Sydney Film Festival 2026
Paul Sheehan reviews Andrey Zvyaginstev's Minotaur and Cristian Mungiu's Fjord.
Lana Chryssavgis reviews Alan Gomis' Dao.
Desmond Bravo reviews Lucrecia Martel's Nuestra Tierra.
The 73rd Sydney Film Festival ran from 3-14 June, 2026. Caméra-Stylo contributors examine some of the Festival’s more auspicious offerings, tracing a path from Russia, Norway and Guinea-Bissau to Argentina.
Michael Haneke entered the Australian film world in the 1990s via the festival circuit. Benny’s Video (1993) and 71 Fragments from a Chronology of Chance (1995) premiered at the Sydney Film Festival, and even after Haneke’s reputation grew and his films were given local releases, the SFF screened Funny Games (2007), Amour (2012) and his 2017 swansong, Happy End. It’s entirely apt, then, that his inheritors should also build audiences and critical patronage through the same festival route. Two films in SFF 2026 feature Hanekesque nuclear families as focal points for probing European bourgeois subjectivity (as Haneke saw it, the family was “the first site of all warfare”). In one of these works, class and privilege are shown to be instruments of self-duplicity; in the other, the family unit is exposed to a socially engineered moral blindness.
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is ostensibly a remake of Claude Chabrol’s spare, restrained thriller, La femme infidèle (1969). A film about the unravelling of a bourgeois marriage might seem a bit trite for the master Russian filmmaker who examined class conflict, state corruption and familial division so incisively in Elena (2011), Leviathan (2014) and – especially – Loveless (2017). But Zvyagintsev uses his characteristic ‘overlay’ technique, adding in allusions to Greek mythology and Russian war mobilization. So, for example, he deftly translates the human ‘sacrifices’ that fuel the minotaur myth – seven youths and seven maidens – into cannon fodder for Russia’s war machine.
The man organizing the sacrifices is Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a mini-oligarch in provincial Russia, who suspects his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) of infidelity; his efforts to prove it lead to a violent and bloodthirsty plot-twist. But although it won the Sydney Film Prize at the festival, Minotaur is not Zvyagintsev’s best work, especially when put alongside the more caustic and existentially grim Loveless, which elucidated a pervasive, unnerving social condition. Still, Zvygantsev’s technical mastery is evident in almost every shot. A slow, simple pan around an apartment embodies this consummate assurance: not presenting clues or portents, just showing how one of the pivotal figures lives, deepening his character.
More successful, I think, is Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord – also a prize-winner, picking up the Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier in 2026. Fjord takes the director, and the family at the centre of the drama, out of their native Romania and into small-town Norway. Mungiu pits the town’s steadfast but vulnerable religious minority against the ‘progressive’ ways of earnest social workers, lawmakers and jurists, agents for Norway’s social-democratic welfare state. But he takes this somewhat over-familiar scenario – which is based on a real-life case that occurred in 2015 – and turns it on its head. For it is the progressives who are the extremists, in their self-conviction and zeal to protect the (supposedly) defenseless children. As the situation escalates, state-directed guardianship and duty of care shade over into heedless cruelty.
An unrecognizable Sebastian Stan – bald, bearded and bespectacled – plays Mihai, the father, and the Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Values, Backrooms) his wife, Lisbet. A string of pointed but plausible misunderstandings lead to the involvement of child protection services, as the couple’s two children are taken from them, pending an investigation followed by a tribunal. But is Mungiu really defending repressive religious mores, as some critics have claimed? In the first instance, just how ‘repressive’ the family’s methods are is put in question when we see how the children talk earnestly and warmly about their doctrinal practices, when their parents are not around. Moreover, anyone discomfited by the family’s religiosity would do well to remember Mungiu’s 2012 film Beyond the Hills, set in a Romanian Orthodox convent, in which a young woman is admonished, restrained and ultimately tortured by the (self-righteous) nuns and priests who run the monastery. Bigotry can take many forms, and liberal-bourgeois habitus, with all its shortcomings, contradictions and failures, is no exception – as Michael Haneke well knew. Both Minotaur and Fjord extend Haneke’s legacy, skewering the class that celebrates its own myopic self-interest, whilst questioning its core values and agendas.
Paul Sheehan
Flows of Perpetual Movement and Radical Collectivity
Alan Gomis’ sixth feature film, Dao, moves artfully between a wedding in France and a funeral in Guinea-Bissau. Although part of the SFF’s Official Competition, Dao resists simple categorisations or distinctions between fiction and documentary, drama and ethnography, lived experience and performance. Gomis shows the setting up of this framework, with footage featuring the casting of the film’s ‘characters’, a seamless mix of professional and non-professional actors – but it also plays out improvised and unscripted scenes that shake off any concerns about an over-serious self-awareness in favour of joyful immersion. In that regard, Dao has been described as ‘sprawling’ or ‘swirling’ in form and content. As it happens, the film invites these descriptors from the very start, with this on-screen definition of its title: “DAO is a perpetual and circular movement which flows in everything and unites the world.” The film drifts between people and worlds, conversations and songs, moments of action and of silence. Accordingly, the camera is concerned more with shaping spontaneous movements and moments than any clear narrative or story. Clocking in at just over three hours, Dao asks its audience to align with its own rhythms and flows, eschewing traditional cinematic storytelling.
Yet Dao is neither lacking form nor hostile to either ‘tradition’ or ‘storytelling’. Rather, it takes these concepts as modes of inquiry, observed through an almost anthropological approach that does not shy away from its colonial baggage. Through microscale positioning of a singular family – mostly made up of Gomis’s own family members – around two major rituals, the film amplifies the universality of familial bonds in spaces of both celebration and mourning. Moments of feeling or friction occur in those ritual practices that are bound up in tradition, revealing the ties and gulfs that accrete between the generations, and between local and diasporic participants. At the wedding reception, in one of its most humorous and memorable scenes, a football game brings children and adults together, where familiar forms of interfamilial rivalry and casual competitiveness play out; whilst in Guinea-Bissau, Nour (D’Johé Kouadio) meets the customs and rituals of her extended family with openness and curiosity, despite the hindrances of language and understanding.
It is with this same sense of openness and curiosity that Gomis presents the film. He allows his subjects to fill out the on-screen space, without forcing the camera or scripted dialogue to fill in missing story details. In the Q&A following the film’s screening and in various interviews, Gomis affirms that much of the film’s dialogue was unscripted and improvised, giving his performers opportunities to convey intimate experiences that are not necessarily resolved in the film. Gomis points to the scene where women in the village divulge their experiences of domestic violence at the hands of men. As he said to the Hollywood Reporter: “These women, at this moment, chose to talk about it because they wanted to talk about it. It wasn’t me, saying, Okay, let’s talk about men. They chose to say that, they wanted to share this experience.” The film comes alive in moments like these, where collectivity is felt and can emerge naturally, without restraint. In refusing always to provide answers or explanations, Dao presents both a restitution and celebration of African heritage – without, crucially, ignoring the impact of colonial history and memory on the coming together of community.
Lana Chryssavgis
Lucrecia Martel and the Argentine Colonial Imagination
It might seem strange to call Nuestra Tierra (literally ‘Our Land’ but premiering at the Sydney Film Festival as Landmarks), made by Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, her first ‘documentary’. Questions of form aside, Martel’s work, in films such as Zama (2017), La Cienaga (2001), and Un Mujer Sin Cabeza (2008), has always felt attuned to the animus of a nation with its eyes stubbornly closed. With Nuestra Tierra, the Salta-born director extends her interrogation of colonial and bourgeois institutions to their calculated erosion of indigenous sovereignty.
The documentary centres around the murder of Javier Chocobar, an elder of the Indigenous Chuschagasta community in northern Tucumán, in 2009. The incident echoes many others: Dario Amín, a mine owner, arrives brandishing a court-approved permit claiming that the land belongs to him. He is supported by two ex-police officers, Luis Gómez and Eduardo Valdivieso. The community have only their ancestral and enduring ties to the land – ties that are legally contested and pressed with erasure. There is a heated exchange. After refusing to heed warnings, and driving deeper into Chuschagasta territory, Amín exits his vehicle before being confronted by three men, one of them Chocobar, in a quarry on the outskirts of their property. The situation quickly deteriorates, and Amín draws his pistol and fires on Chocobar. After nine years of protests over government inaction, the three men are finally brought to trial.
The film explores the incident and the 2018 trial obliquely. It interposes and juxtaposes material to examine the crime against the Chuschagasta from within the institution of criminal justice: segments of court hearings, witness testimonies; Amín’s court-ordered re-enactment of the killing; pixelated DV-camera footage taken by one of the ex-police officers. When the Indigenous community are placed within this judicial framework they are forced to, in Martel’s words, take a “defensive stance”. They are scrutinised and intimidated. Martel frames her understanding of the technology of the court and judicial document as one of domination: “The Spanish colonials, above all specifically in Latin America, brought two interesting concepts: the idea of God and the document…paper documents mediating [all] human transactions…I think these are both more powerful than weapons themselves.” At one point, a member of Amín’s defence team questions whether it is right to let the filmmaker film a public hearing, lest it turn the trial into a “circus”. But it is precisely this bureaucratic performance, the modes of scrutiny it applies, how and where it applies pressure, and ultimately, its blind spots, that Lucrecia Martel is interested in.
Her focus on the court hearing places us within the ring of judicial action, interrogating colonial frameworks of knowledge with a slanted view from within. At the same time, ever-present is cinematography of the land itself, the verdant mountain ranges in Tucumán Province. But Martel’s visual choices place audiences at an incredible distance from the land in question.
It is telling, for instance, that Nuestra Tierra opens with a shot of a satellite orbiting the Earth. Next, it cuts to a reverse-shot of a flat planimetric view of the Argentine country, before homing in toward Tucumán. The film includes many shots like this, views of the terrain from above. But it is difficult to shake the feeling of that first reverse-shot: not a bird’s eye-view, but a ‘satellite’s-eye view’. Satellites, radar, GPS, drone and helicopter viewfinders: these are technologies that image the land and lay the groundwork for the imagination of extraction and possession. The drone becomes an ideological variation on eighteenth-century landscape painting, or its legacies in early photography with prominently featured surveyors and explorers, producing images of a vast and apparently empty land.
One wonders why Martel decided to make heavy use of a drone, to make its footage such a prominent feature of the documentary. This is, after all, equipment eagerly adopted by real estate videographers and soldiers alike. But Martel, through her engagement, insists on defining and exploring its parameters of vision – on exploring what it can do and see and what it cannot see: a negative recognition of its limitations. There is even a literal turning on its head when the perspective of an aerial view flips upside down, earth becoming sky; and a humbling moment when a drone is knocked out of the sky by an eagle.
I am reminded of an anecdote from the Palestinian author and educator Adania Shibli, taking her students from Birzeit University, in Ramallah, to an Israeli watchtower. There, she stops them in front of it and warns that in the desire for liberation you may be tempted to climb it, to commandeer and turn it against those who used it to oppress you; but beware the temptation to peer out from its vantage point, lest its way of seeing become a politic, a circumscription. Seeing how a state sees is dangerous. In many ways, this is a reverberation of the adage from Audre Lorde: the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house. The drone, like the watchtower, is a coloniser’s vision.
Martel’s film wisely includes oral histories from the Chuschagasta community to offset this material. The testimonies paint a portrait of growing indigenous solidarity that emerges despite the failure of Argentine educational and legal institutions to grapple with its Indigenous history, communities, and legacies of colonisation. The Argentine military campaign known as La Conquista del Desierto, during the 1870s and 1880s, is one such mythologised expansion into the Patagonia ranges that saw the murder of over a thousand Mapuche and the displacement of several thousand more. As a Chuschagasta man notes, “very little is said about the fact that Indigenous peoples still inhabit [the country]. That we are still here.” This epistemic violence is slow, variegated, and pernicious. Nuestra Tierra meets it with tact by returning, in Martel’s words, to the “voices of the people…their manner of speaking” that relocates them from the defensive timbre of the courtroom to an intimate zone of recollection. This shares some resonance with the 2024 documentary, Senda India (dir. Daniela Seggario), which follows the Wichí community in northern Argentina and their efforts to resist land-grabbers by filming themselves and documenting their cultural practices and ties to the land. Archival footage, photographs; there is a conventionality in Nuestra Tierra that is unusual for the Argentine director but appropriate in its patient historical (re)accounting and deference. This is the gentle, insistent work of undoing bureaucratic mystification, and doing the essential work of listening.
It is an especially pertinent film to receive in Australia. Only a year ago, Kumanjayi White, a twenty-four-year-old Warlpiri man with cognitive disabilities, was restrained and killed by two policemen inside a Coles supermarket in Alice Springs. The state authorities considered the cause of death “equivocal”. An investigative review by the Queensland Police on the Northern Territory unit ruled there was no police misconduct – yet another case of a state-aligned institution tasked with investigating itself. Nuestra Tierra ends with a chilling but predictable series of intertitles. The jury convicts Amín, Gómez, and Valdivieso. But, in a dispiriting twist, a couple of years later Amín is moved to house arrest, and the others are acquitted and released. It is ultimately this impunity that the documentary refutes, and the Chuschagasta’s resilience that it underscores. The methods through which to serve justice are not, Martel insists, to be found within systems that protect the perpetrators.
Desmond Bravo
Paul Sheehan teaches literature at Macquarie University. His latest book, Modernism and the Virtues of Cruelty in Literature and Cinema, is forthcoming in 2027.
Lana Chryssavgis is a PhD candidate and sessional academic in Literature at Macquarie University. Her research explores transnational women writers and filmmakers and the representations of failure in their work.
Desmond Bravo is a writer and documentary enthusiast raised by Argentine and Anglo-Parsi parents on Dharawal land, where he currently resides. He teaches screen studies at Macquarie University.
