Australia / 2017 / 97 min / DCP

Director : Sally Aitken

Cannes Classics, Cannes Film Festival 2017

Cinema has always been an obsession for the English-born Australian critic David Stratton. Filed in a ring binder labeled 1946 on a shelf in his office he can, without delay, extract a short “review” he wrote as a seven-year old after seeing the Australian film The Overlanders. At last count he’d seen 25,254 films and reviewed most of them. More than 1,000 were printed in the international film trade magazine Variety. It was a love affair with Australian cinema that led David to understand himself and his adopted country. First he earned the respect of the Australian film industry, then the respect of the public. He arrived in Australia an outsider; now he’s a national treasure.