Pick Of The Week

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES Image from The Portable Film Festival website


From the rich and famous to the penniless and obscure, 'Coffee and Cigarettes' is our pick of the most compelling interviews from Australia and around the world in TV, film and online serials.
Pick of the Week

Need some inspiration? This week we recommend you watch:

1. Last Time I Cried. Geneveive Bailey & Henrik Nordstrom, Australia.
2. Shane Jacobson. Enough Rope with Andrew Denton, Australia.
3. Baghdad Refugees Flee to Kurdistan. Isam Rasheed, Iraq.
4. Tsunami Taxicab. Elvis D’Silva, Singapore.

Last Time I Cried. The ever-prolific Geneveive Bailey is our Portable poster-girl. We’ve featured her work in every festival so far, and this showcase is no exception. This poignant documentary is constructed out of several thousand still photographs, in which Gen and Henrik ask several interview subjects aged between 3 and 93 about the last time they cried.


Shane Jacobson on Enough Rope. Godfather of Australian talk Andrew Denton talks to the man most commonly known as Kenny about the business of movies, fireworks and the public image of a toilet attendant. Shane's role as the eponymous Kenny in the 2006 film earned him an AFI Award for Best Lead Actor.


Baghdad Refugees Flee to Kurdistan Online interview series Alive in Baghdad shows the occupation through the voices of Iraqi civilians. This episode presents a portrait of an Iraqi family in self-imposed exile, forced to sacrifice ties with family, work and community and start anew in Kurdistan.

Tsunami Taxicab. This short documentary combines animation and live footage to capture an interview with a taxi driver in Singapore just after the Tsunami hit in 2004, who believes the disaster was the result of God's wrath.