Cannes coup for young Australian filmmaker
ARIEL Kleiman’s status as one of Australia’s fastest-rising film talents was confirmed with the recent announcement that his short film, Deeper Than Yesterday, will be screened at Critic’s Week as part of the Cannes Film Festival.
Critic’s Week has showcased films by up-and-coming filmmakers for nearly 50 years, and has given artists such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Jacques Audiard and Ken Loach their start.
Kleiman, 25, leaves for the French Riviera on Sunday, on the second stop of his festival-hopping itinerary.
In February, he was in Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, where another short he wrote and directed, Young Love, won an honourable mention. He was also the director of photography on Muscles — a film by long-time friend Edward Housden — which has been nominated for the short film Palme d’Or.
“We make these films in a little bubble and we work pretty hard on them for quite a while,” Kleiman told The AJN. “So it’s definitely a nice feeling even just to have it screened so other people can see it. It has been a crazy couple of months.”
And Kleiman will get his wish.
Cannes is comfortably the world’s most prestigious film festival and has long been considered a hotbed for talent-spotting and a launcher of careers.
Deeper Than Yesterday is one of seven shorts that will be screened as part of Critic’s Week, along with seven feature-length films. At nearly 20 minutes, Kleiman’s film is an awkward length and was too long to be considered in the short-film competition at Cannes.
“I was quite surprised [the film was selected for Critic’s Week] because I thought Deeper might have been too long. I didn’t know how it would be accepted at film festivals, because it’s quite a commitment to watch for a short. I had low expectations.”
Set on a submarine, Deeper Than Yesterday is a Russian-language film that explores the effects of prolonged isolation on a group of sailors. As the men become increasingly savage towards one another, they discover the body of a woman floating in the water.
The film was the Victorian College of the Arts student’s third-year project and was shot in eight days with a Russian-speaking cast, comprised of security guards and members of a local Russian drama school.
“I wrote it in English and then we workshopped it with the actors. I understand Russian, but I don’t speak it. The actors really made the script their own in Russian, which was great.”
On a tight production schedule that allowed little room for error, Kleiman and his crew spent eight days bunkered down in a decommissioned submarine docked near Hastings, on Victoria’s Western Port Bay. But it wasn’t the first choice for the film’s location.
“Originally when I thought of it, it was going to be about a group of fisherman that find a woman in the ocean, but we couldn’t find a fishing trawler that would let us shoot on there. But it was probably a blessing because the sub was amazing.”
Kleiman and his housemates — girlfriend Sarah Cyngler, the film’s production designer, and Benjamin Gilovitz, a producer — built corporate websites to pay for the making of the film.
Kleiman said sharehouse living inspired Deeper Than Yesterday.
“I guess the concept of living with people and being with the same people day in and day out, I think that might be where it came from.”
The exposure of Kleiman’s films has earned him a contract with Warp Films (which produced the 2006 indie hit This is England) to pen a feature, which he is currently writing with Cyngler.
ADAM KAMIEN
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