The Top 5 Films of the 2024 Revelation Perth International Film Festival

Image credit: Still from 'Hundreds of Beavers'

Returning with its 27th edition this year from July 3 - 14 is the iconic Revelation Perth International Film Festival, set to take over a range of theatres and venues around the Perth CBD with over 30 feature films and documentaries and as well as over 80 short films and other special events.

Champions of all things Australian screen culture and independent filmmaking, this year’s festival is set to deliver something for audiences of all ages with a program curated to push boundaries, challenge the status quo, and most importantly, entertain.

“We’re so pleased with the calibre of this year’s program,” says Revelation Director Richard Sowada. “It’s a bumper year for local films of all shapes and sizes and we’re backing the creatives behind them with our biggest professional development program to date. There’s an undeniable momentum driving this year’s program and we can’t wait to experience it with audiences.”

With a stacked program (that you can check out here), we caught up with festival program director Jack Sargeant to get the lowdown on the five(ish) films you don’t want to miss this year:

I feel that there are a lot of short films this year, it seems like we have more than usual. Often filmmakers are dissuaded from making longer shorts, I think there’s an unspoken rule saying fifteen minutes or something, but we try and show a range of works, including longer shorts. This year we have programs of experimental shorts, surreal shorts, horror shorts, science fiction shorts, shorts about filmmaking, long shorts and WA made shorts, as well as shorts programmed with most feature sessions. On a personal level, I like the surreal and experimental sessions, but if people want to see the homegrown talent they should check out the WA shorts.

Of the feature length films, Hundreds of Beavers is one of the most gleefully absurd and thoroughly enjoyable films I've seen in a long time. Imagine a live action cartoon combined with golden era slapstick comedy and you may be half-way there. But this movie really defies belief. It was a joy to watch when I saw it last year, I'm looking forward to seeing the Revelation audience watching it for the first time.

I feel we always have a good selection of music documentaries, and this year is no exception, with films on Stuart Gray/Stu Spasm, Wayne Green and Redd Kross (producing a weird and unintentional palette of gray, green and red), as well as Mogwai, all ringing in my ears. Selecting a favourite music documentary is always near-impossible, I think I Should Have Been Dead Years Ago, about Stuart Gray, may win the vote for me, but really these are all just great documentaries.

There’s always a discussion about film as the work of an auteur or a collective project, and there’s no answers to this, but in terms of the idea of the auteur we have Bruce La Bruce’s The Visitor, which I really like, and we also have Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, which everybody is very excited for after seeing Poor Things last year.

It’s more than five, because there’s so much, but one last film that means a lot to me, and maybe explains everything we do at Revelation, is Kim’s Video. A film about all kinds of things – renting VHS tapes, New York City, independent cinema, world cinema, collecting tapes, the nature of archives, and a very strange adventure. Ultimately, it’s just a fascinating story and, to me, a genuine pleasure to watch. It is a film that says a lot about culture, the importance we place on movies, and the way film captures the imagination. I think that’s important.

          - Jack Sargeant

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