Art Smitten is SYN's weekly guide to arts, culture and entertainment in Australia and around the world. With a focus on youth and emerging arts, we're here to showcase culture ahead of the curve. From our base in Naarm/Melbourne, contributors interview, review, and cover the very best of what the world’s second-most liveable city has to offer. Whether it's film, fashion, photography or Fauvism you're into, Art Smitten is the place!
Thierry, Andrew and Christian discuss the controversies surrounding the 2016 Archibald Art Prize . Between self portraits, twitter followers and distracting backgrounds, the Archibald entries always cause a stir. Which one was your favourite? Check them out as the tour makes its way through Australia. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Ken Stone and Irene Silber’s Hard to Believe is a tight 56-minute exposé of an issue that few people like to think about: forced organ harvesting in China. It isn’t exactly a secret that the Chinese government performs surgery on its political prisoners without their consent, but in recent years the media has largely neglected this still very present atrocity. This documentary, which mostly looks at the communist party’s persecution of Falun Gong spiritual practitioners, is Stone and Silber’s gr...
Roger Ross Williams' latest feature documentary is about a 23-year-old autistic man who's obsessed with Disney movies - basically, me, if you just wind his age back two years, move him from America to Australia and rotate his sexuality 180 degrees. In light of that, you'll have to forgive me since I can't exactly distance myself from what is pretty much my own biography. Mostly, I was just overjoyed to see a real person that I can relate to standing on the screen in front of me. I feel like I've...
Beth and Rach are joined by Stephaie Lake, performer in The Dark Chorus, a production in the Melbourne Festival. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Alice Nash, Executive Produer of Lady Eats Apple, joins Beth and Rach in the studio to speak about the production in the Melbourne Festival. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
There’s something incredibly uncomfortable about seeing a show about poor people by non-poor people, essential for rich people in one of Melbourne’s most highly regarded theatre venues. Blessed explores the lives of Maggie and Grey, two poor people who fell in love as teenagers and had heaps of fun, then Grey disappeared for ages and Maggie found him in a disgusting apartment, they talk about their past and what they’ve been up to and then towards the end it turns out that Maggie is pregnant and...
This review contains mature content and language and pretty major spoilers about the show. Straight up, Anti-Hamlet was one of the best productions I have seen this year. It was absolutely trilling, and so engaging it left me exhausted and unable to get up from my seat, which is always a very special experience that I’ve only felt twice before I loved it so much that I was it two times in it’s opening weekend, but not only because I loved it, but because it was so complex and intelligent I think...
Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans is something of an epic, operating on quite a small scale but still putting its characters through some formidable challenges. It's based on TL Stedman's novel of the same name, one that suggests both intimacy and profundity. This story does eventually deliver on both, but in the film at least, the intimacy is there pretty much from the get-go. It sets itself up to be a charming love story about a mild-mannered lighthouse keeper (Michael Fassbender) an...
Ben and Thierry are joined in the studio by Jonathan Holloway, the artistic director of the Melbourne Festival, recapping highlights and challenges of the 2016 season. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Thierry and Ben are joined by Sean Patten, one of the performers and creators behind Gob Squad's production of War and Peace at the Malthouse Theatre. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Christian and Adalya are joined in the studio with Linda Shevlin, curator of Radical Action exhibition, by artist Seamus Nolan. This year is the 100 year anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, and Radical Action focuses on "how events in recent and distant history, attitudes to rebellion, revolution and agitation have formed societies and national identities, question[s] the role of the artist in imagining future states and explore[s] the impact this revolutionary period has had on Ir...
Julieta is the latest film by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, based on three short stories by Canadian writer Alice Munro. The eponymous lead character is depicted in the present and in flashbacks through a diary she is writing in a sort of cathartic fit. From the flashbacks we learn of Julieta's life, her joys and more specifically her tragedies, of which there are several, spanning everything from her parents to her daughter to her love. Some have criticised the film for being emotionless, f...
Thierry, Andrew and Ayden interview Clare Watson about Malthouse Theatre's 2016 production, Gonzo. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Christian interviews curator of the NGV's Vincent Van Gogh exhibition , Ted Gott. It will be opening in 2017, on April 28th, and running until July 9th. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
If you’re fan of that strange nostalgia that comes from witnessing old Hollywood glamour, Café Society might just be for you. Complete with a backdrop of wonderfully detailed fashions, an upbeat jazzy soundtrack and in the company of presumably rich, carefree socialites, Woody Allen’s latest venture is a rabbit hole into that bygone era of Hollywood romanticism. Set in the late 1930s, Café Society details the life of the young and naïve Bobby Dorfman, as he sets foot in Hollywood, eager to make ...
Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon would have been, I imagine, quite an easy film to pitch, but a very hard one to describe. Since seeing it I've been explaining it to people as "the Black Swan of modelling,” which might sound very reductive, but given how much it invites comparison with Darren Aronofsky's film, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how Refn had originally conceived it. Both of them begin by introducing a gifted but naive young woman wanting to enter into a soul-crushing professi...
La Mama Theatre’s The Masque of Beauty seems to have taken its name from Ben Johnson’s courtly masque composed in 1608. However, in Peter Green’s ‘Renaissance Cabaret’ we certainly feel far away from the England court, even if he uses a few Shakespeare passages on one of his literary medleys. Green’s writing, and indeed Faye Bendrups’ directing, both take Australian audiences to very different theatrical territory than they might be used to. True to the form of a masque, this show is a meanderin...
Hell or High Water is a 2016 film written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by David McKenzie. Set in blistering rural Texas, it focusses on two brothers, played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster, who rob banks, and a cop on the verge of retirement who is chasing them, played by Jeff Bridges. There’s action, there’s tension, there’s laughs. Tonally, the film carries itself with a particular relaxed, laid-back nature that seems to befit the type of life present in small-town Texas. What makes this tone ...
Thierry, Ayden and Andrew are joined in the studio by writer and performer, Ryan Good, about his production Cosmonaut in the Melbourne Fringe. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
“Sharp, smart and hysterically funny!”… “A cult hit….gleaming with comic polish.”… “A frothy, sill, saucy and spectacular affair.” These are just some of things critics have said about 5 Lesbians Eating A Quiche, a play written by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood, currently being performed for Melbourne audiences as part of the Fringe Festival. And it was the reviews that initially attracted me to the show, although, as I realised afterwards, no words could really describe what I had witnessed. Th...
Francofonia is the latest film by Russian director Alexander Sokurov, who is perhaps best known for his 2002 documentary Russian Ark , an ambitious and awe-inspiring one-take trip through St Peterburg’s Hermitage museum during the Russian Revolution. In Francofonia , Sokurov once more returns to the themes of art and war and museums, this time focussing on the Louvre during the Nazi occupation of France. As someone who doesn’t get on terribly well with documentaries, I found Francofonia rather i...
Hi, it's Adalya with my second review from this years Man Booker Prize shortlist. This week I'm looking at Deborah Levy's Hot Milk. Hot Milk follows Sofia and her mother Rose as they travel from England to clinic of questionable merit in Spain, seeking answers to Rose's litany of mysterious ailments. Set in the searing heat of Southern Spain, Sofia undergoes a twisted iteration of the classic beach sexual awakening narrative while Rose undergoes Dr Gomez's treatment. As the reliability of the mo...
Hosts Beth and Thierry interview Patrick Durnan Silva on his production, Cull in the 2016 Melbourne Fringe Festival. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Thursday, 1st September marked the seventh year for the Korean Film Festival In Australian (KOFFIA). ACMI hosted Melbourne’s festival and invited guests to share canapés of kimchi, cocktails and listen to traditional music on the Gayageum. This festival boasts twenty newly released and critically acclaimed Korean films, however it was the film titled 4th Place, written and directed by Jung Ji-woo, which opened the festival. Commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, 4th Place...
On Tuesday, the Man Booker Prize Shortlist was announced. For those of you not in the know, the Man Booker is a prize given for what the judging panel deems to be the best novel written in English and published in the UK each year. For many including myself, the Booker is the Prize to watch, the AFL Grand Final for nerds. This year's shortlist consists of: Paul Beatty's The Sellout Deborah Levy's Hot Milk Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen David Szalay's All That ...
Rupert Burns is Kelvin Campervan. Or is Kelvin Campervan Rupert Burns? They seem to get along pretty well in the one body, but can never quite decide who is the artist and who the creation. The one man show explores the nature of a person's relationship with themselves and their history. It is set from the vantage point of mid life, but even at my age of 21 I was inspired to be existential about my own history of years and to ponder their value, as well as the missed opportunities I have already...
Ebony interviews Georgia Symons, creator of Fringe 2016 show You Must Come Alone to Read the Last Book on Earth. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hosts Beth and Thierry interview Assistant Director of the UHT production of Macbeth + Macdeath: a coda, Rachel Shrives. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hosts Christian and Adalya interview Matthew Lutton about the Malthouse Theatre's 2017 Program . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Christian speaks to writer/broadcaster Made Stuchbery, chatting about her ten part radio series Born to Die. It's available on soundcloud . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
