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Australian independent feature Adventures of a Happy Homeless Man is set to screen at Sydney's Chauvel Cinema from July 18-21.

Shot in documentary style, the film is a dramedy about Rafael, a former corporate high-flyer who lost his job, his marriage and his home..

Despite being homeless, he never loses his sense of cheekiness and his passion for music..

Using the moniker Bobo the Hobo, he tries to pursue a music career and an acting career..

.I wanted to make a movie that.s entertaining and also makes people think," said director Dicky Tanuwidjaya..

"The top layer of Adventures of a Happy Homeless Man is a comedy. It.s about a mischievous man who deals with life difficulties with confidence and his own unique humorous view of life. Underneath the comedy layer, there.s a subtle-yet-impactful drama layer that ask the questions about happiness, passion, self-discovery and love."

Felino Dolloso (Balibo,...

Films in the rape-revenge genre typically like to highlight in on their more salacious, titillating and lurid elements. The more brutal the rape and, especially, the more vicious the revenge the better.

However, for his debut feature film, The Devil’s 6 Commandments, writer/director Dicky Tanuwidjaya takes the more staid and philosophical route, going for a more artful approach for the revenge sequences and virtually banishing actual sex from the entire production. Tanuwidjaya also stocks his film with multiple peripheral characters with compounding and intersecting moral dilemmas, so that the plot isn’t singularly driven or too one-note.

When we first meet the main character, Nina (Gianna Patterson), she is already a ruthless killing machine who, along with her half-brother Ares (Felino Dolloso), mete out deadly justice to those who deserve it. Although she desperately tries to cling to her black and white notions of good and evil, that she...

Whether you know some folks on your shopping list who like contemplative dramas or violent revenge stories, there’s something for them below in this edition of the Underground Holiday Shopping Guide.

DramasMad World

Actor Cory Cataldo stepped behind the camera to direct his first feature film, a drama / black comedy hybrid that tackled the issue of bullying before the issue hit the mainstream. Now that Mad World is on DVD, the story of four high school outcasts on the shit end of the social climbing ladder seems even more relevant. Horrifying parental abuse, racism, drug use and other issues swirl together in this potent dramatic concoction.

Buy on Amazon!

Beneath Contempt

In a year stuffed with moody, emotional indie dramas, Benjamin Brewer‘s affecting Beneath Contempt has been, for the most part, unfairly overlooked. A young man is released from prison years after he killed his friends in a...

Sydney low-budget flick The Devil.s 6 Commandments has secured both Australian and Us distribution deals. The $30,000 film, written and directed by Dicky Tanuwidjaya, has been released by Us distributor R-Squared Films (which specialises in independent genre projects) in North America for both DVD and VOD. .It.s harder than getting the film made,. Tanuwidjaya says of his struggle to get distribution. .My first attempt was to contact distributors that distribute films.in the $5-20 million-budget range. And I learned a humbling lesson when the first question that 90 per cent of them asked was .Who.s in it?... The first-time feature film director/producer . who spent $20,000 on production and $10,000 on insurance,...

Movies will be destroyed once and for all! The 12th annual Melbourne Underground Film Festival is upon us with their great theme of Destroy All Movies. The fest runs Aug. 19-28 and to mark the anarchic occasion, filmmaker Palomar has created two official festival trailers, embedded above and below.

MUFF12 opens on the 19th with the highly controversial A Serbian Film by Srdjan Spasojevic, which has been banned all over the world, including most recently in South Australia! So, if you’re an Australian citizen living in or near Melbourne, take this rare opportunity to see this movie that many of your fellow countrymen won’t be able to.

Other films screening at the fest include the epic documentary on the world’s most dangerous artist, Boyd Rice, Iconoclast directed by Larry Wessel. Plus, there are homegrown flicks like Chris Sun’s Come and Get Me, Boronia Backpackers by Timothy Spanos,...

Destroy All Movies! That’s the cheeky theme to the 12th annual Melbourne Underground Film Festival, which will run on August 19-28.

Festival director Richard Wolstencroft lays out his philosophy for this year’s Muff in an excellent Director’s Statement, which is published in the fest’s program guide. He explains his provocative statement as thus:

“Destroy All Movies” can be taken as a query, a question and even a complaint about cinema itself. Most of us love movies. I still do, of course. I am obsessed by them as ever. Making, watching and showing them. But how often do we question our passion in this kind of ontological sense?

In that regard, Muff is a much more focused and scaled back event this year with less films screening, but with a tighter consideration of local talent, as well as a larger, more provocative stance as ever.

Muff has...

Currently in the final stages of post-production is a new action film shot in Sydney, The Devil's 6 Commandments, which revolves around six revenge stories that intertwine with one another.   At the centre of the film is the character of Nina who after being brutally raped by thugs is persuaded by her step brother to track the perpetrators down and torture them. During their revenge mission, Nina and her brother encounter a rogue cop who helps their cause, a homophobic multi-millionaire and a priest with a dark past.   Despite its dark and brutal themes, director Dicky Tanuwidjaya says his first feature film is actually a very personal story.