the Curb

Filmmaker Jordan Giusti's Floodland is an impactful documentary that takes audiences to the flood-prone landscape of Lismore, NSW. Thousands of people call the region home, and yet, due to the climate crisis and government inaction, they find themselves in horrifying situations where their homes are swept away, they lose friends and family, and pets and livestock end up as collateral damage for an ongoing emergency that has no solu...

Haydn Green has been the creative force of Hear My Eyes, a sonic-visual, hybrid experience which blends film and music in creatively intriguing and boundary pushing ways. As the founder and artistic director of Hear My Eyes, Haydn reaches out to contemporary musicians to craft new scores for pre-existing cinema.

Collaborations include Sampa the Great rescoring Céline Sciamma's Girlhood, The Murlocs putting their spin on Gregor Jorda...

This interview has been a long while in the can, waiting to be published. This in depth discussion with filmmaker, creative, and fearless storyteller Lucy Coleman was recorded early in 2025 and due to reasons you'll hear in the long intro (recorded in the foyer of Luna Cinemas Leederville, a home away from home), it's now finally being released into the world.

Lucy Coleman is the creative vision behind films like Hot Mess and Lean I...

One of the standout films from the 2026 batch of Flickerfest shorts has been Damien Power's docu-drama Return of the Champ. With this excellent hybrid experience, the stand up comedian turned director spins the cameras on his relationship with his brother, Will Power, a world champion and Indy 500 winner, who spins a story about a crash that he once witnessed. It's a story that Damien hadn't heard before, and within Return of the C...

Addition is the latest film from director Marcelle Lunam and actor Teresa Palmer. It's a screen adaptation of the novel by Toni Jordan, telling the story of Grace, a woman who counts everything because numbers hold her world together. Yet, when she meets Seamus (Joe Dempsie), her world is thrown upside and her ordered life becomes disordered.

In the following interviews, recorded ahead of Addition's release in Australian cinemas, Na...

Lianne Mackessy is a multi-hyphenate creative whose work spans from acting in front of the camera in films like 2025's Smoke, to writing and directing her own work, like her 2026 drama short film Tuesday Tuesday. 

Making its world premiere at FlickerFest 2026, Tuesday Tuesday follows a young support worker, played by Jillian Nguyen, who spends a final day with her long-time client, played by Peter Phelps, who lives with you...

Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav Borg in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a man who is searching for connection with the two daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) he effectively abandoned when he split from their just deceased mother. 

The once storied director turns up at the funeral for his ex-wife and one of the first things he does is to reclaim a set of speakers from the home (a longstanding c...

In unison, director Óliver Laxe & composer Kandang Ray have created one of the most intense and heart racing cinematic experiences in recent years with their Cannes award winning film Sirāt (winning the Jury Prize). Playing out like a modern version of Wages of Fear with a missing daughter and a rave in the desert supplanting that films explosive cargo, Sirāt is as intense as experience as any other that follows Luis (Sergi Lóp...

Giles Chan's Jellyfish was one of the cinematic revelations that I experienced during 2025. It's a film about a man, Henry, played with grounded depression by Aidan Rynne, who earns money by being a human punching bag. His body is riddled with bruises, most inflicted by others, some inflicted by himself. He's a jellyfish of a person, consuming enough to survive, but otherwise floating through Perth on a journey to nothing.

After one...

Even though we're only five days into the new year, one of the standout shows for 2026 is the ABC adaptation of Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia. This glorious animation carries a stop motion vibe as it invites us into a version of suburbia, one where deep sea divers roam the streets and single mums try to keep their family together.

We follow Klara and Pim and their mum Lucy, voiced with beautiful attentiveness and care by Ger...

Gabriel Mascaro's filmography embraces narrative perspectives that we rarely see on screen. His 2019 film Divine Love is a neon soaked dance experience that amplifies love and unity against a backdrop of bureaucracy, while his 2015 film Neon Bull invites us into a world of rodeos, horse dancing, and flights of fantasy, and in the process, Gabriel invites us to consider the world anew.

That approach to narrative storytelling continue...

If there's one filmmaker who has left a mark more than any other on my life, it's been Kelly Reichardt. Through her work, I've gleaned an understanding of what American life through the ages is like. From the pioneer days captured with a desolate despair in Meek's Cutoff, to the heart shattering singularity of Wendy and Lucy, to the manner that taste and fortune appear in opportunistic ways in First Cow, and now, with her latest fi...

Emmanuel Courcol's heartwarming and heartbreaking film My Brother's Band, aka En Fanfare or The Marching Band, is a film about Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe), a conductor who discovers he has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant. After discovering that his sister is not his blood related sibling and the he was adopted as a child, Thibaut goes down a path of discovery to find his birth mother, and possible siblings. He discovers...

Shaun Tan is many things. He's an Academy Award winning animator, he's an artist who has taken the fantastical to suburbia and made both feel real and otherworldly, and he's someone who has poured years into shaping personal stories into profound imagery.  To me, he's more than just those things. He's someone who has translated what it means to live in Perth, what it means to grow up in a version of suburbia that spre...

In its current form, Old Habits is part of the ABC Compass series, but as you'll hear in this interview with Alfie Faber, he's working on expanding the short into a feature length documentary. And gosh, what a film it will be if he gets it to a feature length. Old Habits is a delight, utilising the charm and vibrancy of the Sisters to expand upon a hidden part of Australian queer history.

Watching Old Habits reminded me of my conve...

In this episode, Andrew interviews Lynette Wallworth about her collaborative documentary Edge of Life.

This interview was recorded during the national release of Edge of Life, currently in a limited run in Australian cinemas. Check out your local cinema guide for details, or visit Kismet Movies for additional information on where and how to view the film.

the Curb is a reader and listener supported independent publication. T...

A brilliant circus family’s hidden legacy unfolds as descendants reunite across continents, revealing their Australian Aboriginal ancestry, global stardom, and the extraordinary secrets they kept in order to survive. The greatest entertainment on earth in the 1900s was the circus and its performers were the global superstars. The big top transported children and adults alike into a world where anything was possible.

Con Colleano, ‘t...