[CENSORED]

"I hope my film will complicate how we feel about censorship, what we define as censorship, and how we feel about cinema. In creating [CENSORED], I wanted to create space for understanding the problems of our spectatorship; to use this archive to make us better, more discerning viewers." – filmmaker Sari Braithwaite, The Guardian

During the making of her short film Smut Hounds (MIFF 2015) – about David Stratton’s battles with the Australian government, which wanted to censor a 1969 Swedish film playing at the Sydney Film Festival – filmmaker Sari Braithwaite gained access to the huge archive of clips that Australian censors had made to international films from 1958 to 1971. Among the collection were scenes removed from films made by directors such as Godard, Polanski, Bergman, Varda and Fellini, as well as countless lesser-known avant-garde European films and Hollywood B-grades.

[CENSORED] is an experimental documentary feature created entirely from these scraps of international films, and narrated by Braithwaite who discusses the process of placing these clips together to raise questions about the power of censorship, the role of the filmmaker and the complicity of the audience. Although the clips were orphaned from their original context, a disturbing pattern revealed itself in these displaced frames. An experimental, personal examination of a complicated archive, [CENSORED] challenges the audience to reckon with the tension of censorship, the filmmaker’s gaze, and role of the spectator.

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