‘Homebound’ tells a story of a beautiful friendship. I found it incredibly touching because I have two sisters (and no brothers) and I feel like I have troubles being close with a guy friend. The adversity that they need to face, in their own country where they were born, is insane. I moved to Australia from Indonesia and I do experience racism, however, I acknowledge that I’m in a much more privileged position for many different reasons, including the fact that I moved here on my own accord — I wasn’t forced to do it and I can go back if it became too difficult. But in ‘Homebound'‘, these two guys lived there their whole lives, yet they receive such horrible treatment. I can imagine many people can relate to that as well.

The opening credits were shown together with Trump’s voice (urgh) in the background, commenting on making the Gaza Strip the Riviera of the Middle East (my goodness). Then, the opening scenes had a dead person being carried through the streets, with the Palestinian flag waved around. We are then introduce to the main character, Osama, with a bit of a “thrown into the story and we need to catchup on what’s going on”, it was quickly revealed that he deals drugs. Then they introduced the second main character, Yahya, in a similar way where things just happens and you as the audience just put things together. That structure was kind of preserved throughout the film in a bite-size chunks.

The movie kind of lasted for a whole year, with season changes signified by the literal mountains that they are surrounded by. Every single shot in nature I was like “dang, how would it be living there, I want to try that!”. The location of the film is amazing. The characters are great too! It introduced the characters pretty well, including the dog, Panda — one of the big highlights of the movie for me, just so so cute.

These were all made by local Australian artists; and they were all there! The session opened with them on stage and giving a short spiel about their films. It was so cool to see them in person. Afterwards, my wife even approached one of the directors and just had small chit-chat. Congratulations to everyone for a the amazing movies, really inspiring.

The movie had a time-jump structure where the audience is given a block of story in non-chronological way. When movies do this, I feel like there’s a risk of it being too hard to follow. That only happens when it’s done well. Thankfully, in my opinion, “Sorry, Baby” did it very well. The opening story block establishes the relationship between Agnes and Liddy. It also reveals a story point that relates to the film title (hint: it involves a baby). It sets a strong sense of “wanting to know”, what happens next? what happened in the past? how is a baby involved in all this?

Samsara is a black and white movie. I don’t watch lots of that. And, it’s also a movie with no dialog, only music. Okay that’s also very different for me. So how does that translate to the watching experience?

The black and white scheme felt so at home with the narrative and setting. It felt like it was meant to be B&W, if it was colour it would’ve been unnatural. Lighting and composition is extra important, along with special effects, make up, costumes and so on. They couldn’t rely on colour! Or rather, colour is not part of the creative axis. Honestly, this motivated me to do more B&W photography and learn the in-and-outs of it.

Melbourne International Film Festival 2025 is ongoing and I went to watch my first session (of 12!) , International Shorts 1.

As an aside, since these are “International Shorts”, they are delivered in many different languages, a lot of them I don’t speak (I speak English and Indonesian). As a person who doesn’t understand these languages, somehow the language also bears weight in how I interpret or see the film. Maybe that’s silly, or maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. Anyway, here’s the review