It’s impossible to know how much of what I’ve heard is the truth. The information I’ve received is conflicting. Each storyteller has a vested interest in their narrative. Or, they are frightened of the consequences if they give their full version of the story. What I do know is a tale about Egypt that involves a film festival, now thirty-eight years old.

2014 has been a strong year for cinema and a strange year for politics. If art and popular culture reflect the times, then 2015 will be the year that we continually push reset.

Christine Lucas (Nicole Kidman) wakes up next to a man with a wedding band. Carefully prising herself from bed, and treading lightly so as not to wake him, she makes her way to the en suite bathroom. She is surprised when she sees a grown woman’s reflection in the mirror and a wedding band on her own finger. There are photographs of her and the man she shared a bed with, taped to the wall. Yellow Post-it notes tell her that his name is Ben (Colin Firth), and that he is her husband.

I knew from a young age that I would work in the film industry. My mother was an extra, and before I could form sentences I was being pushed around in a pram on film sets.

As I experienced adolescence and early adulthood, I learned to think that women should be ashamed of their bodies. I also garnered the idea that sex was an act women engaged in for the specific aim of pleasing men. Worse still, I believed that getting married and having babies was not only important and necessary for me because of my assigned gender, but also that it was actually what I wanted.

Australian national cinema is multitudinous. But as with any country with a colonial past, white people tell most of our stories. Towards the end of 2011, filmmaker Rolf de Heer learned that David Gulpilil was in jail. Flying from Tasmania to Darwin to visit his estranged friend, de Heer realised ‘that the only thing I might be able to do for him was to make a film with him’. De Heer refocuses the conversation about aiding someone in crisis through his realisation that actually helping means changing ‘to do for’ to ‘make with’.

Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson) hears the confession of a troubled man from his community. The nameless, faceless man begins: ‘I first tasted semen when I was seven years old.’

David Michod’s post-apocalyptic follow-up to Animal Kingdom (2010), The Rover (2014), opens with the words ‘ten years after the collapse’. Global crisis has hit and a state of emergency has been called. Australia and its natural resources are under American occupation.

Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) treats its subject with respect and admiration – as its title suggests. Piecing together a portrait of her critical, creative and personal life, the film tries to present a balanced view of a woman whose legacy extended beyond her public persona. But, as a series of her ex-lovers gave accounts of her aloofness, I began to wonder why we’re so concerned with constructing an individual through the opinion of the people who knew them intimately.

If the current resurgence in superhero movies is designed to help us escape what we’re really scared of – ‘It’s okay, someone with power will sort it out!’ – then the recent spate of disaster movies are telling us that we should keep calm and procreate. Reinforcing heteronormativity at every computer-generated turn, today’s symbol of tomorrow is the product of good, wholesome family values: a man, woman and child. When we talk about survival we often reference a complete action: having endured tough conditions or prevailed against the odds.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) changed the way we think about documentary. But, peeling back those fabricated layers, what the film really shows is the falsity of history: a series of stories told by, at best, unreliable narrators, and at worst, ideological tyrants.

Arendt’s seminal work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, was first serialised in the New Yorker magazine. Von Trotta’s film focuses on the criticism she then received for intellectualising and trying to understand the actions of the man on trial. It further looks at the controversy surrounding her implication of several Jewish leaders, who failed to intervene in genocide. Though never denying Arendt was one of the great minds of the twentieth century, von Trotta’s sentimentalising account reduces the remarkable thinker to a puppet for melodrama.

The general temperature regarding the competition films at this year’s Berlinale was middling. Longstanding attendees complained loudly and often about how the films were selected for political reasons rather than merit. As a first-timer, I can’t comment on the festival’s trajectory from cutting-edge to mediocrity, but the handful of competition films I did see didn’t protest the point.

Obviously I agree that it’s important not to belittle the significance of Dylan Farrow’s accusation or the response it’s since spurred. Speculation over the ‘truth’ of the allegations persists, with more journalists defending Allen than Farrow. The courage it must have taken to write that letter needs to be acknowledged and a woman speaking out is not something that should be trivialised or ignored, as it so often is.

When I watched Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, I was moved as much by the story as I was by McQueen’s deft touch: delicate yet bold enough to present Solomon Northup’s life through the harrowing and beautiful tonality it deserves. When I read 12 Years a Slave, the written account of Solomon Northup’s kidnapping and unlawful bondage, I was moved and a little surprised by Northup’s remarkable ability to question his own subjectivity, and also by his determination to convey the kindness of one slave master for whom he was content to toil.

I don’t know how many films I saw in 2013 because I don’t keep a running tally, but my calculated guess sits at several paces north of 300. Choosing ten stand out films was difficult, especially as 2013 was, in my viewing experience, a very good year for film. I have not included any repertory content though I would like to acknowledge the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s excellent programme and the wonderful arthouses in Paris, both of which played an important role in rounding out my year cinematically.

It’s slick, has high production values with a good attention to period detail, and employs an accomplished formal craft that enhances the drug-fuelled montages in which it occasionally indulges. Unfortunately, it’s also an example of cultural biography dramatised and made conservative (packed with fear) for the mainstream.

Critical of himself, and his own practise of indulging in nostalgia, Assayas, with his Après Mai (After May), removes responsibility from the viewer, and the result is the most guiltless, blissful and problematic viewing experience I’ve had, twice, this year.

That we have such a thing as free speech is an illusion, and I don’t say that to be provocative. The ‘light bulb moment’ for me – when falsities, myths and obstructed truths were illuminated – was the first time I read Louis Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’.

When Diana, Princess of Wales died in a car crash in 1997, the British public was inconsolable. There was an outpouring rather than an expression of grief. Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, and driver, Henri Paul, were also killed in the crash but no such similar public grief was expressed for their deaths. Mentioned only in their relational roles to Diana, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul are now mere pawns in a wider public polemic about conspiracy.

Let’s consider the following: the most famous porn movie of all time, Deep Throat; two ‘ghost written’ biographies, Inside Linda Lovelace (1973) and The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace (1974); Linda’s autobiography Ordeal (1980); the documentary Inside Deep Throat (2005) and the motion picture Lovelace (2013). These contradictory items constitute the major entries in the public domain, collectively creating the public’s picture of who Linda Susan Boreman Marchiano was: Linda Lovelace. To the public she was an icon of women’s sexual repression and revolution; for feminists she both defended and spoke out against pornography.

Beyond its disturbing aspersions cast on mental illness, the film tells a story that is inherently flawed by the absence of its own key player. Certainly this isn’t the first time someone has dared tell a story where someone is not physically able to represent themselves onscreen; indeed, any number of ancient history or pre-history documentaries do so as a matter of course, as well as countless posthumous documentaries and biopics on great public icons (such as Salinger). What’s different about this documentary, however, is the lack of inclusion of anything even close to Salinger’s own voice, including the most obvious – his literary one.

Martin Heidegger died in 1976, the same year that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed the Apple Computer Company. One of these men had an idea and the other built it. Martin Heidegger saw technology as a thing with the potential to fully optionalise the essence of our being, while also understanding it might also bring about nothingness, despair through alienation.

Potentially this year’s most brilliant and unnerving documentary film, The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, restages and retells the Israel–Palestine conflict, systematically constructing and destabilising his own narrative complexity like a well-played game of Jenga.

It’s easy for audiences to become conditioned when all we digest are standard genre flicks for eleven months of the year. Instead of watching yet another Hollywood bromance or post-apocalyptic technology-clad blockbuster, film festivals offer an opportunity for viewing to become more than just the consumption of moving images.