beDEVIL
dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1993
90 mins. Australia.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 - 10PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 - 10PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 - 5PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 - 7:30PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com

Like a playful, lavishly-composed Australian folk horror triptych, beDEVIL tells three ghost stories unfolding along cultural fault lines in far-flung corners of the outback and offshore islands. In Moffatt's Australia, though, it is modernity and not antiquity that threatens: her specters are trains, UFOs, and American soldiers. Through lavish stylization and kinetic editing (and embracing all artifice, even bits of digital manipulation), interviews are transformed into performance and memory into heightened drama, as the film blurs the lines not only between Aboriginal and immigrant (or colonial) worlds but also between modes of film and narrative. The resulting tableaux, fanciful and deeply saturated, will haunt not only for their brushes with the uncanny but their many-layered approach to the deeper questions of post-colonial life. At the time of its Cannes debut, beDEVIL was the first feature directed by an Aboriginal woman.