It must have felt audacious indeed to programme the only short film Samantha Lang has ever made at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival some thirty years ago. Not merely because the film was titled Audacious, but because the cultural memory of the scandal provoked by Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) was still raw. Lang’s film, in its own quiet way, ventured even further. Audacious traces the intimate inner life of a woman frustrated by her husband’s...

Leave One Day. Partir un jour. A film of nostalgia, which opened the Cannes Film Festival last year. In the toilets of Palace Moore Park, in Sydney, after the screening, discussions were running wild about what rating this film should get. Mine would be 8.5 out of 10, provoking a wave of incomprehension while washing hands above the sink. My cinematic tastes are more than questionable, I know. My all-time favorite film is The Big Blue  — that says it all. I loved Visconti's The Leopard , but...

There are films that announce themselves loudly, and others that draw you in almost imperceptibly, like a slow breath held just a little too long. The Well belongs resolutely to the second category. It is a film that trusts silence, duration, and atmosphere - an increasingly rare confidence, and one that immediately signals Samantha Lang’s mastery. Lang, whose work has travelled the world’s most demanding festivals and whose The Well competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, crafts here a...