Today is a great day for late night television watchers and Sydney’s cultural credibility in general – it is the launch of Antenna, Sydney’s very first international documentary film festival!

Possibly as a backlash against effects-heavy films like Avatar and Inception, the popularity of films that are built on a skeleton of hard facts has exploded in the last ten years.

This resurgence has allowed directors to side-step conventions and get a little creative.

The films cover a range of pretty obscure and very interesting topics: one of them is an edge-of-your seat thriller about the disposal of nuclear leftovers, another about the fall of the Soviet Union through the eyes of five Russians and one about regretting the move to get binary sex-reassignment from male to female.

Other films made on Australian shores include one addressing the fight to resist the development of a mega mall on the foreshore of St Kilda and another about locusts. There are a couple of short films thrown in in case it’s all getting a little too real.

The festival runs for four days, opening tonight with the documentary Memoirs of a Plague at Dendy, Opera Quays Cinema. The rest of the films screen at Chauvel cinema, including a free screening of Sans Soleil on Saturday, as a tribute to doco great Chris Marker.

If you’ve brushed off this genre in the past as ‘not really my thing,’ be brave and go see one, your inner nerd may be sitting and waiting on the edge of his little seat for this moment.

Antenna

WHAT: International Documentary Film Festival

WHEN: 5-9th October

WHERE: Dendy, Opera Quays for the opening night

other sessions at Chauvel Cinema

COST: $13/$16. Multiple passes available

BUY TICKETS HERE.

Georgia Booth

georgiajbooth@gmail.com