SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: Of mice and men in topical documentaries

WHEN Matthew Newton's Three Blind Mice was chosen for the first competition at the Sydney Film Festival, it seemed like a left-field choice.

Even in the industry, hardly anybody knew the well-known Australian actor from Looking For Alibrandi and Stupid Stupid Man had written, directed and starred in the film.

But when Three Blind Mice screened last night, having been finished the day before, it proved to be a real surprise packet - an impressive freewheeling drama with a topical edge about three Australian naval officers on their last night in Sydney before heading back to Iraq.

Newton plays Harry, a fast-talker out for a wild night, Toby Schmitz is the more conservative Dean, who is meeting his fiancee and her parents for dinner, and Ewen Leslie is troubled Sam, who is planning to jump ship.

Their adventures around the city, including a poker game and a run-in with a pimp, reveal tensions centring on brutal bullying on board their ship.

As well as writing a witty script, Newton has impressively directed a cast full of other well-known actors, including Pia Miranda, Alex Dimitriades, Marcus Graham, Barry Otto, Bud Tingwell and Jacki Weaver.

The festival competition had earlier warmed up with the impressive British drama Hunger, about the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, emerging on Saturday as early favourite to win the $60,000 prize.

The British video-artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen dramatises the tense conflict between prison officers and IRA inmates at the Maze prison, near Belfast, in the 1980s.

Hunger is made in an almost experimental style - with minimal dialogue except for an intense 20-minute debate between Sands, played by Michael Fassbender, and a sceptical priest about the morality of the hunger strike.

It is a brilliantly effective drama that raises questions about the treatment of prisoners during more recent conflicts.

Also in competition on the weekend was the New Zealand director Vincent Ward's documentary Rain Of The Children, which investigates the life of an elderly Maori woman, Puhi, who was the subject of his first film in 1981.

June 9, 2008
Garry Maddox for Sydney Morning Herald