An unsettling but impressive feature debut

You never escape your dad. He helps bring you into the world and decades later he’ll be there to help usher you from it.

This seems to be the central thesis of the curious 2015 film Partisan, directed by Ariel Kleiman and co-written with his frequent collaborator Sarah Cyngler. It is an odd movie, never fully succeeding in its ambition. But in its self-conscious rejection of the notions of cultural identity and conventional filmmaking that permeate our national film industry, and in its keen interest in ideology, it is one of the most interesting Australian films of recent times.