A movie based on the ‘Kafkaesque nightmare’ endured by Australian war correspondent Peter Greste after his arrest in Egypt in 2013 will open this year’s Adelaide Film Festival. Greste and star Richard Roxburgh are both set to attend the world premiere screening at Piccadilly Cinemas.
The Correspondent is directed by Kriv Stenders – whose previous movies include Boxing Day and Lucky Country – and features a screenplay by Peter Duncan adapted from Greste’s memoir The First Casualty. Stenders will also be a guest at the October 23 screening, as will the film’s producer, Carmel Travers.
Announcing the first six films in the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival program today, CEO and creative director Mat Kesting said the festival was “immensely proud” to be presenting the world premiere of The Correspondent. “This is an important film about one of the most urgent issues of our time – freedom of the press – from some of Australia’s finest screen creatives. We look forward to warmly welcoming them to AFF.”
The Journalist's Nightmare
The Correspondent, which received support from the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund (AFFIF), begins with Greste (Richard Roxburgh) arriving in Cairo at a time when tensions in Egypt are high following the military coup led by Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi. Greste is on a two-week assignment covering for an Al Jazeera reporter who is on Christmas leave, but after his hotel room is raided by armed government forces he is arrested alongside two colleagues and accused of terrorism and broadcasting false information.
What unfolds is described in the film’s production notes as “a descent into a Kafkaesque nightmare in which Greste is seen as collateral damage in the war on truth”.
A Film Based on Personal Experience
Greste was actively involved in the production, which producer Travers, a former foreign correspondent herself, first spoke to him about soon after he was freed and returned to Australia in 2015. The creative team decided The Correspondent – whose cast includes Yael Stone as murdered BBC producer Kate Peyton, and Julian Maroun and Rahel Romahn as the Al Jazeera producer and cameraman – would be “a highly contained film” encompassing Greste’s 436 days in jail. “It starts the day Peter’s arrested and ends the day he’s released,” says director Stenders. “It’s a completely immersive film that puts us right beside Peter, and holds to that first-person point of view. Everything we see is from Peter’s perspective.”
Other Films at the Festival
The Adelaide Film Festival will run from October 23 until November 3, with the other films announced today including Songs Inside, a South Australian documentary exploring the transformative power of music through a project with female prisoners. The AFFIF film is directed by Shalom Almond and features local musician Nancy Bates, who both spoke to InReview last year about Songs Inside and the music program it documents.
Bates will perform alongside members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and the prison group Songbirds at the world premiere screening of Songs Inside during the Film Festival, with Kesting saying the musical presentation “promises to be a very special moment for all who attend”.
The Adelaide Film Festival will also present the Australian premiere of Blitz, an Apple Original Film directed by Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) and starring Saoirse Ronan, which follows the story of a nine-year-old boy and his family amid the bombing of London during World War II.
The other international films in the early program announcement are the 2024 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix award winner All We Can Imagine as Light, a romantic drama from India by director Payal Kapadia that follows two nurses living in Mumbai, and closing night movie Nightbitch, directed by Marielle Heller and starring Amy Adams, which is adapted from author Rachel Yoder’s magical realism novel of the same name about modern motherhood.
A Thrilling Conclusion
For fans of horror, the festival will be screening a preview of We Bury the Dead, an Australian apocalyptic thriller by director Zak Hilditch set during the aftermath of a “catastrophic military experiment”. The film stars Daisy Ridley as a woman who travels to the south of Tasmania to join a “body retrieval unit” in the hopes of finding her missing husband but ends up “forced to confront the undead”. When production of We Bury the Dead was announced last year, Screen Australia head of content Grainne Brunsdon said it promised “a fresh take on the zombie/horror genre and plenty of gut-wrenching thrills for audiences, whilst delving deep into the world of loss, grief and the undead”. The full program for the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival will be launched on September 17.
