Linda Linda linda (Asian Cinema Collective & the Sydney Opera House) at Vivid LIVE

Charlotte Macdonald reflects …

A bottle of sweet and innocent syrup––being with your friends is the sweetest romance. 

The bottled-up explosion of nostalgia generated through the care for your craft. 

Linda Linda Linda was presented by Stuart Buchanan of the Sydney Opera House and the Asian Cinema Collective as part of the Vivid LIVE film program in the excellently professional and cinematic Playhouse Theatre (I’ve found their screenings to start pretty much on time, every time). The night and the theatre welcomed my friend Zoe and I with huge, outspread arms.

I always look for films that can express the realities of my own adolescence: the burden of private confessions, stage fright, befriending that one loner who just knows what is up, and just wanting something SO SO MUCH. 

I always look for films that can express the realities of my own adolescence: the burden of private confessions, stage fright, befriending that one loner who just knows what is up, and just wanting something SO SO MUCH. 

I love Kei’s dream-hallucination of The Ramones in the audience as she rehearses, because this is exactly how it feels for me when I try my hand at anything. Staring back is every piece of art you love, everyone who ever came before a thousand funhouse mirrors––of what you could be or create–– and whispers in tongues and can distort and distract. But then … a huge release! All your effort has paid off. The candles of the cake are blown out; tyres swerve around the last curve before the finish line; smoke rises and pools, softly. Here, you can finally breathe.