase scenes through garages and hotel corridors, a lifetime supply of jokes about nuts (in all forms), Kiwi accents so strong they’ll fush and chup you into next Thursday, and, like all good films, a budding romance to rival any rom-com. A galvanising introduction to the weekend of weird treats that lay ahead!

Drones, porn, and Ned Kelly were all on the menu for this year’s Inhuman Screens conference. Led by a host of academics, including our very own Dr Stefan Popescu and Dr Bruce Isaacs, each presentation journeyed into the complexities of our digitised world, exploring everything from uberveillance to porn stars and the ‘nartifical body’: think Black Mirror but real. If Inhuman Screens had a nail-biting trailer, its soundtrack would most definitely be the banger that is Black Screen by LCD Soundsystem.

Alex Proyas found global success inside the Hollywood machine with commercial hits like I, Robot, Gods of Egypt and the cult-classic The Crow. Yet as his Is Hollywood Doomed? masterclass pointed out, this machine has morphed into a monster. Driven by box office earnings, franchises and reboots, innovation has fallen by the wayside.

What once was a feast heaping with originality and artistic challenges is now mere scraps left to competing filmmakers. Proyas’ portrait emphasised a shiny veneer of spandex wearing blockbusters disguising a dismal lack of creativity and an opposition to auteurism. At this point in the workshop, it didn’t seem like it could get any more depressing...then Proyas played Mad World.

Yet despite his eulogising of Tinseltown, the award-winning director, writer and producer wasn’t without some hopeful advice for the new generation of filmmakers: “Remember what is great about the medium and what made you fall in love with movies.”

Filmmaking is one of the loneliest professions in the world, Proyas remarked, driven by the sheer passion to realise an idea on screen: “it’s a mountain you never stop climbing”. In a world of superheroes, Proyas suggests we be a creative villain to Hollywood, be original, be determined and leave the studio system in our rear-view mirrors.

The analogue camera has become something of a trope in recent years — first immortalised in Super 8, a movie named after the film stock of the same name that features (in typical Spielbergian fashion) a ragtag gang of kids fighting sci-fi monsters and making amateur movies; then in Lana Del Rey’s clip for Video Games (and all singles thereafter); then in the carefully curated grids of every #35mm photographer on Instagram.

We’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little bit obsessed with the over-saturated, worn-out aesthetic of 16mm film, but this workshop gave us a new appreciation for the tactility of the medium — something that presenter and Sydney College of the Arts lecturer Peter Humble certainly didn’t hold back in evangelising.

“I love being able to touch it,” he said of the film medium again and again throughout the session.

And his enthusiasm paid off. We entered the shipping container-slash-theatre as two starry-eyed hopefuls with zero technical experience whatsoever; we left as two starry-eyed hopefuls with slightly more technical experience, having successfully unpacked, loaded, and wound a beast of a Bolex camera (almost) without help. For those who couldn’t make it, never fear: Humble’s launched a Workshop for Potential Cinema in Glebe dedicated to analogue appreciation and processing. If this session was anything to go by, it’ll be great.

The festival ended (appropriately) with the gore-splattered, neon-lit synth-y explosion that was Mandy. This latest Nicolas Cage flick is an art-house horror primed for countless memes of the actor, who for two hours, wields chainsaws and chugs vodka in tighty-whities (watch out Walter White).

The plot goes as follows: after the Manson-like cult leader Jeremiah murders the titular Mandy, Cage ragefully avenges the death of his beloved with as much anguished determination as us submitting essays at 11:59pm. What follows is a kind of narcotised video game with no escape key, as Cage traverses various hellish landscapes with an array of weapons including a DIY axe that is literally Buzzfeed Nifty on acid. Like cherries on this psychedelic sundae there’s also a gang of motorbike riding demons, a litany of sci-fi pulp novel references and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s stunning prog-rock score.

This is a film made with the SUFF audience in mind and its true riches are realised in a cinema full of screaming and cheering viewers armed with free ice-cream and an appetite for the weird.

Self-mocking and terrifyingly fun, Mandy is the cinematic equivalent to eating a sour warhead, or 12.

Lily Langman is a third-year Media and Communications student majoring in Film Studies and Michael Sun is also a third-year Media and Communications student majoring in English and Film Studies.

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is a Distinguished Partner of Sydney Underground Film Festival.