Amiel Courtin-Wilson
2021
The Silent Eye
Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Shot in three days in January 2016, the film captures the legendary jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and Japanese dancer-choreographer Tanaka Min in a delicate interaction. An impressionistic, extremely intimate portrait of the unspoken dynamics between two masters who have been collaborating for over thirty years.
The Silent Eye
Bastardy
Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Jack Charles
Provocative, funny and profoundly moving, Bastardy is the inspirational story of a self proclaimed Robin Hood of the streets. For Forty years and with infectious humour and optimism, Jack Charles has juggled a life of crime with another successful career- acting
Bastardy
Hail
Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Daniel P. Jones, Leanne Letch
Fresh from a Melbourne jail, Dan is reunited with the love of his life, Leanne. A fierce, passionate and tender couple who have learnt to appreciate the simplest pleasures in life, Dan and Leanne celebrate, and when surrounded by friends he announces he has resolved to go straight.
Hail
Venice 70: Future Reloaded
Franco Maresco, John Akomfrah
Bernardo Bertolucci, Haile Gerima
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Venice 70: Future Reloaded
Ruin
Amiel Courtin-Wilson, Michael Cody
Phirun is 19 years old and lives in Phnom Penh. One day he is accused of theft and involuntarily injures his employer. Phirun escapes and during his flight, he meets Sovanna; a powerful bond grows between the two of them, and develops into love. Amiel Courtin-Wilson is Australian, and made his debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000 with Chasing Buddha; since then he has made many films, screened at the major film festivals. In 2011 he directed Hail, presented at the 68th Venice International Film Festival in the Orizzonti section. Michael Cody, producer, director and screenwriter, has often collaborated with Courtin-Wilson and now they are back together with Ruin.
Ruin
Ben Lee: Catch My Disease
Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Ben Lee, Anita Caplan
Charming, intelligent and iconoclastic, Ben Lee is an Australian singer-songwriter whose creative growth since his early adolescence has undergone almost relentless media scrutiny. This is a playful yet deeply intimate portrait of Lee, exploring his meteoric rise to pop stardom and the issues of celebrity and spirituality that arise when launched into the spotlight.
Ben Lee: Catch My Disease
The Death of a King
Amiel Courtin-Wilson
A response to Yoko Ono's Film Script No. 4 “ASK THE AUDIENCE TO STARE AT THE SCREEN UNTIL IT BECOMES BLACK.” I decided to assemble material shot in Cambodia in 2013 during the Cambodia King-Father Norodom Sihanouk’s funeral- a week long period of national mourning in which millions of Cambodians swarmed to Phnom Penh to grieve for the loss of their beloved leader. The profoundly overwhelming nature of this mass grieving seemed to resonate with the notion of an audience literally collectively willing an image out of existence. I chose to read the action of the screen turning black as being due to the audiences collective will rather than something imposed on an audience by the filmmaker/artist.
The Death of a King
Exquisite Corpse
Daniel Crooks, Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Exquisite Corpse was an image and language parlour game played by the Surrealists, which asked players to collectively write or draw a story or picture, with only limited knowledge of the other players’ contributions. Translating the original game into an immersive VR experience creating a composite human body, Exquisite Corpse maintains the rules of the game with artists and filmmakers contributing, each with no knowledge of the others’ work beyond which body part they were representing, with complete artistic freedom.
Exquisite Corpse
Charles
Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Charles is a portrait of a middle-aged man I met outside a 7/11 late one night on the outskirts of Oklahoma City in 2015. Charles had been homeless for some years, estranged from his family because of his schizophrenia, and was living by a pond at the back of the convenience store. We instantly formed a very intimate connection due to his gentle and deeply compassionate outlook on life. He told me beautiful stories about how he would talk to the trees and clouds before going to sleep each evening, and his plans to visit his daughter in Memphis before the end of the year. We ate some dinner together by his pond before shooting this portrait at about 3am.
Charles
