World Cinema Showcase: Movie previews

Iranian film The White Meadows. Photo / Supplied

Of Gods and Men, is one of several high-profile films in the World Cinema Showcase not getting a release after the festival.

Among others previewed: The cineaste's purest pleasure would have to be the jaw-dropping Iranian film The White Meadows, which screens in the final weekend. An obscure but mesmerising fable about a man who gathers sorrows and tears, it can probably be read allegorically, but it's a haunting, heartbreakingly beautiful film that can easily be enjoyed on its own terms. The rapture it induces is overshadowed by the knowledge that writer-director Ebrahim Ghafouri and editor Jafar Panahi, himself a distinguished director, are both serving six-year sentences in Iranian prisons on vague and spurious charges and have been banned from making films for 20 years. In the context of such repression, detached comment on the present film seems faintly obscene: but there is no getting away from its sublime, revelatory craft.

A brace of documentaries - one Danish, one American - take us into the war in Afghanistan: Restrepo is the more urgent and unadorned of the two - a grunt's-eye view of a year in "the most dangerous place in the world", the Korengal Valley in the country's north-east. Armadillo, by contrast, is a far more composed and deliberate film full of moments of eerie beauty. But both give a vivid taste of the intractability of a war against a largely unseen enemy.

You Don't Like The Truth is in its own way even more compelling: the anatomy of a series of interrogation videos conducted with Omar Khadr - a Canadian of Pakistani parents - captured at the age of 15 and now imprisoned in Guantanamo, having pleaded guilty to crimes he plainly did not commit. As a study of the cynicism, expediency and opportunism of America's extra-judicial proceedings in the war on terror, it's a knockout.

If these sound too heavy to deal with, the charming My Afternoons with Marguerite is a real change of pace for the prolific Gerard Depardieu: his love interest with a difference is a woman in her 90s. Art lovers are well served by a reprise screening of Waste Land, a provocative and inspiring documentary about a Brazilian artist's collaborations with rubbish-dump scavengers; The Art of the Steal, a fascinating look at the political manoeuvring behind the expropriation by the City of Philadelphia of a private art collection; and The Woodmans, a poignant portrait of a fabled photographer which, for reasons that soon become clear, is entitled not with her name, but her family's. And audiences will get the first look at Another Year, the new film by Mike Leigh.

-TimeOut