From wacky Icelandic women to Colombian drug lords, the pick of MIFF awaits

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From wacky Icelandic women to Colombian drug lords, the pick of MIFF awaits

By Stephanie Bunbury, Karl Quinn and Jake Wilson

WOMAN AT WAR

Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson won hearts and minds a few years ago with his surreal series of vignettes collected under the title Of Horses and Men. With this mini-saga about a middle-aged choir mistress with a sideline in eco-terrorism, he has ventured into more traditional storytelling territory but retained a wacky sort of outsider humour, a combination that has proved a huge hit with festival audiences.

Woman at War.

Woman at War.Credit: MIFF

Halla (Halldora Geirharosdottir) uses her hunter's bow and arrow to bring down high-voltage power lines connected to the new aluminium smelters feeding off Iceland's geothermal energy; nobody knows who she is, apart from the jazz band and the open-throat singers who keep popping up in the sphagnum like Greek choruses to accompany her. Like I said, it's wacky. Meanwhile, good-hearted Halla has been trying for years to adopt a Ukrainian war orphan but, just as she gets the news that a child is waiting for her, the law closes in.

Halla will manage to do it all, of course – blow up her last pylon, escape and collect her new daughter – with the help of a grouchy farmer, a dissident government official who sings in her choir and her identical twin sister. Yes, it's also an identical-twin film. Have fun! Hoyts, August 4, 4pm; ACMI, August 13, 6.30pm. SB

OUR NEW PRESIDENT

Credit: MIFF

This scratch-doc tells the story of the 2016 US Presidential election through Russian eyes, using clips from mainstream and social media. Vladimir Putin says Hillary Clinton has taken an "aggressive stance" towards his country, and so she is depicted as mad, diseased, a crook and an assassin. Putin assures America "we have no plans to influence the election" but calls hackers "artistic free spirits" who, "if they're feeling patriotic, do their part against those who speak ill of Russia". Secret footage shot inside a "troll factory" shows workers busily creating fake news sites and generating anti-Clinton memes and videos. Meanwhile, Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of state news agency Russia Today, tells his staff "the time of detached, unbiased journalism is over". It's a scattergun approach that all adds up to compelling evidence of an orchestrated campaign led from the very top. And we all know how that turned out. Hoyts, August 4, 1.30pm; August 6, 6.30pm. KQ

BIRDS OF PASSAGE

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An explosively imaginative riposte to the macho posturings of Narcos comes out of the drug trade's base camp, Colombia, directed by the couple who gave us the well-nigh perfect Amazonian adventure Embrace of the Serpent. The birds of the title are the migratory species who sweep through the feeding grounds where the gorgeous species sacred to the Wayuu people live, but "birds of passage" is also local slang for drug-runners. Set largely in the 1970s and '80s, when the trade was at its most aggressive, it centres on clan matriarch Ursula, who rules the community with a mix of moral authority and hints of supernatural power, as the traditions she embodies are undermined by the dope, guns and money. When Zapayet, who sells coffee to Americans, meets a couple of Peace Corps volunteers keen to smuggle some weed home, he sees a windfall that will pay the bride-price Ursula is demanding for her daughter Zaida. Fast-forward 10 years and this seemingly petty one-off deal has become an industry, albeit a corrupt one. What interests directors Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego is not the mechanics of the cross-border drug trade or the predation of the drugs themselves – the birds are dealing only in marijuana – but the way a chance meeting between worlds can mutate into apocalypse. Comedy, August 4, 3.30pm, and August 11, 3pm; Forum, August 17, 9pm. SB

TYREL

Credit: MIFF

The Chilean director Sebastian Silva (Nasty Baby), who has recently been working mostly in America, is an expert at keeping tensions bubbling beneath an uneventful surface: you keep expecting something horrific to happen, whether or not anything does. He's at it again with this story of a boisterous all-male birthday party at a remote cabin, set at the start of the Trump presidency and seen through the eyes of a relative outsider, played by Jason Mitchell from Straight Outta Compton, who happens to be the only black guy present. (The other guests include Silva regular Michael Cera, while the birthday boy is the ubiquitous Caleb Landry Jones.) With his usual malice, Silva forces us to consider what social faultlines might be evident in the banter and bonding rituals, such as a party game that involves imitating various accents; he keeps cutting away to Mitchell looking uneasy, not always at the moments you might expect. Hoyts, August 11, 9pm, August 16, 6.45pm. JW

ASH IS THE PUREST WHITE

Credit: MIFF

Jia Zhang-ke has been needling at China's fast-forward transformation for more than 20 years, but this is his first film to get a wide release; you wonder what the Chinese multiplex millions will make of the subdued reflections and digressions relished by foreign fans of his earlier films such as Mountains May Depart. Spread over 18 years, the story begins in a sleazy mah-jong parlour where swaggering local gangster Guo Bin (Liao Fan) dominates proceedings with support from the feisty manageress Qiao, (Zhao Tao, the director's wife and stellar artistic partner). Bin likes to think he is the very incarnation of jianghu, the Chinese underworld with its unforgiving codes of honour and loyalty that suggest equivalence with the Mafia, but he is modern enough to let Qiao take the rap when he is caught with an illegal handgun. After five years in prison, she emerges into a changed world where, ironically, her criminal wiles help her to survive; Bin has predictably moved on to embrace state-sanctioned cowboy capitalism. Through all this, Jia is a keen observer, sympathetic to human passions but never nostalgic; the new China may be cold and acquisitive, but the old ways were rotten too. The Chinese title Jiang Hu Er Nv means "sons and daughters of jianghu". Plus ca change, one might say. Forum, August 5, 9.15pm, Hoyts, August 19, 6.45pm. SB

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