WA director Ben Young’s US crime drama Devil’s Peak will open this year’s Revelation Perth International Film Festival, to be held in July at Luna Cinemas Leederville.
The feature adaptation of David Joy’s novel Where All Light Tends to Go stars Hopper Penn as an 18-year-old who is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves.
Shot in Atlanta, Georgia, but post-produced in WA, the film also features Billy Bob Thornton, Robin Wright and WA actress Emma Booth.
The Australian premiere on July 12 is part of an initial line-up announced today for the 26th iteration of Revelation, which festival director Richard Sowada said would reflect the “compact and modular” direction the festival has moved toward the past couple of years.
“Compressing the event into five days with the same amount of films as before and following it on with four days of WA’s major VR, games, and immersive technology event in XR:WA builds a phenomenal critical mass across all screen-based media forms,” he said.
“It brings together these converging sectors, highlights new career opportunities and, unlike any film fest in the country, opens new ways of thinking about their relationships and what a screen-based festival can be.”
Other early highlights include the world premiere of Adam Morris’ second Albany feature Frank and Frank (or The Valley and the Walrus: Ruminations on the Mystery from Soup to Nuts), starring Myles Pollard as a faith and finance guru who heads to the country to present at a conference only to be faced with a personal crisis. It’s at this point he meets Frank (Trevor Jamieson), a rough-round-the-edges artist, philosopher, bon vivant, and womaniser, who lives in a ramshackle caravan at the rear of the property.
There is also the WA premiere of Canadian dramedy I Like Movies from debut director Chandler Levack. Set in the early 2000s, the film stars Isaiah Lehtinen as Lawrence Kweller, a socially inept movie-obsessed 17-year-old who gets a job in a video store where he forms a complicated relationship with his older female manager.
In the Berlinale-selected Hello Dankness, New York-based Australian siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro, the artist duo also known as Soda Jerk, invite audiences to witness the psychotropic spectacle of American politics from 2016 – 2021 in what is a political fable disguised as a stoner musical comprised entirely of hundreds of pirated film samples.
On the factual front, pseudonymous filmmaker Angie Vinchito’s Manifesto offers a dark and disturbing portrait of adolescence in contemporary Russia via a series of videos uploaded by the country’s teenagers on social media.
Returning for this year’s festival is the International Family Animation Explosion, a specially curated collection of family-friendly international short animations; Westralia Day, which will showcase locally-made films on Saturday, July 15 at The Backlot; and the Get Your Shorts On! and City Of Vincent Film Projects events for emerging filmmakers on Sunday, July 16.
The festival will run from July 12-16. Find out more information here.