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Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s stunning and sensuous period drama The Handmaiden has been added to the Sydney Film Festival lineup
Credit: Courtesy of SFF
In addition to Xavier Dolan’s Grand Prix winning film It’s Only the End of the World, nine other films direct from the Cannes will soon screen as part of the 2016 Sydney Film Festival.
Six feature films, two documentaries and one short have joined the 12-day lineup, which now canvasses some 254 films from around the world, 18 of which come Cannes-approved (or booed). New additions announced overnight include Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s stylish and surreal thriller The Handmaiden; master of mood Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, which stars Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver with a passion for poetry; and Personal Shopper, which stars Kristen Stewart as the movie’s titular assistant with a penchant for sourcing haute couture looks for her celebrity employer in between communicating with the dead.
Personal Shopper also sees Stewart reunite with French director Olivier Assayas, who won the Best Director prize at Cannes for his work on the film and whose previous collaboration with Stewart saw her become the first American actress to win France’s coveted César award for her role as another celebrity assistant in Clouds of Sils Maria. It reportedly features a lot of CHANEL haute couture in particular.
Other films added to the lineup include Marden Ade’s German domestic comedy Toni Erdmann; Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’s The Cinema Travellers, an elegiac documentary about the last of India’s travelling tent theatres; Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Hissein Habré, A Chadian Tragedy, which debuted in Cannes only two weeks before its subject, the dictator Hissein Habré, was sentenced for the horrific crimes he committed during his 11 years as president of Chad; and the dialogue-free Studio Ghibli animation The Red Turtle.
Also making its SFF debut will be One Eyed-Jacks, a 1961 western directed by Marlon Brando and newly-restored under the supervision of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorcese. You can find out more information about these new additions and more here.
The Sydney Film Festival runs from June 8 – 19, 2016. Tickets are on sale now.
Tile image: Personal Shopper, courtesy of SFF
Cover image: Paterson, courtesy of SFF
