By Garry Maddox
- Festival highlights and lowlights
- Even the most unlikely films are dripping with sex
- Movie session times
- Full movies coverage
Brazil might be mired in financial, political and health crises ahead of the Olympics but one of its filmmakers has surprisingly won a different kind of gold medal – top prize in the Sydney Film Festival's competition.
Kleber Mendonca Filho's Aquarius, a drama about a retired music critic battling to save her apartment from a development company, claimed the $63,000 Sydney Film Prize for "courageous, audacious and cutting-edge" cinema.
Veteran actress Sonia Braga, best known for Kiss of the Spiderwoman and Sex and the City, stars in a film that focuses on the indignities of aging but still manages to include a graphic sex scene in flashback, an explicit orgy and a lusty encounter with a young gigolo.
The jury president, British producer and programmer Simon Field, said the decision was unanimous.
Competition winner ... Sonia Braga in Aquarius.
"Aquarius is a compelling and relevant statement about contemporary Brazil and the power of an individual standing up for what she believes," he said.
"Mendonca Filo has created a film that is both political and personal – witty, sexy and playful."
The delighted director said the film was so new – it has only screened at the Cannes and Sydney film festivals – that it had not even been seen in Brazil yet.
"To get this recognition from Sydney Film Festival means a lot to me and to the film, which is building up momentum for our Brazilian release," Mendonca Filho said.
Delighted ... Aquarius director Kleber Mendonca Filho.Credit: Jessie Harris
While Aquarius had passionate fans, it continues a tradition of surprise winners given that two stronger films were competing for the prize: the Australian outback drama Goldstone and the Danish wartime drama Land of Mine, though both were more conventionally told stories than the free-wheeling Aquarius.
As the 12-day festival closed on Sunday, chief executive Leigh Small declared it success, with strong ticket sales despite competition from Vivid.
Described by the head of the festival jury as "a compelling and relevant statement about contemporary Brazil" ... Aquarius.
"People love coming to the city for both Vivid and the film festival," she said.
Ticket sales were up at least 1.5 per cent from last year's 176,000, with "encore" screenings from Monday to Wednesday still to come.
With higher attendance and increased ticket prices, festival revenue was expected to be up 5 per cent.
There were also improvements in two key areas – a 30 per cent increase in the number of sessions that featured filmmaker and curator Q&As and a 6 per cent rise in the number of sold-out sessions.
"Filmmakers attending their sessions is what makes a festival," Small said. "Otherwise it's just a schedule of screenings."
First-time Sydney filmmaker Dan Jackson won the $15,000 Australian documentary competition for another film centring on Brazil.
He lived with a Rio de Janeiro community for more than a year making In the Shadow of the Hill, about the protest movement that formed after a man disappeared as police cleared the city's largest slum ahead of the 2014 World Cup and the Olympics.
There was also a special mention for Sascha Ettinger Epstein's Destination Arnold, about two Indigenous women who aim for an amateur bodybuilding competition.
Artist and filmmaker Lynette Wallworth won a new $10,000 Sydney UNESCO City of Film Prize for "innovation, imagination and impact".
The director of the documentary Tender, about a community-based funeral service in Port Kembla, her most recent work is the virtual reality film Collisions, about an atomic test in outback South Australia in the 1950s.
In the Dendy Awards for Australian short films, Goran Stolevski won the Rouben Mamoulian award for best director for You Deserve Everything, with Luci Schroder's Slapper winning the best live-action short award, Marieka Walsh's The Crossing winning the Yoram Gross animation award and Sheila Jayadev's Spice Sisters winning best short screenplay.