Concrete Playground

Friday, 21st August - 3AM
@ Various cinemas

Tackling the subject of mental illness on screen is tough, especially if your chosen genre is romantic comedy. Tread too carefully and you risk trivialising the subject, lay it on too thick and you might end up with an over-drawn caricature – either way potentially offensive and inaccurate.Fortunately writer/director Max...

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Sunday, 9th August - 3AM
@ CarriageWorks

What could be more iconic in the prolific landscape of Aussie fashion than the ubiquitous trackie (except maybe a pair of ugg’s and a T-shirt that says ‘The Big Banana Down Under’)? In his debut exhibition, renowned fashion photographer Harold David showcases the comfiest of all apparel as seen on...

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Friday, 21st August - 3AM
@ Various cinemas

Unfortunately in recent times the environmental doco has become the brown rice of cinematic experience – a seriously relevant but ultimately dry undertaking. But occasionally a non-fiction offering will rattle genre convention and achieve what is commonly found only in the contrived theatrics of feature film – suspense, intrigue and...

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Thursday, 13th August - 3AM
@ Aquabumps Gallery

How do you shoot the most shot beach in the country without it looking like a postcard you might send to your granny? Hitch a ride in a helicopter and view it as the Gods do. That's exactly what renowned surf photographer and owner of Aquabumps Gallery, Eugene Tan, did...

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Monday, 7th September - 1PM
@ Sydney Opera House

There is no 5 in Ben Folds. Just a man, described by Spin as "incapable of mediocrity," a piano and a slew of unique, slightly left-of-centre pop rock tunes. Ben's been a busy boy since last he graced our shores in 2006, selling out a record four shows with the...

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Wednesday, 16th September - 11AM
@ Chauvel Cinema

If you’ve ever bothered clicking on one of those facebook video posts captioned ‘check this out – the most inspirational talk, like, ever’ it was more than likely filmed at TED. Every year at TED conferences around the world, forward thinkers gather to hear some of the world’s most innovative,...

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Saturday, 24th October - 2PM
@ The Metro Theatre

Steve Aoki everybody! More than just a pretty weird face. This multi-tasking magic man has managed to successfully juggle just about every creative pursuit known to gen-Y. His credits include: commander of the DJ booth, spinner of designer threads and wizard behind Dim Mak records, the label responsible for launching...

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Friday, 2nd October - Monday, 30th November
@ Various cinemas

Before China flung open its imposing red doors to an international market, it was very much the quiet kid in the corner with super strict parents who didn’t talk to anyone for fear of inviting a wedgie. This was the backdrop for the early years of young Li Cunxin's (Chi Cao)...

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Friday, 2nd October - Saturday, 31st October
@ Various Sydney venues

Crave: the festival's festival. An event created on behalf of the NSW government to draw dollars, jobs and foreign folk to our soil, Crave is a celebration of the artistic, culinary and aesthetic offerings of our dear resplendent Sydney - basically an excuse to be the big fat show-offs that we are. It’s...

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Thursday, 5th November - Thursday, 17th December
@ Absolute Stairwell gallery

Can a photograph somehow visually capturethe essence of an auditory experience? With a lens that has perforated rockconcerts, festivals and intimate gigs around the world, photographer CaraStricker takes us on an inside journey, capturing the global music scene withraw immediacy. In Dancing on my bed, Strickerexplores a visual landscape of...

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Saturday, 12th December - Sunday, 13th December
@ The Beach Road Hotel

Well kids you know it’s Christmas timewhen cult indie record label Modular busts out the big guns and wraps the yearwith some of their finest. This year, Bondi’s illustrious Beach RoadHotel will play host to a line-up as long as Octa-moms shopping list, includinglive acts from Tame Impala, Jonathon Boulet...

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Tuesday, 23rd February - Sunday, 7th March
@ Sydney Opera House

Hands up if you've ever stopped dead on a dance floor after one too many Jager bombs, and quietly pondered the hidden meaning in a badly remixed Britney Spears track and how such lyrical genius could be so grossly underrated. Not lately? Then allow yourself to be schooled in the...

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Tuesday, 15th December - 8AM
@ Darlo Bar

I love a good David and Goliath scenario.Like when young filmmakers persistently plug away at their projects and bustthrough the backdoor of an industry that has its golden gates wide open toanything screaming blockbuster and little else. Or when a small inner city pubsticks it to multiplex cinemas by screening...

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Friday, 15th January - 8PM
@ Spectrum

If you’re thinking of naming your latest single after vermin and their plight for fresh produce during the festive season - sorry, it’s taken. With officially the weirdest song title in history (ok maybe second only to Constipation Blues by Screaming Jay Hawkins) Sydney band The Danimals are set to...

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Saturday, 27th March - 7PM
@ Big Top, Luna Park

The Bacardi Express may be an iconic 1960s relic but it certainly ain't the kind of blissed-out peace train Cat Stevens would croon about. For two solid days, under one rattling roof, musicians, bartenders, cooks, crew, and nearly one hundred revellers will clutter five bespoke carriages for the sake of...

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Friday, 19th February - Saturday, 13th March
@ Wharf 2, Wharf Theatre

There’s something disarming about 'irishness'. It has a geniality to it that speaks of the salt-of-the-earth everyman that every other man wants to have a pint of Guinness with. From the moment the first lilting, colloquial sample of dialogue is delivered in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, you’re instantly poised...

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Thursday, 4th March - Saturday, 20th March
@ Chalk Horse

Tara Marynowsky’s faint, whispering watercolors appear to float within the canvas like nebulous snapshots of REM-state imaginings, their pale delicacy unencumbered by the volumes of idea, history and myth of which they speak. With a gentle hand and a playful touch, Marynowsky explores the sinister, surreal, spiritual and supernatural realm...

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Thursday, 1st April - 8AM
@ Newtown Theatre

In a world funded by the currency of youth, aging can be a pretty difficult concept for a lot of folks to accept. Ours is a time in which Botox clinics pop up like wild fungi, dating a boy in school uniform is considered a mark of feminine liberation and...

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Saturday, 10th April - 9AM
@ Ward park and Shannon reserve

Thank the Gods of urban planning for Surry Hills, without which Sydney’s only claim to a hub of cultural diversity, decent culinary haunts, urban grit and faux-artsy yuppiedom would be … um … Melbourne. It gives credence to our posturing as a sophisticated metropolis, it grants us a filament of...

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Saturday, 1st May - 12PM
@ Hordern Pavilion

One must admit that when it comes to our import/export trade-off with Britain, we trump them every time. I mean, we’ve donated Neighbours, Violet Crumbles, the Minogue sisters, and the list goes on. Meanwhile, what have they given us in return? The Queen? And what has she done for us...

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Thursday, 22nd April - 6PM
@ National Art School

Fashion. Never has there been such an infectious strain of creative expression, popping up in everything like flavour enhancer, sweetening the contents of artistic mediums it previously had not much to do with. But I guess that’s the beauty of this current era of post-post modernism: no creative field of...

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Monday, 19th April - Saturday, 24th April
@ Sydney Theatre Company

Farce: a light, humorous play in which the plot depends upon a skilfully exploited situation rather than upon the development of character. By this definition alone, the Druid Ireland theatre company’s production of The Walworth Farce would not have the intricately nuanced, highly developed characters and rich layers of subtext...

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Saturday, 17th April - Sunday, 30th May
@ Belvoir St Theatre

Now this is what school should have been like. Once a fanciful adolescent who would have preferred to lick chalk off the blackboard than sit through economics lectures, I learnt more about the Western financial system in just under two hours from this neatly executed play than I did from...

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Friday, 25th June - 8PM
@ Enmore Theatre

You may not know the title of her last album, or the words to her latest song, but you undoubtedly know her sultry, haunting, faraway voice.

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Thursday, 6th May - Sunday, 9th May
@ Around Bondi Beach

Sliding into the slipstream of the coming Sydney Fashion Week is a festival of a more irreverent, grass-roots variety. An event about “culture, creativity and bringing people together”, Sizzle is Bondi’s answer to the much-loved Surry Hills Fest. The four-day festival will cover just about every angle in celebration of...

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Thursday, 6th May - Wednesday, 9th June
@ Various cinemas

A German comedy about food? Given that the nation is not exactly renowned for its culinary prowess, or comedic cinema for that matter, I was certainly curious about Soul Kitchen, the latest offering out of Germany from filmmaker Faith Akin (The Edge of Heaven, Head On) and winner of the...

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Thursday, 27th May - Wednesday, 30th June
@ Various cinemas

A typically bland, clean-cut suburban family this motley crew ain't. Within the walls of a deceptively serene weatherboard house in the quaint fishing village of City Island on the outskirts of Manhattan dwell a working-class family engaged in a perpetual game of emotional hide-and-seek. Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia) is a...

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Wednesday, 2nd June - Saturday, 5th June
@ Performance Space

Modern-day man-love is strange and complex new territory indeed. Since hunting rituals fell out of vogue all those years ago, there’s no longer a clear-cut way of navigating the sticky terrain of platonic male bonding. In the age of self-help saturation, men are being called on to express their feelings,...

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Thursday, 3rd June - Saturday, 5th June
@ Tusculum House

We all remember slide show nights, right? Somewhere in the decades between storytelling around a campfire and Facebook, they reigned supreme as the most effective means of rubbing one's super-thrilling life in the tired faces of one's nearest and dearest. Sadly, in this digital age of instant uploading, generations to...

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Sunday, 13th June - 10PM
@ The Oxford Hotel

What better way to celebrate the birth of our majesty the ultimate Queen than at a Bash called Gay, swathed in the get-up of an infant fetishist. Coincidently on the very same weekend every good patriotic Aussie citizen uses the ageing of our venerable queen as an excuse to get...

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Friday, 11th June - Monday, 14th June
@ The Rocks

Gazing out the window at the bleak state of Sydney’s sodden landscape at the moment, the idea of its resplendent porcelain harbour and picturesque surrounds seems a vague, fictional phantasm. But I assure you, it’s all still there, hidden beneath the oppressive greyness of this diabolical low-pressure system — the...

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Saturday, 19th June - Monday, 21st June
@ Sydney Convention Centre

Song Summit is set to be one of Vivid festival's finest moments. It is a grand-scale meeting of music-minded revellers with a common agenda: to share, create, enjoy and explore Sydney's dynamic landscape of sound. For delegates, the Music Market will be the central meeting ground - a hub of activity that grants access to fresh-out-of-the-oven music industry products and services.Punctuating the action-packed days will be Song Summit Live, a nightly lineup of music performances seasoned with some of the best raw talent. For three-day delegates, the performances are free; the rest of us can purchase tickets separately for each night. So if music be the food of your love, leave your iPod at home and head down to Darling Harbour for a banquet of sound.

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Sunday, 13th June - Sunday, 4th July
@ Belvoir Downstairs

"There is no paragraph that will explain this work, which is probably a good thing. It's not a work I want to explain," says award-winning playwright Jonathan Gavin of his much anticipated follow up to the critically acclaimed Tiger Country.

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Thursday, 19th August - 6PM
@ LO-FI Collective

Within the realm of visual art, unrestricted by coherency or legibility, typeface knows no bounds and the artist is free to deconstruct its literal meaning and use it symbolically or for pure aesthetic. And that's exactly what the international artists, designers and typographers taking part in this touring exhibition have done. Sponsored by Kirin, the fifth installment of Go Font Ur Self showcases a series of works by over 13 individual artists and collectives who each present their own unique interpretation of everyday type. From kooky graphics to sophisticated design, these artists free words from the tired duty of making sense and allow them to frolic over canvases with careless abandon. The alphabet hasn't had so much fun since Heinz made it a soup.

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Sunday, 27th June - 8PM - Sunday, 18th July - 8PM
@ Belvoir Theatre Upstairs

Drawing on all the vampire faves from [i]Twilight[/i] to [i]True Blood[/i], with the aim to lighten up those pallid creatures of the night and put the comedy back into the business of bloodlust.

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Thursday, 24th June - Wednesday, 28th July
@ Various cinemas

A powerful portrayal of a woman caught between the constraints of societal expectation and an innate desire for freedom and self-expression.

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Friday, 16th July - Sunday, 25th July
@ Bondi beach

Rather than cower beneath the chill of winter's icy ocean winds, Bondi Beach is embracing the colder months like a Swiss Ski resort in peak season. This week, snow deprived Sydneysiders will have the opportunity to skate on a 600 square-metre lake of ice alongside the sprawling white sands of one of the worlds most iconic beaches.

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Thursday, 1st July - 6PM
@ Australian Centre for Photography

The Australian Centre for Photography provide the proverbial keyhole for a good old ogle at the curious obsessions of 12 Australian photographers in this one-night-only slide show of cats, cars and other collectibles.

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Thursday, 8th July - Wednesday, 18th August
@ Various cinemas

As Paloma, a precocious 11-year-old trapped in an opulent Parisian apartment, attempts to expose the absurdity of life through her dad's old Hi8 video camera, we are invited to question what it is we truly value in this strange existence.

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Thursday, 8th July - Wednesday, 25th August
@ Various cinemas

First up, let me start by saying that this film is not The Karate Kid. Yes, it's a remake of the beloved 1984 original complete with updated versions of Pat Morita's classic Mr. Miyagi and charismatic poster-boy Ralph Macchio's Danny Le Russo. Yes, it follows the same familiar Star Wars-like...

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Thursday, 15th July - Saturday, 14th August
@ Various cinemas

Fiona and Ben have been waiting to adopt a child from Calcutta for two years. They have her name, they have her photo, but they don't have her - a fact that will test their already tenuous relationship to its limits.

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