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FILM FESTIVALS Feeling Sexy has been invited to the film festivals listed below. We'll add to this listing every month, so check in regularly to find when Feeling Sexy will screen at a festival near you! Brisbane International Film Festival July 29 - 8 August 1999 (opening night film!) Anne Demy-Geroe, Director Brisbane International Film Festival, had this to say about the film: "Young art student Vicki falls in love with Greg, a shy and old fashioned med student. They marry and settle in a little worker's cottage to domestic bliss- for a very short time. Vicki finds herself at home going crazy with two babies.And Greg - working 14 hours a day, on call at night and still having to find time to study - understandably has little sympathy. Vicki wants to 'feel sexy' so she looks for something that will start those butterflies fluttering back inside her. Feeling Sexy is the first feature from Archibald Prize winning artist David Allen. Art critic Candida Baker says of Allen's art: "She explores female sexuality with a combination of innocence and honest that is devastating to behold. She paints the unmentionable." This comment applies equally to Feeling Sexy where the interest lied in the raw truthfulness with which she portrays Vicki's internal and external worlds- her domestic situation and her imagination. At the same time Allen evokes sympathy for hardworking Greg. The two young marrieds are caught in a social institution that is not structured to meet either of their needs, and, as in real life, they have learnt to adapt. While the film has charm and, yes an "innocence", it is at the same time quite knowing. Allen does not shrink from showing what is sometimes uncomfortable and other times horrifying. And to do this she coaxes very strong performances from her two leads, particularly newcomer Susie Porter. Allen has avoided the obvious temptation to use her own artwork in the film with the notable exception of the stunningly photographed installation piece. But the filmwork is evidence that her eye for colour is both striking and subtle. Feeling Sexy, a charming but powerful comic work with a genuine regional inflection, should elicit excitement from those committed to a Queensland film industry." Melbourne International Film Festival 1999 At the Melbourne Film Festival, June 1999, where incidentally a judge who saw the film came up to Davida afterwards and offered us $10,000 towards the cost of blowing it up to 35mm! Now that's what you call audience response! Vicki is an impetuous art student who falls in love with and marries Greg, a shy medical student. Soon, married life equates with being stuck at home with two toddlers, not quite what Vicki anticipated. To relieve the boredom, she takes a part-time job teaching art classes, but this rapidly evolves into a "back of the van" love affair with Hugo, one of her students. Vicki can only sustain the deception for so long, and eventually confesses to greg. Conflict leads to despair, which in turn becomes understanding - can either fantasy or reality save the relationship? Feeling Sexy is the debut feature for davida Allen, who comes to filmmaking from an established career as an Australian painter. In addition to the fact that much of Vicki's life is centred around painting, feeling Sexy conveys a highly painterly texture. Set in the 1970's a pastiche of pastels and plastics seep into the relationship between Vicki and Greg. Hilary M. Austin's production design works to create oppositions between the interior, domestic experience of motherhood, and the exterior world of creative freedom. With tight disciplined cinematography that creates mounting tension, Feeling Sexy is a film which is emotionally involving. An intelligent examination of the mechanics of relationships. "As an artist I've always worked from my own observations, and I am fascinated with relationships. How they last and why they deteriorate, and why the gloss of an new relationship fades, and what it is that can keep people together for years. It is hard to keep everything new and shiny. Everything grows old and dull. I wanted to disguise the recipe of how a marriage can stay together as a fairy tale" - Davida Allen. Venice Film Festival 1999 At Venice, a journalist asked Davida to explain the funny costume that the husband wears in the film. Davida said "Come to Queensland and you'll understand!" Perhaps Queensland is the only place in the whole world wear grown men still wear shorts and long socks.... Wellington Film Festival New Zealand, June 1999 Bill Gosden, Director, New Zealand Film Festival wrote this: Sweet, funny and funky, this portrait of a marriage is the irresistible film debt of painter and writer Davida Allen, who'd never been on a film set before she ventured, at the age of 47, onto one of her own. Allen names Dr Zhivago amongst her all- time favourites and "Lara's Theme" might well be surging through the head of Feeling Sexy's heroine, Vicki, a woman who refuses to accept her exhausted husband Greg's protestation that marriage can't be passionate every minute of the day. In swift, deft strokes Allen tells us more about love and sex - and marriage and kids - in the course of a short feature than many experienced filmmakers manage in a mini-series. The film's images effortlessly rehabilitate the distinctively Australian expressionism inaugurated by Jane Campion's early work. Allen's images are much looser as befits the film about an unabashedly physical woman; when we laugh at the way she frames Greg's dorky walk shorts (this is Queensland after all), or his dreadful 70's shirts and hair, we can also see he's a spunky little guy. Her camera's much kinder to woman's fashion and celebrates the freckled flesh of her heroine in and out of her sexy bohemian attire. As to the children we never see them in full; only as grasping hands, bandaged limbs, messed up, hungry mouths. (Vicki wails that the kids are killing her imagination and Allen's refusal to have her movie captured by their no-doubt endearing faces harkens to her heroine's complaint.) Even when Allen's images are at their most cartoonish, they're radiant with pleasure in the interior light and texture of the tropical domestic setting. Her ebullience as an image-maker perfectly catch the vitality of her heroine (also, it so happens, a painter) indelibly played by Susie Porter. And when the film turns dark Allen finds the daunting expression of Greg's fury in his evil pet Blue Heeler. Vicki and Greg survive the dog, just as they survive the Tattoo Man, the Orange Garage Man and various other challenges to domestic bliss. We confidently predict that Vicki and greg won't be the only ones feeling great after the sweetly engineered epiphany of feeling Sexy. Toronto International Film Festival 1999 Vancouver Film Festival September 24 - October 10 1999 Gijon, Spain September 1999 Cork, Ireland October 1999 London Film Festival November 4 - 18 1999 where it was introduced by our composer Claire Jordan, who is in London working. Goteborg Film Festival Sweden, 28 Jan - 6 Feb 2000 Singapore Film Festival 31 March - 15 April 2000 Stay tuned for news of more festival dates!