When ReelGood Film Festival founder John Roebuck first launched the festival back in 2014, it was certainly an experiment. He really had no idea what he was getting himself into, but John is a guy who likes to experiment, exhibit A being his shot-by-shot remake of Jurassic Park.

Current festival director Chris Luscri is deep in the spirit of that experimentation with the selections for the 2025 festival, which kicks off Saturday morning at 10 a.m. for a day-long affair at Lido Cinemas in Hawthorn. In fact, a whole sub-category of this year’s films is dubbed “experimental,” and if you rock up for the show on Saturday, you’ll get a good idea why that is.

The nature of an experimental film, though, is that it defies the sort of qualitative analysis in search of themes and narrative progression that is common to discussing films, especially for a writer trained as a film critic.

Therefore, this preview will take on an experimental form in itself.

Instead of telling you the films to which the images interspersed among these words relate, we will only list the titles, and promise you that those titles will not be listed in the same sequence as the images.

(There’s an answer key written at the bottom of this piece, upside down.)

(No there isn’t.)

These images are not all from “experimental” films, as this preview also encompasses this year’s documentary shorts. In some instances, though, you might be hard-pressed to tell the difference, so formally interesting are these documentaries.

Do all the experimental films work equally well? Heck no! That’s part of the fun of an experimental film. While it will absolutely captivate some people, others will think it’s shite. (None of these films are shite, though. Well, not that we would publicly admit, anyway.) If you’ve ever enjoyed yourself at a good museum art installation, you’ll certainly enjoy these films.

The experimental film is designed to challenge the traditional contours of narrative and form, and the best ones leave you gob-smacked, unable to articulate what you’ve just seen, only how it’s made you feel. (And having chosen this method of previewing them, I am blessed with not having to articulate how they made me feel.)

I will tell, you however, that one of the films was made in consultation with renowned Thai independent filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a champion of the experimental if ever there was one.

Want to know which film? You’ll have to buy your tickets to find out.

These images are from Richard Peter Tuohy’s Tooborac, Charlotte Mungomery’s This is Not Here, Allison Chhorn’s Missing, Adam C. Briggs’ Write a Letter, Marlikka Perdrisat’s Ornmol, Jordan James Kaye’s Debil Debil and Bryce Kraehenbuehl’s Red Earth.

Come see these and the movies in all other genres at the RGFF on Saturday. You can get your tickets here. We will have one final preview before the festival, of this year’s drama shorts.