STA Screen Goulburn Film Group—The Lonely Spirits Variety Hour

The Lonely Spirits Variety Hour will screen at 4pm, January 29 at the GPAC. The screening will feature live music before the film, and an exclusive Q&A with the cast & crew after the film, including the film’s director and producer Platon Theodoris and editor and cinematographer Brian Rapsey.

• Live music from Peter Campbell at 3:30pm
• Film Screens at 4pm (Running time 77 minutes)
• Q&A after the film

 

The Lonely Spirits Variety Hour is an existential mishmash of Spike Milligan and Jacques Tati with an Australian flavour, this is absurdist comedy at its weirdest and most charming. Neville Umbrellaman is a verbose, velvet-voiced intellectual who hosts a late-night radio show from his parents’ garage. The alter ego of Rabindranath Chakraborty, Umbrellaman is deeply committed to the program, a labour of love and fantastical fancy that masks deeper, more tragic truths. Luckily, he’s got plenty of eccentric guests to help him out, from folk singer Kenneth Wong and Terry the neighbour to French baker Yvette and Chakraborty’s secret crush, Sabrina D’Angelo. But is anybody tuning in? This adaptation of Nitin Vengurlekar’s lauded stage show of the same name is a rare gem of independent local filmmaking. Starring Vengurlekar as Chakraborty/Umbrellaman – reprising the role he also played onstage – the film builds on the warped whimsy of award-winning director Platon Theodoris’s debut feature Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites, enabling him to stake a claim as one of the country’s most distinctive and curious filmmakers. The Lonely Spirits Variety Hour is a hilarious, wonderfully weird delight.

 

The film has taken the Best Actor prize at the Festival des Antipodes 2022, St Tropez in France and was the winner of Best Film at the Sydney Underground Film Festival in 2022. The film was also nominated for the Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award, MIFF 2022 for Production Design. ScreenHub AND Cinema Australia nominated The Lonely Spirits Variety Hour as one of Australia’s Top 10 Films of 2022, with The Curb nominating the film as its top film of 2022!

 

When

Location

Goulburn Performing Arts Centre, 163 Auburn Street, 2580, View Map