The 18th Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF) returns with its tradition of celebrating bold, boundary-pushing independent cinema at the Dendy Newtown in Newtown, Australia, from September 12th to 15th, 2024.
Festival Director Nathan Senn said “At SUFF, we’re all about celebrating the wild, the weird, and the wonderfully unexpected. This year’s festival will take you on a journey through cinema’s most daring corners – where anything can happen and usually does. Our lineup of films is a testament to the fearless crea2vity of filmmakers who dare to challenge, provoke, and entertain, and we can’t wait for our audience to join us for the ride.”
2024 Festival highlights include:
Opening Night kicks off with the 50th anniversary of Female Trouble (1974), John Waters’ anarchic twist on Hollywood melodrama. Starring Divine as Dawn Davenport – a teenage nightmare turned fame-obsessed criminal – the film embraces the lurid mantra ‘crime is beauty’. To enhance the experience, audiences can immerse themselves in this perverse classic with scratch n’ sniff cards, which release specific scents at key moments in the film.
Closing Night presents the NSW Premiere of Scala!!! (2023), a wildly-entertaining documentary written and directed by Ali Catterall and Jane Giles telling the riotous inside story of the infamous sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll cinema. Featuring John Waters, Mary Harron, Ben Wheatley, Stewart Lee and others this is a must-see for all lovers of cinema!
Twisted black comedies including the Australian Premiere of Mother Father Sister Brother Frank (2024), depicting a suburban family’s murderous plot, and Andy Burkit’s outstanding Melbourne-shot indie directorial debut The Organist (2024), revealing a man’s horrifying discovery that he’s been supplying organs to a cannibal. With a special Q&A after the film with Andy Burkit and lead actor Jack Braddy.
Documentaries exploring resilience and defiance, including Michel Gondry: Do It Yourself (2023), highlighting the filmmaker’s inventive DIY approach; Brandon Spivey’s Crass: The Sound of Free Speech (2023), chronicling the punk band’s fight for artistic freedom, and Jason Summers’ I Should Have Been Dead Year’s Ago (2024), profiling Stu Spasm, from the infamous Sydney-band Lubricated Goat, who caused a nationwide stir playing naked on Andrew Denton’s ABC TV show Blah Blah Blah.
Exploring self-deception and quests for truth are The Lies We Tell Ourselves (2023), following an eccentric up-and-coming director who travels to across the world to create her latest arthouse film, Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaali! (2023), delving into the life and psyche of Salvador Dalí as he grapples with his myths and realities, and The Hyperboreans (2023), a poignant experimental film, which investigates the legends and historical tales that shape cultural narratives.
Nancy Walker’s musical comedy and pseudo-autobiography Can’t Stop The Music (1980) following the rise of the Village People as they navigate the music industry and the challenges of fame. With its campy humour and catchy disco tunes, the film is a vibrant snapshot of the late 1970s disco era. Audiences can experience this cult classic in a special remastered screening, introduced by Village People afficionado DJ Maynard with prizes up for grabs for the best-dressed Village People character or eighties disco glam.
The NSW Premiere of Bruce LaBruce’s award-winning feature, The Visitor (2024), a brilliantly depraved, queer, subversive romp set in contemporary London, paying explicit homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s provocative last feature, Teorema. The film follows a mysterious Black man who infiltrates an upper-class British family, triggering sexual and spiritual awakenings while blending eroticism with a critique of colonialism and racism.
Award-winning Italian Director Mitzi Peirone’s horror-thriller adaptation of Don Roff’s Clare Bleecker book series, Saint Clare (2024), starring Bella Thorne, takes audiences to a small town as a woman who is haunted by voices and her past, which leads her down a path of corruption, trafficking and visions from the beyond.
The Australian Premieres of Sacramento (2024) starring Kristen Stewart, Michael Cera, and Maya Erskine, an off-beat road trip where old friends hilariously navigate their chaotic future and RATS! (2024), a film by Karl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky about a rebellious teen caught in a wild FBI sting, nuclear threat, and 2007 emo culture.
Retrospective Q+A sessions exploring the incredible and often career of George and Charis Schwartz, Australia’s pioneers of erotic filmmaking in the 1970s – with Charis in attendance, and artist/filmmaker Jill Westwood (from industrial noise-performance phenomenon Fistfuck (1981-4), one of very few women-led groups of the era), who challenged codes of male domination, by reconsidering power relations and reclaiming her own body and sexuality.
This year’s festival also brings to the big screen some incredible short films, including a package of madcap shorts not for the faint-of-heart in WTF!, expressions of sexuality in all its forms in LOVE/SICK, genre-crossing shorts from the vanguard renegades of Australian independent cinema in Homebaked Shorts, the year’s most eye-opening bite-sized documentaries that traverse the personal to the global in Stranger Than Fiction, and the return of the much-loved TAKE48 Film Challenge for its sixth year, putting filmmaker’s abilities to the test to create a short film in only 48 hours!
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