David Gulpilil was Australia’s most acclaimed Indigenous actor, debuting in Walkabout in 1971 as a lone youth wandering the Outback as part of a tribal rite of passage. He gained a wide audience in Crocodile Dundee. It is an honor to present the U.S. premiere of the award-winning documentary of this actor’s extraordinary life, made more poignant by his death in November. For Gulpilil, who had inoperable lung cancer but lived for years past a dire diagnosis, the film – winner of Best Documentary from the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts–is his fond farewell and valediction.  The Sydney Morning Herald calls it “unbearably moving and utterly engaging,” and The Guardian says it is “sublime, humane and elegant” and “rises to the challenge of doing justice to the extraordinary.” Australia 2021 (101 minutes)

Sponsor: Australian Consulate General San Francisco

Winning period drama based on the true story of Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, played to perfection by Romola Garai, an intelligent, thoughtful woman imprisoned by the conventions of Victorian England. We feel those constraints motivating her drive for social reform and women’s rights. We also understand the illusions she had about her father, Karl Marx, the revolutionary she idolized. Sadly, following her heart she falls for a playwright and charismatic Marxist. We root for Eleanor, as do her wonderful array of bohemian friends, including Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner, but while fighting to save the world, she could not save herself. UK/Italy 2020 (107 minutes)

Partly autobiographical, Last Film Show is a simple, yet rapturous, ode to the 35mm celluloid cinema era. Director and writer Pan Nalin traces the journey of a young boy in a remote Indian village and his relationship with cinema in a rapidly-changing world. This reverent and magical film is an East Indian Cinema Paradiso. Winner, World Cinema Award 2021 Mill Valley Film Festival India/France/USA 2021 (110 minutes)

Almost perfect social realist drama and debut feature from Eva Riley about a lonely, but determined teenage gymnast, who having lost her mother is abandoned by her useless father. Everything changes one evening when she meets her half-brother, a cocky ne’er-do-well, who arrives home on his motorbike and somehow draws Frankie into his rather exciting underworld of small-time theft. There is real warmth and tenderness between them and these newbies are magnetic to watch – Frankie Box, a real-life gymnast, and Alfie Deegan, a trainee carpenter. Winner The Discovery Award, British Independent Film Awards. UK 2019 (84 minutes)

Hollywood quickly learned that grumpy old men can be funny onscreen. Now the Australians have taken this knowledge a step further in the touching comedy Never Too Late. A group of former Vietnam POWs who escaped their captors now find themselves unhappily contained in the Hogan Hills Retirement Home for Returned Veterans. Known as the Chain Breakers for their exploits in the war, the men figure breaking out of a nursing home should be a walk in the park by comparison. Only then can they fulfill their unrealized dreams. For James Cromwell’s character that means reconnecting with the love of his life (Jacki Weaver). 2020 Australia (95 minutes)

Sponsor: Australian Consulate General San Francisco

This forceful debut feature from Cathy Brady frames a raw domestic drama against the backdrop of an Irish community bearing the scars of The Troubles. The story of two sisters who grew up on the fractious border, inseparable as children then torn apart after family tragedy set them on wildly different paths. When one of them, missing for years, suddenly returns home, frayed at the edges, their intense bond is re-ignited. Together, they unearth their late mother’s past and their family’s generational trauma, uncovering deeply buried secrets and reaffirming an inalienable bond as sisters never to be broken again. Winner Best Debut Screenwriter Cathy Brady, British Independent Film Awards. Ireland/UK 2020 (85 minutes)

Presented in partnership with Consulate General of Ireland, San Francisco and SF Irish Film

Oscar-nominated director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) shines a spotlight on Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood in this revealing documentary portrait. Still a gloriously photogenic interview subject at 72, with his cadaverously craggy features and perennially jet-black plume of crow-feather hair, the charming Wood muses on his career with the Stones, his passion as a painter and his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. A genuine, 24-carat rock star guitarist, Wood has played hard, lived fast and somehow survived to tell the tale. With terrific archive footage and appearances by Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Rod Stewart, Damien Hirst and more. 2019 UK (82 minutes)

Mike Figgis will introduce the film on Zoom

Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) is a strong silent type. A good guy. He is a city detective who returns to his hometown, Kiewarra (Australia’s Victoria) a parched, soulless place, for the funeral of his school friend who it appears shot his wife and kid and then himself. Investigating this crime unlocks dark memories of a crime from decades earlier which implicated Aaron, forcing his family to leave town. Haunted by guilt, told through flashbacks, Aaron delves into the crimes while the sinister, hostile bunch of locals, seethe with secrets and lies heightening the murky mood of the film. Excellent performances all around make this murder mystery totally absorbing. Australia 2020 (117 minutes)

Co-Presented by SFFILM

Sponsor: Australian Consulate General San Francisco