Quickly now, we’re twelve films in already.

{Twelve films thus far.}

Tokyo Family (Director: Yôji Yamada)
Bends (Director: Flora Lau)
Passion (Director: Brian de Palma)
Mood Indigo (Director: Michel Gondry)
Grisgris (Director: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)
The Patience Stone (Director: Atiq Rahimi)
The Daughter (Director: Thanos Anastopoulos)
Omar (Director: Hany Abu-Assad)
Michael H Profession: Director (Director: Yves Montmayeur)
The Spirit of '45 (Director: Ken Loach)
Final Cut — Ladies and Gentlemen (Director: György Pálfi)
Like Father, Like Son (Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda)

The privilege of making art is something not often spoken about. We instead prefer to talk about the obstacles (the financial hurdles, the funding and proposal rejections, the silence in response to a work, the idea unfulfilled). But listening to Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke talk about his work, in the documentary Michael H Profession: Director, it is, as he described, a privilege to be able to pour all of your neuroses into a creative outlet. He spoke also of taking seriously your audience, and from this standing being able to take them, the audience, to places they perhaps did not want to go. He spoke of a reduction of means, like a painter, in order to achieve clarity, and of removing any obvious tracks. And he spoke of perhaps our greatest fear: the fear of pain and suffering, either our own or witnessing the pain and suffering of a loved one. How could anything be worse?

Yes, here once more, the Melbourne International Film Festival. And we are greedily seeing film after film. You’ll have to keep up, the pace is steady and relentless, and the time short.

In two and a half weeks, 53 films carefully sifted have been booked. Some Louise and I have picked for theme, others based on a director’s earlier work, some on a whim, and some to bridge a gap between sessions. All, out of interest. This is my annual holiday. My vacation to the tropics in winter only I am, by own devising, scaling the wall between Israel and Palestine only to find I've landed in a war-torn Middle Eastern village.

Clear the decks, pack the snacks. Sit, watch, learn, feel, bristle, and when you get home, squeeze in before you flake on the floor in pet sandwich by the heater a few of those essential day-to-day things. Four films on Friday, four again on Saturday, and four yesterday, this festival is making a squeezebox of my heart as I lurch from Chad with my jerry cans of black market petrol (Grisgris) to a carpenter’s workshop-no-more in Athens (The Daughter). From Friday’s beautiful opening with Yôji Yamada's Tokyo Family, with its low camera angle and all those details to chase on the periphery, the story fished about in my body and I recalled what I knew: this ain’t for the faint of heart. To be put through the emotion mangler requires stamina. Lights dim, and suddenly you are watching a film unfold about family relationships and how we face, or don’t face, death and loss. Outside of the cinema feels a world away and the immersion some films ask for I happily give. From Bends, we see how precarious our standing. All too easily, you can lose it all. And in Atiq Rahimi's The Patience Stone (a favourite, so far), how we can perhaps rebuild. In The Spirit of ’45, how an empire can rebuild after war. The geography covered both literally and emotionally, why, it is vast.

Of the 12 films thus far, only two have left me cool. Passion, for, having seen Alain Corneau's Love Crime, I struggled to see why the story needed to be retold in the same way. When you know what is coming, the thrill is lost. And Mood Indigo, which I so wanted to enjoy. The fantastical scenes of food that dances off the plate, the nod to Un Chien Andalou with the macabre cutting of the eye pouches one and two, and the shoes that woof and give chase, why, all those apartment life details at the beginning to the animation at film’s close were perhaps what this film wanted to be but a thin storyline had to be shoehorned in. Only one film has made me bristle. Final Cut — Ladies and Gentlemen felt like one giant missed opportunity to play with the limitless possibilities of collage. If you could make your own narrative from 450 films spliced together and rendered anew, would you choose to let your characters tread a conventional path? They can go and be and see anything. There are no restraints save own imagination. That is the beauty and strength of collage. Juxtapose one image with another and completely new meaning forms. This is what I was looking for in Final Cut. For terrific play with scenes that out of original context and in new order woven become something else. Struggling with the boy-meets-girl humdrum story, perhaps this work was saying that all love stories are essentially the same and no matter which way you cut and paste the outcome is always the same. It never changes. It is the universal love tale. A tale where men act and women respond. Moreover, it is only for the young and the beautiful. The ultimate man and the ultimate woman seem a little narrow for me. I longed to see love in more guises than presented, so instead I played the game I am guessing you are meant to play with this film and I tried to spot which film was which. But perhaps with this trio I just needed but refused to play along. Perhaps I like my love stories to be more like that of The Patience Stone, that are found where you did not expect them to be found. Or like the love story that unfolds in Grisgris. Perhaps this surrealist is more realist than I’d realised.

Onward to today’s films. It’ll be no surprise that I am hoping for more highlights like Omar, Tokyo Family, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Like Father, Like Son, The Patience Stone et al.